2013 Mainstream APU – Kabini
In many ways, Kabini and Temash are very much the same product. Both are based on the Jaguar x86 cores and the 128 SIMD unit Radeon GCN graphics architecture. In fact, both use the same die!
AMD claims that Kabini will focus on the low-cost, mainstream notebook market will bring quad-core processors to this market as a “first.” That is true – Intel has really only pushed the dual-core Core i3 products down into the sub-$500 segments that we are going to see Kabini in. The CPU clocks speeds and higher are on Kabini than on Temash as are the GPU clocks – but how much better and what that turns into for the consumer is something we discuss in our Kabini performance evaluation article.
Kabini is also the first platform that will see support for AMD’s new Screen Mirror technology that is hoping to compete against Intel’s WiDi for wireless display.
Again, looking only at performance per watt measurements compared to the Brazos platform, Kabini is seeing some great improvements in efficiency. The 9 watt Kabini E1-2100 runs 215% more efficiently than the 22 watt Brazos while the 15 watt Kabini A4-1500 is 66% more power efficient than the 22 watt Trinity APU currently on the market.
With a common battery size of 45 WHr, AMD claims that you can see as much as 1.7 hours more battery life with Kabini over the company’s previous Brazos platform while in video playback. And 2.5 hours more with simple WiFi based web browsing! Those are impressive advantages to see for a mainstream market that usually gets less than optimal power options.
Again, with AMD’s very limited collection of tests we can’t tell you anything definitive, but things look pretty good. On the battery life test, AMD claims Kabini will do much better than even the 17 watt Ivy Bridge-based Core i5 platform, but then doesn’t use the Core i5 IVB system in any of the performance results. If we take a look at the Cloud Gate 3DMark results we do see the 25 watt Kabini head to head against the Sandy Bridge Core i3 dual-core platform of 35 watts – and the two are basically identical in performance. The A4-5000 15 watt part is about 25% slower than SNB in this case.
There will be five Kabini SKUs at launch starting with the A6-5200 at 25 watts and 2.0 GHz core clock, 600 MHz GPU clock. The A4-5000 is also a quad-core platform with 1.5 GHz clock speed and 500 MHz GPU speed and both A-series APUs will run with DDR3-1600 low power memory.
The E-series drops the core count to 2 and lower TDPs to as little as 9 watts for the E1-2100. Clever readers may notice that the E1-2100 and the A4-2150 (Temash) are essentially the same part save the 100 MHz GPU clock difference.
I still seriously doubt
I still seriously doubt Temash will be able to compete with Silvermont.
I won`t buy anything until Silvermont/Windows Blue are out.
It’s a fair thought to want
It's a fair thought to want to wait for all options to be on the table. The question will be how long you want to wait.
I wonder if MSFT will use one
I wonder if MSFT will use one of these for the supposed XboxTablet ?
Will these Silvermont competitors have the silly USB2.0/2GB RAM limitations of the current Atoms ?
Or is that imposed by Intel to force you to buy a more expensive “real X86 product”
Their naming scheme makes my
Their naming scheme makes my head spin! Although, great product.
When comparing TDPs, there
When comparing TDPs, there seems to be some overlap between Richland LV/ULV and Kabini.
It’ll be interesting to see a performance, cost and power comparison between the 25W TDP Kabini (A6-5200) and 25W Richland (A10-5745M).
Would you rather have the 19W Richland A8-5545M in an ultrabook form factor or the 15W Kabini A4-5000?
and when the apps with HSA
and when the apps with HSA aware come out amd will get 2x the performance if only windows could use this new arch
and when the apps with HSA
and when the apps with HSA aware come out amd will get 2x the performance if only windows could use this new arch