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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."
Beema and Mullins
successors to last year's Temash and Kabini
I'm waiting for Darmok and Jalad
Seconded. I have an AMD E-350 in my NAS. It has 4 SATA ports (+1 eSATA), so that gives one optical drive and 3 drive bays, but leaves one of the drive bays empty and unusable. I went with AMD over Intel because Intel crippled (not sure if it still does) its Atom boards to 2 SATA slots, making them unusable for RAID-Z.
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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.
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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
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In other words, it has a separate processor running proprietary firmware with full access to system memory. What could possibly go wrong?
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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.
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