Dear Folks,
I am planning to order the components for a new PC that I will put together myself with a bit of help from the local PC store I use for repairs etc.
At first I had thought to buy an FX 8350 motherboard plus fan and some RAM and a power supply e.g. Corsair Builder Series CXM 750W Modular 80 PLUS.
The case could be a large one e.g. Cooler Master HAF X USB 3.0 XL ATX Case. Perhaps that is too big but it would have good ventilation.
I would add a flash drive (SSD) and an optical drive and run with it for a number of months and then get a graphics card etc - probably an Nvidia one.
I started looking at the AMD Kaveri A10-7850K processor and reviews comparing it with the FX8350 etc.
At first it seemed that the FX8350 was faster per $ or £ than the Kaveri and that a separate graphics card like an Nvidia one was a better option according to various web sites I visited on the subject.
But then I read about HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) and discovered that it had been used to make e.g. libre office run a lot more efficiently.
I don't do gaming so I don't need powerful graphics acceleration. I began to realise that the graphics acceleration produced by the Kaveri processor would probably be adequate for my own requirements.
From what I can see looking at some tests done by Phoronix it works a lot better than typical on board graphics would do on a conventional CPU set up.
It also seems that the open source drivers work pretty well for Radeon graphics cards.
My question to you is this: if I would choose the Kaveri processor (and probably not bother adding either an Nvidia card or an extra Radeon card) and run with it, how rapidly (e.g. 2- 3 years) do you think HSA enhancements and optimisations of popular packages used in Debian etc be created and incorporated into new releases (e.g. Jessie and beyond)?