Slashdot Mirror
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
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
In other words, it has a separate processor running proprietary firmware with full access to system memory. What could possibly go wrong?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
The SDK doesn't allow making "fat binaries"? One would sort of expect such capability these days.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.