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AMD Launches New Mobile APU Lineup, Kabini Gets Tested
An anonymous reader writes "While everyone was glued to the Xbox One announcement, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 launch, and Intel's pre-Haswell frenzy, it seems that AMD's launch was overlooked. On Wednesday, AMD launched its latest line of mobile APUs, codenamed Temash, Kabini, and Richland. Temash is targeted towards smaller touchscreen-based devices such as tablets and the various Windows 8 hybrid devices, and comes in dual-core A4 and A6 flavors. Kabini chips are intended for the low-end notebook market, and come in quad-core A4 and A6 models along with a dual-core E2. Richland includes quad-core A8 and A10 models, and is meant for higher-end notebooks — MSI is already on-board for the A10-5750M in their GX series of gaming notebooks. All three new APUs feature AMD HD 8000-series graphics. Tom's Hardware got a prototype notebook featuring the new quad-core A4-5000 with Radeon HD 8300 graphics, and benchmarked it versus a Pentium B960-based Acer Aspire V3 and a Core-i3-based HP Pavillion Sleekbook 15. While Kabini proves more efficient, and features more powerful graphics than the Pentium, it comes up short in CPU-heavy tasks. What's more, the Core-i3 matches the A4-5000 in power efficiency while its HD 4000 graphics completely outpace the APU."
But even more puzzling to me is why both MSFT and Sony picked the absolute WEAKEST CHIP that AMD sells for their flagships...what the fuck?
Because of exactly what parent said:
AMD can provide unified memory (hUMA) with a decent GPU and a decent CPU on the same die. Intel cannot, nvidia cannot.
hUMA will not make your PC faster in general, but it will provide you with a feature, even a PC with 20 Geforce Titans does not have: Latency free data exchange between CPU and GPU.
It will make GPU processing more feasible especially on a small scale. I can't give you an example from gaming, but I can give you an example from my own expertise. When we simulate big proteins, we do it on a GPU. However, for small proteins, the latency overhead simply kills us. Processing on the GPU would be faster, but we need to copy back and forth all the time. We don't need faster GPUs, we need faster transfers. With hUMA: no problem.