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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."
heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access is really what one should be paying attention to. With that tech in both of the upcoming consoles and major support from the same, Intel better watch out.
On Wednesday, AMD launched it's latest line of mobile APUs, codenamed Temash, Kabini, and Richland.
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Should be:
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On Wednesday, AMD launched its latest line of mobile APUs, codenamed Temash, Kabini, and Richland.
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You guys are ridiculous.
What AMD has here is a successor to Brazos, and the primary competitor is Atom. Which it runs rings around, might I add. It also equals or beats an Ivy Bridge based Pentium in all measures except single threaded performance, partially due to Kabini not having a turbo function.
Say what you will, but AMD has a clear winner in the low cost ultra mobile market at the moment.
What's more, the Core-i3 matches the A4-5000 in power efficiency while its HD 4000 graphics completely outpace the APU.
Sure. Unless you're using the damn CPU at full speed.
What I'd be more interested to know though, is how expensive A4 5000 CPUs are. Do they cost as much as the Core i3 3271u?
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
A 50% increase in battery life is a 25% reduction in power consumption, not a 50% reduction. So they're cutting their TDP by a quarter.
Do not underestimate the demands of poorly-coded flash facebook games.
What's more, the Core-i3 matches the A4-5000 in power efficiency while its HD 4000 graphics completely outpace the APU.
has anyone bothered looking at the benchmarks? The overall system power consumption when games were run was 20watts for AMD and 35watts for the Core i3.
To my calculation, that's a 75% more power consumption then AMD. Intel hardly "matches" anything...
AMD was still at least 3 watts less power hungry in any other benchmark, too...
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
Yeah, then we can all enjoy our 1000$ i3 .
What AMD has here is a successor to Brazos, and the primary competitor is Atom.
So AMD says, but Tom's Hardware disagrees:
So what about the Core i3-3217U, a 17 W processor? Surely that one is a more virile competitor, and not much more expensive than the Pentium. Core i3's on-die HD Graphics 4000 engine with its 16 EUs stomps all over the A4's 128 ALUs, despite the backing of AMD's capable Graphics Core Next architecture. Now, AMD claims that Kabini isn't meant to go up against Core i3. But we found notebooks with this exact CPU selling for as little as $360 on Newegg. It may turn out that the free market doesn't let AMD choose which Intel-based platforms its Kabini-based APUs contend with.
The cheapest laptop newegg sells that I could find was $250, so there's a good $100 range where Atoms, Celerons, Pentiums and AMD is battling it out - that's not much, really.
It also equals or beats an Ivy Bridge based Pentium in all measures except single threaded performance
Which is likely the part that matters in these laptops. I mean if you're trying to use these for serious number crunching you are using the wrong tool for the job. It's not like the single threaded performance is poor, it is horrible. Anandtech compared it to a i7-3517U, which is totally unfair price-wise (it's a $350 chip) but fair power-wise (it's a 17W chip). In cinebench single-threaded the Intel chip scored 1.24, the A4-5000 0.39 - that's a 3.18x performance lead with 2W higher TDP, 2.8x if you scale it to be equal. You're getting a not-quite-as-dog-slow-as-an-Atom ultra mobile laptop, but you're not getting anything fighting above it's league either.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yeah you're the only person on the Internet bothered by a grammar error.
They are also lying about the prices.
"But we found notebooks with this exact CPU selling for as little as $360 on Newegg."
They found one notebook, which is a $650 model, on a temporary sale for $360. The cheapest i3 notebook with the CPU they are comparing, not on sale, is $525, and it's a shitty one.
The cheapest B960 laptop is also $400, which makes it quite a bit above the $300-$350 atom models that this will be competing with. Maybe they should have compared it with the standard $300 laptop and it's shitty 1.1ghz celeron.
You missread his post.
Your failure to understand the argument does not constitute a failure on my part to comprehend his comment.
He was asserting that single threaded performance is what matters on these laptops, because no one is going to use them for big number crunching tasks that can actually use multiple cores effectively. He's correct.
No, he's complextely wrong. What do you imagine that typical users need single-thread performance for? Most users need this only for games, and poorly-written ones to boot. PC games which require single-thread processing power are now vanishingly rare thanks at least in part to the influence of the tri-core Xbox 360, and the overwhelming tide of console to PC ports. Everything else the user typically does which requires very much CPU is already multithreaded. Most things the user does require virtually no CPU.
Running a GUI, editing files, I literally did these things on machines with single-digit MHz speeds which, when they were less responsive than using applications of today, were only so because of disk access times. And these tasks are today multithreaded, because they are based upon multithreaded libraries. Take a look at the programs running on a typical windows machine today, virtually all of them have a crapload of threads. Windows makes thread creation cheap in the way that Unix makes process creation cheap... not least because Windows is heavily multithreaded itself. And we are talking about what the majority of users will do with this hardware, which means running windows, playing the occasional game, watching cat videos on youtube.
Aside from games, the only times that most users use much CPU is during video encoding or possibly decoding, both of which are aggressively multithreaded and often even GPU accelerated, or while using graphics or video editing applications which are also typically heavily multithreaded, and have been for years. In short, practically no typical user actually needs serious single thread performance any more — what they need is good multithreaded performance, so that their computer can do a million pointless things behind the scenes without causing their cat videos to skip.
The Pentium beats the Brazos at single threaded performance, therefore, is a better chip for this kind of task.
The Pentium is only better than the new AMD cores we're talking about at the kind of task that people who buy APUs don't do. Thus, while your statement is factual, it is also irrelevant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would go one step further and say that the majority of users need neither better single-threaded performance nor better multi-threaded performance. They just need newer hardware that isn't on its last leg.
Beyond the first two or three cores, throwing additional cores at the problem provides little benefit for basic tasks. Video decoding might be multithreaded, but it is usually not massively multithreaded. At best, most of the decoding software I've worked with uses one thread to decompress and a second thread to deinterlace, so you're unlikely to use more than two cores total, in my experience, with the exception of the tiny trickle of CPU power required to fetch the data over the network or from disk in the first place.
And good app responsiveness typically requires only two cores, give or take—one to offload the minor background tasks so that they don't get backed up too far behind the foreground processing and one to handle the foreground app's processing needs. Beyond two cores, the benefits start to fall off pretty rapidly. I can perceive very little difference in responsiveness between my current-generation MacBook Pro (4-core 2.7 GHz Core i7) and my circa 2007 black MacBook (2-core 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo) except in CPU-hungry apps like Photoshop. Once you get past four cores or so, the only benefit is for people running massively multithreaded tasks, which isn't typical end-user stuff by any stretch of the imagination.
The big difference that faster single-core performance gets you, assuming all other things are equal, is better battery life—being able to crank through the background tasks in less time means the CPU is idle longer. So more single-threaded performance per watt is a big win over more multi-threaded performance per watt because the former is more likely to result in power savings.
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