but there is some confusing technical reports.
It really is confusing. Here’s my take. I think Richland does have GCN, but it still has two distinct memory regions: DDR3 for the CPU and GDDR5 for the GPU. With that setup you still need to explicitly copy buffers back and forth to make it work.
I think that Kaveri is also GCN, but with a unified memory block: both the CPUs and GPU system use the same GDDR5 memory and there is no need to copy buffers from one to the other for it to work.
If I am right, that means that a) As a developer, Richland is a great part to use for now to start writing code, and b) by the time Kaveri comes out all of the memory latency issues associated with having to copy buffers around will go away on their own.
Man I hope I’m right.