Hasta La Gadget!

It’s all-change for AMD‘s APU line-up for mainstream and performance notebooks in 2013, as the company attempts to hit Intel where it hurts with chips that, bang for buck, offer more performance from less power. That’s the claim, anyway, and Kabini – for the mainstream – and Richland – for the performance end – are the processors that are expected to deliver it. Among the boasts are the first ever quadcore for small-display touchscreen notebooks, and up to 72-percent of the gaming performance than Intel’s comparable chips.

AMD Kabini

Kabini is AMD’s mainstream platform for portables in 2013, targeting small touchscreen notebooks as well as entry-level laptops. The company is making a big push for battery life, with machines running the new APUs apparently capable of up to 10hrs of resting runtime, or over 9hrs of web browsing. Even playing Full HD 1080p video, they should be good for more than 6hrs of use.

The single-chip SoCs use Jaguar cores with 2MB of shared L2 cache, and come in 9W to 25W TDP variants. Each supports two simultaneous displays of up to 4096 x 2160 resolution, with DisplayPort 1.2, DVI, and HDMI 1.4a output capabilities. Other connectivity includes provision for up to eight USB 2.0, up to two USB 3.0, two SATA Gen2/Gen3, and an SD card reader.

There’s also AMD’s Steady Video technology, for smoothing out jerky camera footage, and AMD Perfect Picture HD, which does real-time processing of on-screen graphics to bring out the best contrast and colors. Compared to last year’s chips, the new Kabini E1, E2, A4, and A6 APUs offer up to an 88-percent boost in performance.

AMD Kabini Mainstream APUs

AMD Richland

As for the performance end, AMD is taking on Intel’s Core i3 and Core it with the new Richland series of APUs, replacing Trinity in the process. They offer up to 71-percent better graphics abilities than the Core i5, AMD claims, while still being capable of over 10hrs resting battery life or 7.5hrs of web browsing.

Compared to Trinity, overall performance is up by up to 19-percent, the company claims, while graphics performance is improved by as much as 40-percent. The A8 gets gesture control and face login, for chip-level biometric security, as well as AMD Screen Mirror for wirelessly pushing graphics to a nearby TV. The A10 throws in game bundles, a strategy AMD has tried with success before, including a number of games with each qualifying PC purchase to show off the abilities of the APUs.

There’s also provision for AMD Dual Graphics, with the onboard GPU in the Richland chips capable of working simultaneously with a discrete GPU from the company’s Radeon HD 7000 or 8000 series. That should make for ultraportables that can still put in some solid gaming, AMD claims.

The first notebooks running AMD Kabini and Richland APUs will show up in the coming months.

AMD Richland Elite APUs

AMD Kabini and Richland fight Intel for mainstream and performance notebooks is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

AMD has been willing to tease its 2013 ultra-mobile APU (accelerated processing unit) strategy through PCs like the Acer Aspire V5, but today it’s spilling the beans in earnest. The headliner for many is the company’s just-shipping Elite Mobility line, or Temash: the A4 and A6 designs are built for tablets, like Hondo was, but their Jaguar-based system-on-chip designs should be faster in both CPU and graphics power without a hit to battery life. AMD estimates that the Radeon HD 8280G video core in an Elite Mobility A6 is about five times faster a Clover Trail-based Atom and twice as fast as Hondo, but lasts about 45 percent longer on battery than an Intel Core i3. And that’s while untethered — that Turbo Dock feature is still in place to boost speeds by over 30 percent when a dock is around for extra cooling.

The E1, E2, A4 and A6 mainstream APUs based on Kabini, meanwhile, are all about tackling the Pentium and Core i3 chips that go into entry-level laptops. AMD reckons that the dual-core (E-series) and quad-core (A-series) parts are up to 88 percent faster overall than their ancestors, and can even punch above their weight class: the E1’s Radeon HD 8000-level graphics are up to 66 percent faster than those of a much thirstier, Trinity-era A4 chip. Battery life is a specialty as well, with up to 10 hours when idle and 9 hours of web use. That’s typically 2 to 3 hours more than Kabini’s Brazos ancestor could manage. AMD wasn’t specific on when these mainstream APUs would first ship when we were briefed, but we had the opportunity to benchmark an A4-based reference laptop. Read on past the break for the scores and some early impressions.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, AMD

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Source: AMD

This week the hardware manufacturer MediaTek has shown the MT6572, a system-on-chip they suggest will be the first to bring both a dual-core CPU and “4-in-1″ technology. What that means is that this particular dual-core processor will be working with integrated Wifi, FM radio, GPS, and Bluetooth, the final product aimed not at the top-tier smartphones as previous multi-core mobile processors have been, but at the entry segment of the market. This means that inexpensive smart devices – not just subsidized models – will have multi-core power for users everyday lives.

This release puts a dual-core Cortex-A7 CPU sub-system in place clocked at up to 1.2GHz on 28nm process technology. Where late 2012 was a time when it made sense for MediaTek to reveal its so-called “world’s first quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC”, here in the spring of 2012, that MT6589 SoC becomes ever-so-slightly less important than the markets this new MT6572 will be able to address. Emerging markets are the markets of choice here, places where smartphones have only just started to appear.

This processor build is made for Android (at first) and works with MediaTek’s own multi-mode Rel. 8 HSPA+/TD-SCDMA modem as well as support for up to qHD (960 x 540) pixel displays. This SoC is able to work with 3D Graphics, support for 5 megapixel cameras, and support for HD 720p video playback (and 720p video record). Jeffrey Ju, MediaTek smartphone business unit GM, commented this week on the release:

“As smartphones move to a baseline of dual-core processing and with worldwide operators looking to reduce device subsidies, enabling highperformance, multi-core platforms with easy-to-adopt reference designs will be key to enable our customers to rapidly address the fast-moving mobile market opportunity.” – Jeffrey Ju

This hardware will begin to be available in smartphones starting in June of this year. At the moment, no specific hardware manufacturers have been named in MediaTek’s push for the baseline market.

MediaTek dual-core processor MT6572 aims for new world market is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Many already believe that the real highlight of Intel’s 4th-generation Core processor lineup would be a giant graphics update. Today, Intel is revealing that they’re right — and, importantly, that there’s an equally large shift in naming strategy. Where 3rd-generation Core graphics were divided into two tiers, the new generation is focused on three, two of which are built for performance over efficiency. Ultrabooks with 15W U-series processors will use comparatively ordinary (if still faster) HD 5000 graphics. Thin-and-light laptops with 28W U-series chips get a new tier, Iris, that Intel claims is up to twice as fast in 3D as last year’s HD Graphics. Power-hungry parts see even more of a boost: they can carry Iris Pro graphics with embedded DRAM, which should double the 3D speed on H-series mobile chips (47-55W of typical power) and triple it for the R-series (around 65-84W) on the desktop. We also know that M-series laptop and K-series desktop CPUs will have Iris Pro options.

The feature set for the graphics trio is slightly more familiar to us, although there are a few tricks up Intel’s sleeve. All three can draw DirectX 11.1 and OpenGL 4 visuals, as well as take on OpenCL 1.2 computing and faster media processing. We’re almost more interested in the display modes, though. Along with receiving “enhanced” 4K output, the new Core graphics can handle a 3-screen collage mode — we won’t need dedicated video for a large, multi-monitor canvas. Sadly, Intel isn’t providing more than incidental details about the processors themselves, although it has already teased that we’ll get the full story around the Computex show in early June.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Intel

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Source: Intel

Although AMD hasn’t had much recent success at the higher end of the processor spectrum, it’s clear the company is very much interested in attacking the budget realm. Witness its two new lower-tiered FX-series processors: the quad-core FX-4350 and six-core FX-6350 bring noticeable (if modest) improvements over the FX-4300 and FX-6300 chips they effectively replace. Both unlocked CPUs up the base clock speed to 3.9GHz, while the Max Turbo speeds jump to a respective 4.3GHz and 4.2GHz each. The FX-4350 further trumps its ancestor by doubling the Level 3 cache to 8MB, albeit with a higher power draw. More importantly, prices aren’t budging much at all in spite of the brisker performance. When the FX-4350 and FX-6350 cost just $122 and $132 each, they’re cheap enough that DIY builders shouldn’t weep when the bills are due.

Filed under: Desktops, AMD

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Via: AMD Unprocessed

Source: AMD