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AMD Beema and Mullins Low Power 2014 APUs Tested, Faster Than Bay Trail
MojoKid (1002251) writes "AMD has just announced their upcoming mainstream, low-power APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), codenames Beema and Mullins. These APUs are the successors to last year's Temash and Kabini APUs, which powered an array of small form factor and mobile platforms. Beema and Mullins are based on the same piece of silicon, but will target different market segments. Beema is the mainstream part that will find its way into affordable notebook, small form factor systems, and mobile devices. Mullins, however, is a much lower-power derivative, designed for tablets and convertible systems. They are full SoCs with on-die memory controllers, PCI Express, SATA, and USB connectivity, and a host of other IO blocks. AMD is announcing four Beema-based mainstream APUs today, with TDPs ranging from 10W – 15W. There are three Mullins-based products being announced, two quad-cores and a dual-core. The top of the line-up is the A10 Micro-6700T. It's a quad-core chip, with a max clock speed of 2.2GHz, 2MB of L2, and a TDP of only 4.5W. In the benchmarks, the A10-6700T quad core is actually able to surpass Intel's Bay Trail Atom platform pretty easily across a number of tests, especially gaming and graphics."
This would be great for NAS if they make motherboards with a large number of SATA ports.
Yes I know you can add a card but that drives up the costs and complexity.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Beema and Mullins
successors to last year's Temash and Kabini
I'm waiting for Darmok and Jalad
This year's technology is superior to last year's technology...News at 11...
So on the heels of the worst chips ever made, the E300 and E1 and E2, they're making another pathetically underpowered piece of crap that morons will try to run Windows 8 on. I can't wait to see the next emachines slimline piece of crap with 2GB of RAM roll into my shop because their $300 all in one solution is "too slow."
It's quite impressive that even though it's still 28nm, the GPU has 38% reduction in leakage current. That comes from improvements in the 28nm process. You would only get those sort of improvements by moving to a new node.
Well, those benchmark results are pretty interesting.
It seems to be pretty close to a low end Core i3 on a fair number of the tests which is very impressive, and the TDP is pretty good as well. It seems very competeive all of a sudden for low end laptops even considering the power draw which has been AMDs main weakness recently.
Of course, it completely pwn3s the intel stuff at graphics as one might expect, but it is surprisingly respectable in the CPU department.
Disappointingly it doesn't have HSA support. That would be cool, though I can see why they didn't bother for this iteration: not much out there can really make good use of HSA.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The summary missed the most interesting part of this chip in that it contains a ARM core running trusted zones Trusted Execution Environment.
This makes them quite interesting for highly secure applications such as industrial embedded controllers
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
These APUs embed an ARM Cortex-A5 'PSP' for trusted computing.
I'm wondering whether this arm core is utilized with respect to running Android apps, via AMD's collaboration with Bluestacks.
A Cortex A5 is no speed demon compared to the quad-core beasts powering your smartphone. But it would only have to execute dalvik bytecode for an app, with an amd64 chip running the Windows host OS.
(AMD haven't indicated they want to enter the Android market but this might give them an advantage over Bay Trail tablets, which rely on libhoudini to translate ARM binaries to x86-64)
Fuck beta
The reason I say this is that the performance of Intel instruction set architectures has already reached a point of diminishing returns, and the rate of progress has slowed considerably. Intel's own parts are no longer doubling in performance every two years; they're improving marginally every two years instead (I'll throw up a completely made up number that is only very roughly accurate for the purposes of this post - let's say 20%).
The amount of money necessary to drive substantial improvements in desktop processor technology no longer meets the amount of money available in the market to pay for such improvements:
- The desktop processor market share is shrinking
- For the vast majority of use cases, CPUs from several years ago were already "good enough"
- We are nearing the end of the "easy" node shrinks, and possibly nearing the end of the "possible" node shrinks
All of these combined means that there just isn't enough money in the market to drive significant performance increases anymore.
The amount of money that AMD has to spend to get closer and closer to parity with Intel is less than the amount of money that Intel has to spend to stay ahead of Intel; thus, AMD will eventually catch up.
The release of Beema and Mullins are evidence of this.
How long will it take AMD to catch up? My guess is 2 - 3 years more years.
At that point, Intel will no longer be able to easily have any competitive advantage over AMD because it would cost them far too much to move significantly ahead of AMD. Intel will be forced to gut its margins to stay competitive.
That's my prediction.
For an "AMAZING" product like this is supposed to be, those are some awfully curated results right there. The product is only compared with a Core i3 (outdated Ivy Bridge) when it's actually going to win the test, and there's a plethora of multi-threaded tests that nobody on earth actually uses to put AMD's quad-core in the best light. Also, there are NO BATTERY LIFE TESTS to speak of, just "trust us" quoted TDP figures, and no pricing information.
And while it is MUCH faster at games than Bay Trail, it's not fast enough to play ANY modern games, even on the lowest setting possible. This leaves it firmly parked somewhere between tablet and ultraportable processing capabilities, so there's the question about product positioning.
Call me back when AMD is willing to let reviewers just have at it. If your product does not suck, then it does not need to be coddled.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
"especially gaming and graphics." I think the author is confused. Their current 100 or so watt A10's are exceptional at gaming plus the underlying processing. With 4.5 watts in this new one, you can watch an HD movie just fine or do other pure graphics operations but run Starcraft 2's AI scripts on the CPU portion? Oh HELL no!
Let's take X Rebirth for example. You can run it on moderate graphics hardware but you need a beastly CPU, at least an original i3 minimum (so passmark rating of 1800+) just to barely run the game and even then you get framerate drops. I put it on a Phenom x6 and it really tore up the CPU cycles.
Let's see how close AMD is on their low powered chips. Their E1 -2500 APU got a whopping 915 score with one of the worst single core performance ratings I've ever seen on a modern chip. So the author clearly doesn't know the difference between an AMD low powered APU and a more traditional desktop APU. One can do gaming, the other is lightyears away. I think it'd crush a Mali 400 tablet GPU, but at 4.5 watts, it'd crush your batter life pretty quickly as well.
There is a huge gulf between the quality of PC games and tablet games due to the massive performance/storage differences, even in the realm of integrated graphics.
That said, most modern PC games can be played on HD 4000 at 720p low/med settings. I know this because I play them on my HTPC with frame rates are at around the 30-50 fps mark. They play even better on AMD Trinity/Richland/Kaveri.
The problem with Kabini et-al is they castrated the GPU to just 128 shaders and 8 texels per-clock, compared to 384/512 shaders and 24/32 texels/clock for the bigger boys. They also castrated performance with a single memory channel. This results in performance comparable to HD 3000 on the desktop, but Beema has even lower performance thanks to the thermal constraints. HD 3000 was entry-level 3.5 years back when it was first released, but games have moved-on since then, and that level of performance is no-longer enough.
AMD decided they did not want this part to compete with their other offerings, and that's why the memory bandwidth and GPU power are castrated. And that's the reason this product's target is unclear - it's overpowered for your average tablet game, and not beefy enough for real PC games. And again, the power consumption is a concern.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
2 cores, 1.6GHz, 80 shaders. That's what these are trying to be an improvement on. And they are a massive improvement. I'm going to buy one to replace my E-350.
since I'm a gamer. Their cpu may not be the best but their graphics development clearly shows how well integrated it is in their cpu and far more superior than intel. For the average user, it might not be a big deal but it's more future proof because of that power.