Sadly (not really -- Atoms are trash), we don't have any recent Atom/Celeron/Pentium laptops around. No one has ever sent us a Celeron or Pentium laptop for review, and the last Atom netbook we tested was probably almost two years back. Anand does have Clover Trail covered, but there's no real point in running our heavy laptop suite on that.
In the mini-ITX DIY segment, Kabini may compete against the Celeron 847 boards (which currently run about $75). I'd be interested to see how it stacks up there. The AMD solution would have a clock speed advantage (847 only runs at 1.1 GHz) but the Sandy Bridge-based 847 almost certainly has better IPC.
Thanks for that, my German isn't great but from what I can tell this chip is a great choice compared to Intel's actual competing products. Such a shame Anand's review is with a Pentium consuming over twice the power and i5/i7 products costing many times more.
My interest is in the low power desktop boards and hope to see a useful comparison on here at some point. I'm sure Zotac or some other manufacturer with such a leaning would be happy to supply comparable boards to cover Kabini and the lower power Pentium and Celerons.
rubbish Kabini includes dual channel on die - the `prototype` doesn't use it. which is ofc a shame , and if anandtech wasn't being paid by intel or employed intel staff on its website , they would likely have added another stick to show the improvement gained.
"Just to call out a couple noteworthy items, first is the single-channel memory configuration. In theory that could be hampering performance somewhat, but we have no real way of knowing. While the laptop does support two SO-DIMMs, Kabini only supports a single-channel interface, so adding a second SO-DIMM wouldn't help." --Page 2
So, Whose right? If Kabini indeed support dual channel on die, then yes, it's a shame. Knowing it will raise the bar for AMD and intentionally didn't include it with testbed in the review.
Kabini does not "include dual channel on die". All the websites i've seen say "Kabini features a single 64-bit DDR3 memory controller", two SO-DIMM sockets does not mean two channels ... Unless i'm mistaken and if that is the case i would ask for your source on that.
It should be criminal to market any of these chips as "Elite Performance" platforms. The words elite and performance have pretty well understood meanings, which nothing AMD is offering stand up to. If I'm shopping for a new computer and it is advertised as an elite performance platform, I'm going to expect it to run AAA games at elite settings.
AMD is distancing themselves from my wallet a little more every day, thanks to weak products, weak initiatives, hype and terribly dishonest marketing.
Don't know about in your office PC unless you're an Office-only type of worker. I guess that applies to a lot, but I wouldn't know. I could see it in an AIO for office type of deal, or nice, SFF setups. I feel like multi-seat and/or thin-client setups would be cheaper though. May as well buy that i3 if you're getting an independent machine.
Considering just how many office machines are running XP (the pentium4s only get replaced when they burn up, the core-based products are likely to stay until the IT department adopts some faddish idiocy*).
* not saying that core+windows is irreplaceable, just that stupid business fads are much more likely than real reasons to replace them, the money being available, and enough pointy haired bosses on board at the same time.
Uh huh, I'm sure you were totally predisposed toward getting an AMD product until you saw that marketing-speak.
Dude, it's marketing. Intel is just as (if not more guilty) of the same. Feel free to hate marketing-speak -- I certainly do. But let's not pretend it's something unique to AMD, m'kay?
And uh, there's nothing weak about Jaguar, from what I can see. It looks like the best low-power x86 SoC bar by a large measure.
You are free to buy an Intel product, you know Intel, that beautiful company that in the past was threatening anyone thinking that he could sell PC's with Athlon's. That behavior off course has nothing to do with words like "criminal" or "dishonest marketing". So go and buy an Intel system, the "dishonest marketing" free and "criminal" hardware.
Ya know, it happened, but an i3 ULV with 4k graphics knocks this chip silly, to ignore GT3e coming around the corner. Sorry but it's to the point where Intel will never need such moves again.
It's even worse than that. Kabini can't compete in either CPU, or GPU perf with ULV Ivy-bridge, let alone Haswell. Less performance, slightly better battery life?, and likely cheapy cheap laptops sound the DO NOT WANT trumpet pretty loudly. Maybe if we could get this kind of performance at 7W instead.
True, price will keep most budget buyers out of Haswell powered ultrabooks. Not so for the now-on-clearance-sale Ivy Bridge Dell & HPs though. And in that market Kabini loses most of it's price advantage, while still giving worse performance & marginal battery life improvements. There it's the new $500 plastic Kabini laptop, vs. the $600 aluminum IVB Lenovo. I just don't see that being a win.
The HP Pavilion 11 Touchsmart costs 400$. It has a 10-point touchscreen. So, the 400$ touch enabled Kabini seems mighty atractive compared to the 600$ Lenovo now.
Besides the price issue, you seem to be quite missing the point of a low-power architecture like Jaguar. Let me know when ULV Ivy Bridge can scale down to 3.9W.
Also, a lot of people seem to have trouble comprehending the fact that TDP doesn't really have much in common with the actual power draw of the chip (or the heat output). We've already seen what happens when you try to cram even the lowest wattage Ivy Bridge into a modern tablet form factor: high temperatures w/ fans, low battery life, high price.
It competes with an Sandy Bridge ULV i3 and it gets quite close to a i3 Ivy, while offering better battery life. Seems like a clear proposition to me: if Pentium like performance is what you need this offers you that and better GPU performance. Perfect for the low-end of the ultrathin/ultrabook market.
yeah, pretty much how I read it as well. Assuming you can afford to pay an extra $200 dollars there's not much reason (other than possibly graphics drivers) to not get haswell instead.
I'm not sure that Exynos 5250 is the best representative of Cortex A15. For one, it's dual core without any HT so at a massive disadvantage in a test like Kraken. Secondly, it came out in actual device in the market about 7 months ago. By the time Kabini shows in products, it will probably be over 8 months later. We'll have other Cortex A15 parts by then, and if the Tegra 4 Kraken scores that I'm hearing (~6000) is right, and if something Tegra 4 is using about half as much power as this 15W Kabini, then Kabini suddenly doesn't look that competitive.
Of course as you say, the success of Kabini will depend on what OEMs do with it, but traditionally these cheap AMD parts find themselves in devices that are compromised in everyway. Even if we get a 1080p screen this time around (which I'm hopeful), we'll still have to deal with sub-optimal keyboards, trackpads that work only half the time, and other cost-cutting measures we are familiar with. For this to succeed, someone needs to put it in a Ultrabook-style laptop, with good display, good keyboard and no software glitches, and price it under $500. That's a tall task.
HP just announced a very interesting Slatebook X2 running Android (not skinned) on Tegra 4 with 1080p IPS screen and a Transformer-style detachable dock for $479, including the dock (sidenote, I was disappointed there was no coverage of this on AT). If the performance claims for Tegra 4 (and other future more optimized Cortex A15 parts) are accurate, with such devices on the horizon, will there even be a cheap Ultrabook-style market left for Kabini to compete in? Can Kabini find its way into similar designs by major OEMs? I hope, for everyone's sake that AMD can succeed, but I am doubtful.
I certainly think Kabini can go into the same designs that we're seeing Tegra 4 target. Which will end up being faster? That's a different question, and I'm not sure we have enough information to come to a conclusion right now. If Kabini/Temash can get into tablets sooner rather than later, they've got a chance. If it takes 6-8 months, you're right: it may not matter at that point.
No Cortex-A15 has HT, and Kraken is single threaded anyway. I think Kraken just isn't a great benchmark. Although its makers say it's a lot better than Sunspider it shares a lot of the same sorts of problems:
1) It's Javascript which has its own unique (pretty severe) overheads which can dominate run-time to the extent that it drowns out a lot of the variation from the type of JS code you're running. JS is used and it's important, but even today on good JITs most JS code is several times (think 5 times) slower than an equivalent written in something like C++ or even Java, making it a bad representation of performance of more efficient software. 2) Much of what it does - path finding, signal processing, and crypto - is not the kind of stuff Javascript is usually used for. 3) Its test durations are really short, which is bad for benchmarks in general but can be especially bad for JITs where it 4) The variation in current browsers is extreme (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&... where you can see some tests are substantially faster and others substantially slower. This again highlights the big overheads of Javascript and the impact of different JIT strategies, but also that the state of performance is still pretty volatile. A similar sort of variation could manifest between different backends (ie, x86 vs ARM) even for the same browser.
Cross-architecture comparisons are hard and I don't blame people for using JS when there's not a lot else available (although at least some other inclusions would be nice).. but you shouldn't draw a very broad conclusion from a Kraken comparison alone. And if you did that it'd also make the Kabini vs i5 comparison look a lot worse than a lot of other tests show.
I think it would have been interesting if Anand tested the CPU against some older mid-range to high-end CPUs. From my own assessments it looks like Jaguar has slightly better IPC than K8 and is overall comparable to the original Phenom (though obviously without the huge power consumption).
I really want to see a comprehensive rundown of single-threaded tests with constant clock rate. We have a rough idea of which architectures have better IPC, but I'd like to see some hard numbers.
This is the first real step forard for AMD I've seen in nearly a decade... everything else were minor clock speed bumps, experimental architectures that ended up being slower clock-for-clock than the old ones, big iGPUs and shuffling around its product stack to target a changing market with the same technology.
The performance advantage Intel has accumulated over the years means that AMD can still only really compete via price, but Kabini is finally the kind of product that attempts to narrow the gap with the competition again. Please AMD, more of this! Maybe in one or two years we the consumers will have a real choice in the x86 market again if you keep it up.
Why are you always comparing that dual core ARM chip? Why not Octa chip?(like, the best currently available ARM chip) And why always avoid using Geekbench, but instead use a heavily software dependant tests? This always seems to be case when dealing with ARM on this site. Really, it looks like a deliberate undermining of the architecture, in my mind.
One: the chip has 4+4 independently operated core clusters. Operating at low power cores makes for a very advanced solution, compared to big cores revving down for a certain task. Besides, what does your remark have to do with what I said? My point is, Octa is a FAR more capable ARM chip than the one used in this comparison.. yet it doesn't cost more, and consumes up to 70% less power.
Two: as opposed to what? Comparing Chrome for Android with Chrome for Windows? Geekbench is not perfect, but it is the best you can try when comparing across platforms. It is the ONLY credible comparison of pure processing abilities in this case.
Three: answer the first two then. What am I missing here?
And those 2x4 cores can run simulataneously with the right software, hence the name Octa.
I agree with darkich that Anand always appears to show ARM in the worst light, first by only showing JavaScript browser tests rather than native code benchmarks, and second by insisting on the Chrome browser rather than the stock or fastest available browser. For example Geekbench shows that Exynos Octa easily beats Bobcat at the same frequency:
Most of the smartphone/tablet testing is done elsewhere (Brian for Smartphones, Anand for tablets). Given we're looking at tablets and laptops here, comparing performance to a Smartphone would be silly, so then we need to find a tablet with the Octa...which doesn't exist except in prototype form.
As for the "octa" having eight cores, that's true, but it typically only runs four at a time -- either the four A7 or the four A15. With the right software (basically only a benchmark designed to do something the Galaxy S4 won't ever do on its own), you can get the theoretical performance, but in practice you won't ever get this (at least not on the only currently shipping Exynos 5 device).
Finally, as pointed about by Kyuu, Geekbench is not a great benchmark. Sure, it can tell you some theoretical performance numbers, but many of the tests have very little to do with real workloads. I don't think we've ever used Geekbench outside of some smartphone testing, just like we don't generally report things like SuperPi or Sandra performance. Then again, I don't necessarily like Cinebench or x264 HD much either. If you want the Geekbench results, here's the 32-bit numbers for the A4-5000: 2987
If you're doing an SoC comparison I don't see why it matters if that SoC runs on a phone instead of a tablet. And I understand that this review may not be an SoC review, but that's what a lot of people are looking for right now.
Geekbench's integer tests aren't that bad. Crypto, bz2 and jpeg compression/decompression done in native code are actually relatively common tasks on a variety of hardware. The code being ran on the lua test (prime testing) is junk, but since lua is interpreted most of the measurement is with how well it does with interpreters and running junk code doesn't make much difference.
IMO your criticism applies more to Kraken which you conspicuously left out of your list of not so great (but we use them anyway) benchmarks. I gave a bunch of reasons why I don't like it in an earlier post, but I'd like to add a little bit to that - it's not just that it does a lot of DSP (audio and image processing) and crypto stuff but that these tests take up proportionately a lot more of the runtime, drowning out the little path finding and string parsing scores.
These tasks (DSP and crypto) are useful on a variety of platforms like Geekbench's, but the problem is that they're greatly distorted by being executed in Javascript - which is not where it'll usually be ran. It's going to have a hard time optimizing beyond double precision - assuming the code wasn't intended to be double precision in the first place, which would make it even less relevant. It'll have a lot of memory overhead issues and vectorization is pretty much out of the question, despite these being vector-friendly operations. This all makes it a bad proxy for how native code would perform at these tasks, especially if we're comparing with hand optimized SSE and NEON.
No, the right software is a Linux kernel patch which allows all 8 cores to be used, and S4 will be upgraded to use it. Although it will improve performance, the actual goal is lower power consumption because you can now mix and match cores. Today a single high performance task forces all processes to use A15 even when they don't need it, and when the task finishes all processes have to be migrated back again. In the new world you enable 1 A15 as needed and keep 1 or 2 A7's running the background processes.
Like most benchmarks, Geekbench is not perfect. But I agree with Exophase it is most definitely a lot better than JavaScript benchmarks. Geekbench does test real workloads (many of the tests is actual code people use), quite unlike JS benchmarks, which have nothing to do with browsing performance, let alone CPU performance.
The state of smartphone/tablet benchmarking is a shambles - and this is an opportunity for AnandTech to make a difference. You could take a set of Linux benchmarks (eg. freely available versions of SPEC subsets, Phoronix and other common benchmarks like the ones used in Geekbench) and create an app for Android and iOS.
Thanks for the Geekbench link, integer performance of Jaguar is slightly better than I expected vs Exynos Octa (http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/... This may be partly due comparing a phone SoC with a laptop SoC (Jaguar has a major advantage on the memory/stream part), but this kind of detailed comparison is far more interesting and revealing relative strengths and weaknesses in the microarchitectures than looking at JS performance.
Wow.. can you give a source about that kernel update? I can imagine all eight cores mixing would be beneficial on all areas. While four A15 cores can work asynchronously between each other(independently change frequency, idle/sleep state), their voltage is inherently higher that that of A7 cores. If the A57 soc will be able to mix cores too, then that will be an overall amazing prospect.
And I completely agree about Geekbench.. no matter how realistic workloads it represents, it beyond any doubt DOES give an idea of raw processing power. It's ridiculous to neglect that.
Note there are actually 3 different variants of big.Little software, ARM's hypervisor code which is OS unaware, the Linaro In-Kernel-Switcher and MP switcher (the latter supports 8 cores).
This makes me wonder about the Snapdragon 800 for the Note 3 rumours..an upclocked Octa on that kernel should really be more than good enough. Only advantage I can see in snapdragon is the GPU..adreno 330 looks like a whole step above from anything on the market right now.
This was a really underwhelming review... Comparing Kabini to a Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge. Really? Why don't you make the charts with relevant comparisons instead of forcing people to dig through benchmarks to find comparable CPUs?
And you just got to wonder what's the point of this sentence: "After all the bad news in terms of performance (not that it’s really bad, but it can certainly look that way at times), the good news is that not only is Kabini noticeably faster than Brazos, but it’s also mighty frugal when it comes to power use. "
Bad news in terms of performance??? Why, because it doesn't compete with an i5 Ivy Bridge?? If anyone wants to read a decent review to Kabini, with more comparisons to relevant notebooks head on over to Notebookcheck.net. Here's the link: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl...
To sum up: The Kabini A4-5000 is competitive with a Sandy Bridge i3 in terms of CPU and GPU performance (number of cores compensating for lower single thread performance) and it sometimes shadows an Ivy Bridge i3.
That's being awfully generous on "competitive". Single-threaded, i3-3217U is about twice as fast as A4-5000; multi-threaded it's only about 20% faster. In their graphics testing, the HD 4000 in an i3-3217U is consistently leading by 20-40%. That's a Core i3 laptop with Ivy Bridge that you can get for under $500, right now, and it's ahead by 20% or more in every test I looked at...and Core i3 with HD 4000 isn't exactly known for being a performance monster.
I'd say that AMD is over-reaching with their targets; A6 is more like a match for Pentium, A4 for Celeron, and anything below that isn't really worth discussing (i.e. Atom). When we see the Haswell update next month, the margin in favor of Intel will only increase, but at least I don't think AMD will have to worry about ULV i3 Haswell for a few more months. Based on currently available laptops, Kabini needs to be well under $500 to compete -- or I'd say $500 is acceptable if you get a decent LCD.
"Even though the A4-5000 on paper only slightly higher clocked than the recently tested A6-1450 , the performance differences in practice are quite large. The reason for this is the higher TDP Classification: Not to exceed its maximum consumption of 8 watts (without "turbo Dock"), the A6-1450 can achieve the full turbo of 1.4 GHz only with utilization of a single core; under full load decreases the frequency contrast decreases to just over 1.0 GHz. Thanks to constant fitting the A4-5000 1.5 GHz can settle in some benchmarks by almost 50 percent, and so makes a clear leap forward.
, When all four cores, the APU beats even just the Core i3-2367M and comes in part the newer Core i3-3217U close. However, the gap in the per-thread performance remains impressive: Even a Pentium 987 per core expects at least 50 percent faster. Although the parallelization of modern applications has been greatly improved, you should not completely exclude this point.
In everyday life, the tester provided by AMD still feels quite fast and responsive. The more power than the A6-1450 or the previous E2-1800 is quite noticeable, could additionally by a turbo mode but even higher - a pity that the A4-5000 have to do without this feature. For office and multimedia applications including full HD video, the rich, however, reserves the APU from perfect. "
I'll go by their words since they have a more thorough review than the poor job you guys did here. The A4-5000 beats the Pentium in their benchmarks - except in single threaded performance - in every aspect. The Kabini GPU is comparable with the HD3000 in many of the graphical benchmarks and can run some non-demanding or old games. Hands-down the A4 eats the Pentium brand, so no AMD isn't over-reaching with their targets - have you tested the A6 yet and compared it with an i3 IB?
And why are you talking about Haswell, when Kabini sits below the Intel Core brand? AMD defeats Intel below the Cores and this just confirms that. Now if you want to talk about Richland versus Ivy Bridge and Haswell I'll concede that AMD is really behind and Steamroller can't come soon enough.
Because no one cares about Sandy Bridge ULV considering its now end of life. They also tested a lot of highly synthetic benchmarks. i3 ULV ivy notebooks can be had for $400 on newegg, i5 ULV notebooks cost $500 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... sale yes but sales happen all the time). Also for the greater part of its lifetime, kabini will compete with haswell.
No, Kabini will compete with Pentiums. You guys keep forgeting that. And Ivy notebooks will be replaced and Kabini notebooks won't compete with them for most of it's shelf life. As for sales, do you think you won't see sales of Kabini notebooks? Just because there's a small overlap of vendors clearing up inventory of Ivy notebooks doesn't invalidate that Kabini is a new chip and won't compete with Ivy Bridge for most of its life.
No, if an i5 ULV notebook costs $500, an i3 ULV notebook costs $400 and a kabini notebook costs $450 then the kabini is competing with i3/i5 and NOT pentium. Pricewise it competes with i3 and possibly i5. Haswell ULV will launch in a few months. Bobcat launched what? two years ago. With a similar lifetime (hope its shorter) jaguar will be competing with haswell for the vast majority of its lifetime.
Yep. The barrier IMO, is OEM. OEM tend to hiking the price. When bobcat E350 first out, the average price is ~$360. What the hell. With $460, i can get 2x performance with sandy bridge i3.
If only AMD want to build their own machine (laptop and desktop).
A Kabini notebook costs 400$. And that's without having into account promotions, which WILL happen just as they happen to those precious i3 Ivy Bridges of yours. You seem to forget that promotions happen to all notebooks. And if you keep bringing ULV i3 Ivy Bridges for that price, then guess what? I'll get a TRINITY APU notebook instead for that price! Because I can also get them!! And they have a much stronger GPU power than Kabini, and Ivy Bridge and I can also get some quite decent ultrathins.
The top Trinity LV APU (the A10-4655M) beats the Ivy Bridge ULVs in terms of GPU performance. The issue is that there's barely any notebooks for sale with it (The Samsung Series 5 ultrathin is one, the HP Sleekbook another).
The A8-4455M is available in the Asus U38N and a Lenovo model and that one is weak. It's comparable to a Ivy Bridge i3 em terms of CPU/GPU performance (weaker single-thread but better multi-thread - more cores). However, Trinity powered notebooks are usually cheaper than Ivy Bridge ones and you can get them with great promotions now.
No, they're not. A A10-4655M with dual channel RAM beats the living crap of a HD4000. You just don't want to admit that. Go dig for benchmarks before spouting falsehoods.
No, mobile amd apus do very good in 3d mark but poorly in games because games have more cpu load (unlike 3dmark which is very cpu light) and the gpu can't boost as high. For instance the 7660G generally ties with the 630m in 3dmark but loses by about 20% in games. Thats a 25 watt part so it will do better than the 17 watt ULV but beat the living crap? NO. Even the 7660G only beats the HD4000 on average by 30%, move that down to ULV and the difference is less.
And by the way. HP announced the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart for 400$ with this A4 and the A6 APU. So 20% less than those wonderful i3 Ivy Bridges of yours and with a 10 point touchscreen. Jeez, I wonder if it's good enough to compete?
With promotions. And there's no one saying that 400$ is the minimum price point that Kabini can achieve. Lets see what other OEMs will show in Computex. Because it can go lower. Ivy Bridge is an architecture in end of shelf life. Promotions are bound to happen. Those weren't the normal prices of notebooks of a freshly released architecture and if you were intelectually honest instead of trolling like a jackass you would recognize that.
Core i3 ULV laptops are routinely selling for $400 now. The ASUS VivoBook X202E for instance is at Amazon for $399 right now and comes equipped similarly to the Kabini prototype (other than the LCD of course), and it provides a touchscreen: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009F1I1C4/ref=as...
The closest I can come to that with an AMD APU right now has...a Kabini processor and it's on preorder. What's more, it's the A4-1250 Kabini that cuts the CPU and GPU clocks by about 30% relative to A4-5000. The A4-5000 might be competitive with an i3-3217U, but the A4-1250 won't be (other than battery life, which should be slightly higher). http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CM1AAOG/ref=as...
You should refrain from commenting because you are just digging yourself deeper and showing bias against AMD. Which is pitiful since with a website with the reputation and impact that Anandtech has you should strive for impartiality. HP announced that the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart will come with a Temash and Kabini APU. Price will start at 400$ at launch. Less than that Acer, which I agree is a terrible deal and is overpriced because it is sporting hardware from a new generation. But again, you are just showing poor knowledge since that Acer doesn't bring a Kabini APU but a Temash APU. An APU with even lower TDP than what you reviewed in here - and you can also go check a decent review of the APU in that notebook in other websites since you guys don't seem to bother or care with those details since "it's AMD".
But you, more than anyone else should know that when a CPU generation is nearing the end of its shelf life you usually see a lot of deals of notebooks with that silicon. Good consumers will use that chance to get cheaper and great notebooks but that doesn't invalidate the launch of new hardware that, when launched will sell for higher prices.
You're one to talk about bias; check the mirror please. All I'm saying is that Kabini (and Temash) need to offer compelling price/performance/features against the competition. It doesn't matter whether the competition is "nearing the end of its shelf life" -- it's there and AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, etc. have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. I recommend products based on what's best, at a given price, and right now a $400 Ivy Bridge ULV laptop is going to be difficult to beat with a slower APU and a similar price point.
Your "Ivy Bridge ULV is EOL" comments are actually wrong as well. Did you know ULV Pentium and Celeron parts just launched last quarter? Did you know that Intel is still making and selling Core i3 Sandy Bridge parts? Of course you did, because you want comparisons against the two-year-old Sandy Bridge parts so that Kabini looks better. The truth is that laptops with Ivy Bridge are going to be around for a long time. Pretending otherwise is dreaming, and of course you'll disappear when proven wrong or come back as a new user to spread more FUD when your fantasy predictions don't pan out.
Ultimately, it will depend heavily on what the OEMs deliver -- and when they deliver it. The Pavilion 11 Touchsmart at $399 doesn't seem too bad, but what do you really get? Oh, that's right: it *starts* at $399, and that will almost certainly be with Temash as you're so keen to point out. But Temash is just Kabini at lower clocks and potentially two CPU cores instead of four. Do you know how bad an A4-1250 will look compared to an i-3217U, or a Pentium 2117U, or even a Celeron 1037U? Those should all be priced $400 or less, with the major difference being L2 cache and the lack of Quick Sync on Pentium and Celeron. I've seen some benchmarks elsewhere, and basically the A4-1250 is often half the performance of the Kabini A4-5000 reviewed here.
Kabini is much better than Brazos and Atom, no doubt about it. It's also slower than Ivy Bridge ULV in many tests, and areas where it does win (some GPU benchmarks) are often meaningless for the Windows laptop market. (“Oh, you’re faster at running games! I can get an unplayable 15FPS compared to an even more unplayable 13FPS!”) On an Android tablet, Kabini and Temash will do much better, but for Windows they're at best "fast enough", while other similarly priced laptops are going to be faster. Who buys a slower part for the same price? I’m not sure, but as an unbiased tech journalist I’m certainly not going to recommend doing so.
The reason why Kabini and Temash are good for AMD is the following. Clock for clock they are better than Sandy i3 ULVs and equal to Ivy i3 ULVs. They provide a better battery life than the ULVs but most importantly they have a smaller die size than their Core competition and are being made in a mature 2 + year 28nm Bulk HKMG process from TSMC. For the first time, AMD is giving a good performance and a lower die-size than Intel. Previously AMD had to compete in price and/or price/performance with a large die-size. No longer is it handicapped in that manner and this time it can definetely make an impact.
Also JAGUAR architecture has made its way into both PS4 and XBox-one as semi custom APU and it will only make things better and easier for AMD.
The name calling is uncalled for. I can respectfully disagree. Who cares about promotions or not? I care (and the consumer cares) about the price that they are paying out of their wallet; that is what matters in the market. Ivy Bridge is going to get discounts because its going EOL. That is the market that kabini will have to compete in.
Yes, the consumer cares about promotions but my point is: Kabini notebooks won't have to compete against Ivy Bridge discounted notebooks except for a small portion of their commercial life. And if Kabini needs to compete with that, the same can be said about Haswell, Richland, etc, etc. Every new notebook that gets in the market now will compete with promotions for the older models being cleared out and it's not those promotions that will affect their success or not. And that's the point I am making and that you fail to understand. Promotions happen all the time, they direct the consumer to one product above another but they are temporary. And the flaw in your reasoning is assuming that Kabini/Temash notebooks will face Ivy Bridge notebooks with promotional prices during all the time they are going to be for sale and not recognizing that promotions happen for all products and aren't exclusive of Ivy Bridge notebooks.
No haswell will be more expensive but offer more performance.
Promotions happen all the time but if they happen all the time then they might as well be considered as non temporary (like dell's discounts).
I have no doubt that promotions will happen for kabini I'm just saying that $500 is too much for a notebook of this class. Its not an i3 ULV competitor (see TH for i3 ULV comparison) and at this moment must be compared pricewise to the market its in.
I'll beg to disagree with that. As a non-promotional price, for a notebook with a 1080p touchscreen display I think that 500$ is more than fair. As for promotions happening your line of reasoning seems to assume that discounts will only affect Intel notebooks which isn't clearly the case. While you may get cheap Ivy Bridge notebooks when in promotion, go search for cheap Trinity/brazos notebooks with promotions and you'll find them even cheaper. The same will be said of Temash/Kabini notebooks.
I fail to understand why you don't seem to acknowledge that. Or the proposition of an APU that beats Pentiums and Celerons in performance (excluding single-thread performance, which is much less relevant nowadays) and has superior battery life. Will Atom and Haswell Pentiums offer better performance/efficiency/price ratio? It remains to be seen.
Depends really. With a 1080p screen its a good price. Sales happen all the time. Yes you can and will get i3 ULV systems for cheap and can get kabini systems for cheap. I'm simply saying given the fact that these promotion happen all the time literally (go to newegg laptops, sort by price-lowest and more than 75% of the notebooks on that page are on sale) you have to take these things into consideration. Kabini is competing against discounted but perfectly fine notebooks in this segment. You can get a nice lenovo g580 with SV i3 for $350. Any promotion that runs with a kabini notebook will have to match that price/perf and kabini is much weaker than SV i3. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
The performance quite poor and notebookcheck doesn't really tell a different story. An i5 is the right CPU to compare it too because it runs in the same performance envelope. With all the other stuff that goes into a decent notebook or tablet/hybrid the CPU cost alone does make that much of a difference.
The problem with Kabini is Single Threaded performance which matters for responsivness in plain old office work loads. Which is what most of these notebooks do. x264, cinebench, ... none of that really matters. And gaming. In game low settings don't do much for CPU requirements and that is why even at low many games aren't playable. Something Intel can offer despite its HD 4000 which has nowhere near the reputation of AMD's GCN. If all you want is an office notebook for some casual gaming like a bit of Starcraft. An i5 is still a worthwhile investment.
Well theres two arguements. One is cost, and yes amd will come in cheaper because intel likes their margins. So if cost is your primary motivator than this chip looks good.
The other argument is performance/watt and peak performance, both of which make an i5 look much better than this chip.
Now it's true an i5 doesn't scale down to 3.9W, so in that market this chip appears to be a real contender and the one to beat. But that's not the version that was tested here today so we don't know that for sure.
Personally, I'm disappointed, and think haswell will compare very favorably in all metrics except price. I'm not sure haswell will be tablet suitable though, where some sku's of this chip should be.
Not saying this chip is terrible, just saying for anything 8-9W and up it seems to me haswell will be the clear choice if price isn't a major factor.
Just that it does compete on performance doesn't mean performance isn't valuable information. How much speed loss are you dealing with when going with cost effectiveness. This isn't a smartphone CPU that will ultimately end up running different software. It is still Windows and the same games and programs as an i5 is used for. The cost difference in the end product isn't that huge or insurmountable. The buyer would like to know how much they get when paying up or who much they loose when going cheap. Comparing it only with Atoms would be cheating and something marketing folks do not a review site that wants to have some reputation. These chips don't go into Smartphones not even Tablets (that is Temash) they go where 15W Haswells will go and 2/3 of those sub $800 notebooks BOM is still none CPU related. So even if Kabini was given away for free the notebooks would still cost something.
But price is always a major factor. It's the "majorest" factor. This is a site for enthusiasts (read geeks) but think of the person at the AT&T store who picks the 2 or 3 generation old iPhone because it's $50 cheaper.
AMD set the standard with x64 that Intel evetually agreed was superior and joined. With the introduction of these hUMA (fully shared CPU and GPU memory) chips AMD has again set the standard that Intel will have to copy. As I've said before; Intel hasn't been a tech leader in a decade and, again, they'll be playing catch up once they cave to AMD's superior design. But by then, just as has been true for years, Intel graphics and multitasking will continue to lag behind AMD. Intel's only bragging right is saving one or two watts and slapping an "Intel Inside" tatoo on products, but charging twice as much for it. http://goo.gl/OItwV
why are you including a cpu which isn't in the same market? `hey here's a good AMD APU , but were going to ignore that and put an IB in the graphs for lol factor cause its far better and we don't want AMD to look good for once`. seriously anandtech.
This could be really nice in 7" to 8" windows8 tablet! Faster than atom, cheap and eat less power. Finally one can get surface pro tablet near 300-400$ and still get resonable good performance... Yeah Haswell ULV will be much faster, but then the cost will be near 1000$ for tablet, I am not so interested in that alternative! Fanny how AMD can beat intel in ultra portable devices! We really need a new version of Atom to compete with this. Luckily it is coming so we will see some old fachioned competition in that sector! Competetion is good! We just have to see what has happened in highend CPU and see stalling situation in there...
Dude.. AMD put together a laptop and shipped it to Anandtech for benchmarking. How is it Anandtech's fault that AMD intentionally chose not to put dual-channel memory into a prototype notebook that it built itself? Instead of blaming Anandtech for being "biased," maybe we should be looking at why AMD chose not to equip its own prototype with dual channel memory?
He didn't mention dual channel memory not even once in his comment. He mentioned comparing a inexpensive chip that competes against Atoms/Pentiums in price/performance/TDP with an intel i5 which is a much more powerful chip.
I wonder how starvered the cores are for memory bandwith. Even the xbox one will be using quad channel memory (4 64 bit controllers) and 2133 mhz instead of 1600, that is over five times the bandwidth. The ps4 keeps the quad channel but uses gddr5 memory
CPU is almost never bandwidth starved. Literally, you can run a 3770k on 1033 mhz ram and outside winrar you will never notice any differences compared to 2133 mhz ram. 3770k is dual channel but more than 4x as powerful as this kabini apu.
Your statement that an i7 does not need faster memory does not necessarily translate to this situation with jaguar and that is why I am curious if the cores are starved. I wish it was possible for anandtech to test this (but it is very hard to do so for there isn't really laptop ram faster than 1600 mhz for laptops). Here is why you can't just assume what works with an i7 translates with the jaguar chip.
533 mhz dual channel is equivalent to 1066 single channel. (Remember i7-3770k is dual channel while amd jaguar in this implementation is single channel). Thus you can't just assume an i7 is fine with dual channel, than the jaguar would be fine with single channel for the i7 has 100% more bandwidth due to it being dual channel.
Furthermore i7-3770k is intels high performance architecture with large r&d vs amd's energy efficent architecture with small r&d chip. It is very likely intel has better data predictors in their i7 so there's less cache miss and thus you don't care about the memory speed. Intel R&D money is a big deal and translates into better IPC for many reasons including branch prediction.
Lets put it this way arm is going higher bandwidth for more ipc. Tegra 3 is a mere single channel 32 bit controller, Tegra 4 is likely to be a dual channel 32 bit controller, Exynos 5 uses a dual channel 32 bit controller. Apple on their Ipads now use a quad channel 32 bit controller. One reason why exynos and ipad were faster than tegra 3 was better memory bandwidth.
I am not saying you will see improvements greater than 20% but I am curious if faster memory speeds would cause ipc to go up from 5 to 20%. For example with bulldozer amd gets 8% faster encoding with x264 first pass with 2133 memory dual channel instead of 1333 dual channel according to vr-zone.
It may not be in amd best interest to make the jaguar chip dual channel 64 bit for cheap laptops that compete against intel's celeron or pentium lines, for laptops. Yet at the same time Jaguar is going to be AMD process for low power in the future. It is quite possible that AMD may in the future (if the tdp is low enough) make a 20nm dual channel chip for the higher margin tablets, high margin tablets would insist on higher ipc for the cpu and more bandwidith for the screen, while low margin cheap computers would not care about increase ipc. It is possible that in the future AMD can find a sweet spot between intel atom and intel haswell. (I am not saying this is likely, just merely possible all depends on intel's pricing to oems for haswell.)
It is extremely unlikely for this chip's cpu to be hurt by memory bandwidth. Sure the i7 has 100% more bandwidth but you must factor in the power of the chip. The i7-3770k is going to be something like 6x more powerful (3.7 ghz turbo + IPC advantage + HT). Even if the kabini chip tested in this review was half as efficient as the 3770k in utilizing memory bandwidth it still wouldn't show any differences in cpu performance. Phone/tablet SOCs mainly need the bandwidth for the gpu portion of the die (the high res screen was the reason that apple needed such an interface). If they need more bandwidth it'll be for the igp portion of the die (definitely 1066 mhz ram on a single channel will hurt this thing) for kabini.
It’s hardly misleading. Haswell is still under NDA and Bay Trail is due around Q4 which is why they aren’t compared. The better comparison will be Bail Trail based on pricing and performance. AMD should still have a healthy lead for GPU but if Intel’s recent info is true it should be close on the CPU front. The main difference is that Bay Trail has a low enough TDP for a cheap fanless tablet whereas the chip reviewed today is 15W so Ultrabook class. So you get two out of four with AMD: The Good: GPU + Price The Bad: power consumption + low IPC So business as usual really.
Given AMD's traditional design wins and how those systems end up, I suspect this is not going to matter much. I have more hope of Bay Trail providing a solid deal for once than I do this.
It's a shame because this really should be AMD's niche to dominate, but I doubt any OEM'll give them a serious try.
I think so, yes. IB Pentium 2117U (17 Watt TDP) should be around 33 % faster in legacy Intel-optimised CPU benchmarks doing the math and according to say Techspot. I would think ULV Pentiums are more expensive for OEMs, notebooks is a different story. Not to mention Kabini should cost a fraction to make for AMD compared with even crippled 2C Ivybridges aka Celeron / Pentium. Kabini wins in games and Open CL, and in AVX-enabled applications it should eat the Pentium alive since the latter doesn't support AVX extensions (should be mentioned at least). I'd prefer AVX extensions to Cinebench but this site seems to suggest I am a minority...
Comparing a 3W SoC (Z2760) to a 15W SoC (A4-5000), and calling the former laughable... not really fair.
Sure, Kabini is definitely faster than the old Atom architecture and, yes, I understand this is not a definitive comparison; nevertheless - it seems misleading.
What would happen if we compare a 3W Kabini to a 15W Haswell? Laughable wouldn't even begin to describe the performance difference.
But... an A4-5000 doesn't use anywhere near 15W, as far as I've heard. Still, let's consider the evidence - the Z2760 is a 32-bit, dual core, hyperthreaded CPU at 1.8GHz with a low powered graphics unit and 1MB of L2. The A4-5000 is a 64-bit, quad core CPU at 1.5GHz with a far stronger graphics unit and 2MB of dynamic L2. Temash would be a different proposition I expect as the A4-1200 is only clocked at 1GHz.
Yes, absolutely, I agree - it's just that the direct comparisons and conclusions made are a bit stark.
There's always another side to an argument; in your case, I could argue that comparing the brand new Jaguar to a terribly old Atom architecture isn't the way to go. Consider the following evidence - Silvermont is 64-bit, quad-core, 2MB L2 cache, OoO, 2GHz+, 22nm, far more energy efficient, supports 1st gen Core instructions and Turbo Boost; it would decimate Jaguar.
In the article, I also discovered that the 2020M is referred to as a 1.8GHz 35W part, when it's actually 2.4GHz. Are the benchmarks done on a underclocked 2020M or was that simply a typo?
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, not AMD vs. Intel.
So this is the core that will be in the next 2 big consoles? Am i the only one that think that these are quite weak, even if you have 8 of them?
That does mean now that if one of those 2 consoles are the lead in the development that the games will be forced to be really good multi threaded. (So i guess the next games for the pc will also be using multiply cores way more)
Why did they go for the jaguar core thats really targetted for ver low end or mobile stuff?
Why didn't they just go for a Richland 8 core system with a very good gpu that lets say is a 100W part?
What is the guess that the TDP is of the xbox one or ps4? A console can take 100W just easily that doesn't matter, so why choose for a core that is dedicated for mobile?
Yes, the Jaguar core is 'weak', but what does 'weak' mean? That is such a vague definition. For one usage scenario Jaguar might be unacceptable, for another it might be overkill. Remember, Sony/MS are not building a contemporary PC. Jaguar might seem slow to us, and in a gaming desktop it would be, but that's not the point. Think of consoles, in this case the PS4 and the Xbox One, as non-PC devices such as tablets. Would you say the latest Samsung/Apple running on a Cortex A15 is slow? No, you would say it's super fast. Well, Jaguar is even faster. Yes, a console has to deal with different workloads than a tablet, but that's why it has very different hardware.
Why did Sony/MS choose Jaguar? Jaguar is easier to integrated, more power efficient and most importantly cheaper than Richland. It's a far simpler architecture than Richland, and probably easier to work with in a console's life. Also, it's very important to note that Sony/MS wanted an integrated solution - they weren't going to build a system with a dedicated video card like a gaming PC.
Cost, cost, cost - everything is about the cost. A console cannot be expensive (the way a gaming PC is) - it has to sell very well in order to establish an install base to sell games to. Sony/MS will probably sell their 8th gen consoles at a loss initially - AMD's Jaguar/GCN was their best/only choice. What else could they do at the same price or even at all? Silvermont isn't ready yet and NVIDIA probably wouldn't be willing to integrate a GPU of theirs the way AMD did, and both of those would be more expensive than Jaguar/GCN. Not to mention, MS has had a ton of trouble with NVIDIA in the original Xbox - they are probably not willing to go down that road again.
It's not really an 8-core solution - it's two quad-core modules and communication between the two might be problematic; so games on the new PS/Xbox would probably run on four Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz. However, don't forget that neither of the two consoles has a ton of raw graphics power under the hood - the Xbox GPU is roughly equivalent to an HD 7770 (but with better memory bandwidth), and the PS to an HD 7850. Games would be specifically developed for this kind of hardware (unlike PC games) and would most probably be GPU limited so the Jaguar cores would really be sufficient.
A Pile Driver module is much larger than a Jaguar core. For die size concerns, it going with Jaguar made sense if core counts are the same. Steam Roller cores are due out in 2014 which are expected to bring higher IPC and a slight clock speed increase compared to Pile Driver.
Power consumption is also an issue. The bulk of the power consumption from the XBox One and PS4 SoC's will come from their GPU's. Adding a high power CPU core like Pile Driver would have ballooned power consumption close to 200W which makes cooling impractical and expensive. Jaguar still adds power but it is far more manageable in comparison.
In addition, Steam Roller is tied to processes from Global Foundries (though IBM could likely manufacture them if need be). TSMC is the preferred foundry for bulk processes due to cost and a slight edge in density. Jaguar has been prepared to be manufactured at TSMC from the start. AMD could have stuck with GF but it would have had to port GCN functional units to that same process. Such efforts are currently underway for Kaveri that is looking to be a 2014 part. So for any type of 2013 launch, going that route was not an option.
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Musafir_86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
-Finally!-BTW, some pictures still missing/not loading...
-Thanks for the article, but when Anand's architectural deep-dive will come out?
Regards.
Musafir_86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
-Sorry, I missed the link on the main page, and all pictures load correctly now.Thanks.
codedivine - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Kabini looks interesting. Somewhat surprised that the max bandwidth (10.5 GB/s) supported is less than even Exynos 5 Dual (12.8GB/s).Wondering whether the GPU supports fp64 and at what rate?
codedivine - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I guess Anand answered the fp64 question in the other article already :)axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Wow...the AMD Jaguar Temash and Kabinis cost about the same as Atoms (~$30-$50) and perform many times faster than Atoms.
I wonder why Anandtech did not compare the Kabinis against Atoms/Celerons instead of i3 and i5 that cost around $200 to $225+ ?
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Sadly (not really -- Atoms are trash), we don't have any recent Atom/Celeron/Pentium laptops around. No one has ever sent us a Celeron or Pentium laptop for review, and the last Atom netbook we tested was probably almost two years back. Anand does have Clover Trail covered, but there's no real point in running our heavy laptop suite on that.JDG1980 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
In the mini-ITX DIY segment, Kabini may compete against the Celeron 847 boards (which currently run about $75). I'd be interested to see how it stacks up there. The AMD solution would have a clock speed advantage (847 only runs at 1.1 GHz) but the Sandy Bridge-based 847 almost certainly has better IPC.MrMilli - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Here you go: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/201...BushLin - Friday, June 21, 2013 - link
Thanks for that, my German isn't great but from what I can tell this chip is a great choice compared to Intel's actual competing products. Such a shame Anand's review is with a Pentium consuming over twice the power and i5/i7 products costing many times more.My interest is in the low power desktop boards and hope to see a useful comparison on here at some point. I'm sure Zotac or some other manufacturer with such a leaning would be happy to supply comparable boards to cover Kabini and the lower power Pentium and Celerons.
jagd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Dual channel may not help to CPu but you are forgetting GPu , this is a shame for anandtech .MrSpadge - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It's a shame for Anandtech that AMD didn't include a dual channel controller on the die? Weird.HalloweenJack - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
rubbish Kabini includes dual channel on die - the `prototype` doesn't use it. which is ofc a shame , and if anandtech wasn't being paid by intel or employed intel staff on its website , they would likely have added another stick to show the improvement gained.t.s - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
"Just to call out a couple noteworthy items, first is the single-channel memory configuration. In theory that could be hampering performance somewhat, but we have no real way of knowing. While the laptop does support two SO-DIMMs, Kabini only supports a single-channel interface, so adding a second SO-DIMM wouldn't help." --Page 2So, Whose right? If Kabini indeed support dual channel on die, then yes, it's a shame. Knowing it will raise the bar for AMD and intentionally didn't include it with testbed in the review.
GuMeshow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Kabini does not "include dual channel on die". All the websites i've seen say "Kabini features a single 64-bit DDR3 memory controller", two SO-DIMM sockets does not mean two channels ... Unless i'm mistaken and if that is the case i would ask for your source on that.lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
No, you're right. HalloweenJack is spreading FUD instead of candy.Spunjji - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Tool.johnny_boy - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
I wondered the same thing, but I thought "shame on AMD". Why would they be that retarded though? I don't get it.johnny_boy - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
I get it now, after having read the comments. I should also read the article.whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I believe that kabini is typically $42-72, though I can't find the linkpolyzp - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD back in the High End with Steamroller! Check out the benchmarkshttp://amdfx.blogspot.ca/2013/05/amd-steamroller-f...
Kevin G - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Those aren't real benchmarks, just estimates that are based upon improvements from an anonymous source.TerdFerguson - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It should be criminal to market any of these chips as "Elite Performance" platforms. The words elite and performance have pretty well understood meanings, which nothing AMD is offering stand up to. If I'm shopping for a new computer and it is advertised as an elite performance platform, I'm going to expect it to run AAA games at elite settings.AMD is distancing themselves from my wallet a little more every day, thanks to weak products, weak initiatives, hype and terribly dishonest marketing.
Finally - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I want a Kabini in my Office PC, I want one in my 13' laptop and I surely will be recommending them to all my friends.lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Don't know about in your office PC unless you're an Office-only type of worker. I guess that applies to a lot, but I wouldn't know. I could see it in an AIO for office type of deal, or nice, SFF setups. I feel like multi-seat and/or thin-client setups would be cheaper though. May as well buy that i3 if you're getting an independent machine.wumpus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Considering just how many office machines are running XP (the pentium4s only get replaced when they burn up, the core-based products are likely to stay until the IT department adopts some faddish idiocy*).* not saying that core+windows is irreplaceable, just that stupid business fads are much more likely than real reasons to replace them, the money being available, and enough pointy haired bosses on board at the same time.
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Uh huh, I'm sure you were totally predisposed toward getting an AMD product until you saw that marketing-speak.Dude, it's marketing. Intel is just as (if not more guilty) of the same. Feel free to hate marketing-speak -- I certainly do. But let's not pretend it's something unique to AMD, m'kay?
And uh, there's nothing weak about Jaguar, from what I can see. It looks like the best low-power x86 SoC bar by a large measure.
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It looks like the best low-power x86 SoC by a large measure.**yannigr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
You are free to buy an Intel product, you know Intel, that beautiful company that in the past was threatening anyone thinking that he could sell PC's with Athlon's. That behavior off course has nothing to do with words like "criminal" or "dishonest marketing". So go and buy an Intel system, the "dishonest marketing" free and "criminal" hardware.yannigr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I meant "criminal" free hardware off course.Intel, because we hate monopoly.
lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Ya know, it happened, but an i3 ULV with 4k graphics knocks this chip silly, to ignore GT3e coming around the corner. Sorry but it's to the point where Intel will never need such moves again.Spunjji - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Ah, so that justified them doing it while they did do that, right? ;)Coolmike899 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I know it's not on topic, but did anyone else see the add for the GTX 780 on anand's home page?coburn_c - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Only one test comparing it against an a15? There is trickery afoot.wumpus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Or likely a lack of A15 based systems in Anand's test lab. HEY YOU! You with the A15 tablet samples. Send some to Anand.beginner99 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
looks ok now...but this will change in about 1 month and then even more so when baytrail-T arrives.devashishpurandareva - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The article describes a 14 inch display, but the specs embedded in the article mention 15.6 inch screen...JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Fixed.coburn_c - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
A4-5000: half the performance of Haswell with all the TDPtakeship - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It's even worse than that. Kabini can't compete in either CPU, or GPU perf with ULV Ivy-bridge, let alone Haswell. Less performance, slightly better battery life?, and likely cheapy cheap laptops sound the DO NOT WANT trumpet pretty loudly. Maybe if we could get this kind of performance at 7W instead.NotTarts - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Kabini will be priced under $60. What's Haswell going to be priced at again? $200? $300?takeship - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
True, price will keep most budget buyers out of Haswell powered ultrabooks. Not so for the now-on-clearance-sale Ivy Bridge Dell & HPs though. And in that market Kabini loses most of it's price advantage, while still giving worse performance & marginal battery life improvements. There it's the new $500 plastic Kabini laptop, vs. the $600 aluminum IVB Lenovo. I just don't see that being a win.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The HP Pavilion 11 Touchsmart costs 400$. It has a 10-point touchscreen. So, the 400$ touch enabled Kabini seems mighty atractive compared to the 600$ Lenovo now.axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Touche! Thanks to AMD for providing alternatives to Intel's Atoms and higher priced CPUs.
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Besides the price issue, you seem to be quite missing the point of a low-power architecture like Jaguar. Let me know when ULV Ivy Bridge can scale down to 3.9W.Also, a lot of people seem to have trouble comprehending the fact that TDP doesn't really have much in common with the actual power draw of the chip (or the heat output). We've already seen what happens when you try to cram even the lowest wattage Ivy Bridge into a modern tablet form factor: high temperatures w/ fans, low battery life, high price.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It competes with an Sandy Bridge ULV i3 and it gets quite close to a i3 Ivy, while offering better battery life.Seems like a clear proposition to me: if Pentium like performance is what you need this offers you that and better GPU performance. Perfect for the low-end of the ultrathin/ultrabook market.
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
yeah, pretty much how I read it as well. Assuming you can afford to pay an extra $200 dollars there's not much reason (other than possibly graphics drivers) to not get haswell instead.aryonoco - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Very interesting article. Just a few notes:I'm not sure that Exynos 5250 is the best representative of Cortex A15. For one, it's dual core without any HT so at a massive disadvantage in a test like Kraken. Secondly, it came out in actual device in the market about 7 months ago. By the time Kabini shows in products, it will probably be over 8 months later. We'll have other Cortex A15 parts by then, and if the Tegra 4 Kraken scores that I'm hearing (~6000) is right, and if something Tegra 4 is using about half as much power as this 15W Kabini, then Kabini suddenly doesn't look that competitive.
Of course as you say, the success of Kabini will depend on what OEMs do with it, but traditionally these cheap AMD parts find themselves in devices that are compromised in everyway. Even if we get a 1080p screen this time around (which I'm hopeful), we'll still have to deal with sub-optimal keyboards, trackpads that work only half the time, and other cost-cutting measures we are familiar with. For this to succeed, someone needs to put it in a Ultrabook-style laptop, with good display, good keyboard and no software glitches, and price it under $500. That's a tall task.
HP just announced a very interesting Slatebook X2 running Android (not skinned) on Tegra 4 with 1080p IPS screen and a Transformer-style detachable dock for $479, including the dock (sidenote, I was disappointed there was no coverage of this on AT). If the performance claims for Tegra 4 (and other future more optimized Cortex A15 parts) are accurate, with such devices on the horizon, will there even be a cheap Ultrabook-style market left for Kabini to compete in? Can Kabini find its way into similar designs by major OEMs? I hope, for everyone's sake that AMD can succeed, but I am doubtful.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I certainly think Kabini can go into the same designs that we're seeing Tegra 4 target. Which will end up being faster? That's a different question, and I'm not sure we have enough information to come to a conclusion right now. If Kabini/Temash can get into tablets sooner rather than later, they've got a chance. If it takes 6-8 months, you're right: it may not matter at that point.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
HP just announced their back to school products and there is a successor to the HP dm1 that will cary A4's and A6's.Exophase - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No Cortex-A15 has HT, and Kraken is single threaded anyway. I think Kraken just isn't a great benchmark. Although its makers say it's a lot better than Sunspider it shares a lot of the same sorts of problems:1) It's Javascript which has its own unique (pretty severe) overheads which can dominate run-time to the extent that it drowns out a lot of the variation from the type of JS code you're running. JS is used and it's important, but even today on good JITs most JS code is several times (think 5 times) slower than an equivalent written in something like C++ or even Java, making it a bad representation of performance of more efficient software.
2) Much of what it does - path finding, signal processing, and crypto - is not the kind of stuff Javascript is usually used for.
3) Its test durations are really short, which is bad for benchmarks in general but can be especially bad for JITs where it
4) The variation in current browsers is extreme (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&... where you can see some tests are substantially faster and others substantially slower. This again highlights the big overheads of Javascript and the impact of different JIT strategies, but also that the state of performance is still pretty volatile. A similar sort of variation could manifest between different backends (ie, x86 vs ARM) even for the same browser.
Cross-architecture comparisons are hard and I don't blame people for using JS when there's not a lot else available (although at least some other inclusions would be nice).. but you shouldn't draw a very broad conclusion from a Kraken comparison alone. And if you did that it'd also make the Kabini vs i5 comparison look a lot worse than a lot of other tests show.
georgec84 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
These chis look great! I hope it can provide AMD with a small spark. They certainly seem to be looking up compared to 2 years ago.Nintendo Maniac 64 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I think it would have been interesting if Anand tested the CPU against some older mid-range to high-end CPUs. From my own assessments it looks like Jaguar has slightly better IPC than K8 and is overall comparable to the original Phenom (though obviously without the huge power consumption).JDG1980 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I really want to see a comprehensive rundown of single-threaded tests with constant clock rate. We have a rough idea of which architectures have better IPC, but I'd like to see some hard numbers.Streetwind - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This is the first real step forard for AMD I've seen in nearly a decade... everything else were minor clock speed bumps, experimental architectures that ended up being slower clock-for-clock than the old ones, big iGPUs and shuffling around its product stack to target a changing market with the same technology.The performance advantage Intel has accumulated over the years means that AMD can still only really compete via price, but Kabini is finally the kind of product that attempts to narrow the gap with the competition again. Please AMD, more of this! Maybe in one or two years we the consumers will have a real choice in the x86 market again if you keep it up.
KaarlisK - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Regarding memory performance: as I understand it, Kabini supports two DIMMs, but only single-channel.darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Why are you always comparing that dual core ARM chip?Why not Octa chip?(like, the best currently available ARM chip)
And why always avoid using Geekbench, but instead use a heavily software dependant tests?
This always seems to be case when dealing with ARM on this site.
Really, it looks like a deliberate undermining of the architecture, in my mind.
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
One: the "octa chip" is really quad-core.Two: Geekbench is not a great benchmark utility, especially when comparing cross-platform.
Three: Attributing an anti-ARM agenda to this website is pretty freakin' silly.
darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
One: the chip has 4+4 independently operated core clusters.Operating at low power cores makes for a very advanced solution, compared to big cores revving down for a certain task.
Besides, what does your remark have to do with what I said?
My point is, Octa is a FAR more capable ARM chip than the one used in this comparison.. yet it doesn't cost more, and consumes up to 70% less power.
Two: as opposed to what? Comparing Chrome for Android with Chrome for Windows?
Geekbench is not perfect, but it is the best you can try when comparing across platforms.
It is the ONLY credible comparison of pure processing abilities in this case.
Three: answer the first two then. What am I missing here?
darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Correction..I meant two modules (core clusters), with 4 cores each, of courseWilco1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
And those 2x4 cores can run simulataneously with the right software, hence the name Octa.I agree with darkich that Anand always appears to show ARM in the worst light, first by only showing JavaScript browser tests rather than native code benchmarks, and second by insisting on the Chrome browser rather than the stock or fastest available browser. For example Geekbench shows that Exynos Octa easily beats Bobcat at the same frequency:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/...
This means Jaguar will get very close to A15 - until Cortex-A57 is released of course.
darkich - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
There you go.AnandTech, speak up!
I'll take silence as a confirmation that I was right
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Most of the smartphone/tablet testing is done elsewhere (Brian for Smartphones, Anand for tablets). Given we're looking at tablets and laptops here, comparing performance to a Smartphone would be silly, so then we need to find a tablet with the Octa...which doesn't exist except in prototype form.As for the "octa" having eight cores, that's true, but it typically only runs four at a time -- either the four A7 or the four A15. With the right software (basically only a benchmark designed to do something the Galaxy S4 won't ever do on its own), you can get the theoretical performance, but in practice you won't ever get this (at least not on the only currently shipping Exynos 5 device).
Finally, as pointed about by Kyuu, Geekbench is not a great benchmark. Sure, it can tell you some theoretical performance numbers, but many of the tests have very little to do with real workloads. I don't think we've ever used Geekbench outside of some smartphone testing, just like we don't generally report things like SuperPi or Sandra performance. Then again, I don't necessarily like Cinebench or x264 HD much either. If you want the Geekbench results, here's the 32-bit numbers for the A4-5000: 2987
browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1983485
Exophase - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
If you're doing an SoC comparison I don't see why it matters if that SoC runs on a phone instead of a tablet. And I understand that this review may not be an SoC review, but that's what a lot of people are looking for right now.Geekbench's integer tests aren't that bad. Crypto, bz2 and jpeg compression/decompression done in native code are actually relatively common tasks on a variety of hardware. The code being ran on the lua test (prime testing) is junk, but since lua is interpreted most of the measurement is with how well it does with interpreters and running junk code doesn't make much difference.
IMO your criticism applies more to Kraken which you conspicuously left out of your list of not so great (but we use them anyway) benchmarks. I gave a bunch of reasons why I don't like it in an earlier post, but I'd like to add a little bit to that - it's not just that it does a lot of DSP (audio and image processing) and crypto stuff but that these tests take up proportionately a lot more of the runtime, drowning out the little path finding and string parsing scores.
These tasks (DSP and crypto) are useful on a variety of platforms like Geekbench's, but the problem is that they're greatly distorted by being executed in Javascript - which is not where it'll usually be ran. It's going to have a hard time optimizing beyond double precision - assuming the code wasn't intended to be double precision in the first place, which would make it even less relevant. It'll have a lot of memory overhead issues and vectorization is pretty much out of the question, despite these being vector-friendly operations. This all makes it a bad proxy for how native code would perform at these tasks, especially if we're comparing with hand optimized SSE and NEON.
Wilco1 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
No, the right software is a Linux kernel patch which allows all 8 cores to be used, and S4 will be upgraded to use it. Although it will improve performance, the actual goal is lower power consumption because you can now mix and match cores. Today a single high performance task forces all processes to use A15 even when they don't need it, and when the task finishes all processes have to be migrated back again. In the new world you enable 1 A15 as needed and keep 1 or 2 A7's running the background processes.Like most benchmarks, Geekbench is not perfect. But I agree with Exophase it is most definitely a lot better than JavaScript benchmarks. Geekbench does test real workloads (many of the tests is actual code people use), quite unlike JS benchmarks, which have nothing to do with browsing performance, let alone CPU performance.
The state of smartphone/tablet benchmarking is a shambles - and this is an opportunity for AnandTech to make a difference. You could take a set of Linux benchmarks (eg. freely available versions of SPEC subsets, Phoronix and other common benchmarks like the ones used in Geekbench) and create an app for Android and iOS.
Thanks for the Geekbench link, integer performance of Jaguar is slightly better than I expected vs Exynos Octa (http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/... This may be partly due comparing a phone SoC with a laptop SoC (Jaguar has a major advantage on the memory/stream part), but this kind of detailed comparison is far more interesting and revealing relative strengths and weaknesses in the microarchitectures than looking at JS performance.
darkich - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
Wow.. can you give a source about that kernel update?I can imagine all eight cores mixing would be beneficial on all areas.
While four A15 cores can work asynchronously between each other(independently change frequency, idle/sleep state), their voltage is inherently higher that that of A7 cores.
If the A57 soc will be able to mix cores too, then that will be an overall amazing prospect.
And I completely agree about Geekbench.. no matter how realistic workloads it represents, it beyond any doubt DOES give an idea of raw processing power.
It's ridiculous to neglect that.
Wilco1 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Note there are actually 3 different variants of big.Little software, ARM's hypervisor code which is OS unaware, the Linaro In-Kernel-Switcher and MP switcher (the latter supports 8 cores).This is the team developing the big.Little MP software: https://wiki.linaro.org/projects/big.LITTLE.MP. Here is a presentation: http://www.linaro.org/documents/download/6d58a63e4...
Yes A57 supports big.Little with A53.
darkich - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Thank you.This makes me wonder about the Snapdragon 800 for the Note 3 rumours..an upclocked Octa on that kernel should really be more than good enough.
Only advantage I can see in snapdragon is the GPU..adreno 330 looks like a whole step above from anything on the market right now.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This was a really underwhelming review... Comparing Kabini to a Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge. Really?Why don't you make the charts with relevant comparisons instead of forcing people to dig through benchmarks to find comparable CPUs?
And you just got to wonder what's the point of this sentence:
"After all the bad news in terms of performance (not that it’s really bad, but it can certainly look that way at times), the good news is that not only is Kabini noticeably faster than Brazos, but it’s also mighty frugal when it comes to power use. "
Bad news in terms of performance??? Why, because it doesn't compete with an i5 Ivy Bridge??
If anyone wants to read a decent review to Kabini, with more comparisons to relevant notebooks head on over to Notebookcheck.net.
Here's the link: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl...
To sum up: The Kabini A4-5000 is competitive with a Sandy Bridge i3 in terms of CPU and GPU performance (number of cores compensating for lower single thread performance) and it sometimes shadows an Ivy Bridge i3.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
That's being awfully generous on "competitive". Single-threaded, i3-3217U is about twice as fast as A4-5000; multi-threaded it's only about 20% faster. In their graphics testing, the HD 4000 in an i3-3217U is consistently leading by 20-40%. That's a Core i3 laptop with Ivy Bridge that you can get for under $500, right now, and it's ahead by 20% or more in every test I looked at...and Core i3 with HD 4000 isn't exactly known for being a performance monster.I'd say that AMD is over-reaching with their targets; A6 is more like a match for Pentium, A4 for Celeron, and anything below that isn't really worth discussing (i.e. Atom). When we see the Haswell update next month, the margin in favor of Intel will only increase, but at least I don't think AMD will have to worry about ULV i3 Haswell for a few more months. Based on currently available laptops, Kabini needs to be well under $500 to compete -- or I'd say $500 is acceptable if you get a decent LCD.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Considering that Notebookcheck said this:"Even though the A4-5000 on paper only slightly higher clocked than the recently tested A6-1450 , the performance differences in practice are quite large. The reason for this is the higher TDP Classification: Not to exceed its maximum consumption of 8 watts (without "turbo Dock"), the A6-1450 can achieve the full turbo of 1.4 GHz only with utilization of a single core; under full load decreases the frequency contrast decreases to just over 1.0 GHz. Thanks to constant fitting the A4-5000 1.5 GHz can settle in some benchmarks by almost 50 percent, and so makes a clear leap forward.
, When all four cores, the APU beats even just the Core i3-2367M and comes in part the newer Core i3-3217U close. However, the gap in the per-thread performance remains impressive: Even a Pentium 987 per core expects at least 50 percent faster. Although the parallelization of modern applications has been greatly improved, you should not completely exclude this point.
In everyday life, the tester provided by AMD still feels quite fast and responsive. The more power than the A6-1450 or the previous E2-1800 is quite noticeable, could additionally by a turbo mode but even higher - a pity that the A4-5000 have to do without this feature. For office and multimedia applications including full HD video, the rich, however, reserves the APU from perfect. "
I'll go by their words since they have a more thorough review than the poor job you guys did here. The A4-5000 beats the Pentium in their benchmarks - except in single threaded performance - in every aspect. The Kabini GPU is comparable with the HD3000 in many of the graphical benchmarks and can run some non-demanding or old games. Hands-down the A4 eats the Pentium brand, so no AMD isn't over-reaching with their targets - have you tested the A6 yet and compared it with an i3 IB?
And why are you talking about Haswell, when Kabini sits below the Intel Core brand? AMD defeats Intel below the Cores and this just confirms that.
Now if you want to talk about Richland versus Ivy Bridge and Haswell I'll concede that AMD is really behind and Steamroller can't come soon enough.
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Because no one cares about Sandy Bridge ULV considering its now end of life. They also tested a lot of highly synthetic benchmarks. i3 ULV ivy notebooks can be had for $400 on newegg, i5 ULV notebooks cost $500 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... sale yes but sales happen all the time). Also for the greater part of its lifetime, kabini will compete with haswell.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
No, Kabini will compete with Pentiums. You guys keep forgeting that.And Ivy notebooks will be replaced and Kabini notebooks won't compete with them for most of it's shelf life. As for sales, do you think you won't see sales of Kabini notebooks?
Just because there's a small overlap of vendors clearing up inventory of Ivy notebooks doesn't invalidate that Kabini is a new chip and won't compete with Ivy Bridge for most of its life.
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
No, if an i5 ULV notebook costs $500, an i3 ULV notebook costs $400 and a kabini notebook costs $450 then the kabini is competing with i3/i5 and NOT pentium. Pricewise it competes with i3 and possibly i5. Haswell ULV will launch in a few months. Bobcat launched what? two years ago. With a similar lifetime (hope its shorter) jaguar will be competing with haswell for the vast majority of its lifetime.t.s - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Yep. The barrier IMO, is OEM. OEM tend to hiking the price. When bobcat E350 first out, the average price is ~$360. What the hell. With $460, i can get 2x performance with sandy bridge i3.If only AMD want to build their own machine (laptop and desktop).
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
A Kabini notebook costs 400$. And that's without having into account promotions, which WILL happen just as they happen to those precious i3 Ivy Bridges of yours. You seem to forget that promotions happen to all notebooks. And if you keep bringing ULV i3 Ivy Bridges for that price, then guess what? I'll get a TRINITY APU notebook instead for that price! Because I can also get them!! And they have a much stronger GPU power than Kabini, and Ivy Bridge and I can also get some quite decent ultrathins.whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Trinity and ivy bridge ULV are very similar in gpu performance. ULV ivy demolishes ULV trinity cpu wise though.Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
The top Trinity LV APU (the A10-4655M) beats the Ivy Bridge ULVs in terms of GPU performance. The issue is that there's barely any notebooks for sale with it (The Samsung Series 5 ultrathin is one, the HP Sleekbook another).The A8-4455M is available in the Asus U38N and a Lenovo model and that one is weak. It's comparable to a Ivy Bridge i3 em terms of CPU/GPU performance (weaker single-thread but better multi-thread - more cores).
However, Trinity powered notebooks are usually cheaper than Ivy Bridge ones and you can get them with great promotions now.
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
They are very similar and within error range (+/- around 10%).Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No, they're not. A A10-4655M with dual channel RAM beats the living crap of a HD4000. You just don't want to admit that. Go dig for benchmarks before spouting falsehoods.whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No, mobile amd apus do very good in 3d mark but poorly in games because games have more cpu load (unlike 3dmark which is very cpu light) and the gpu can't boost as high. For instance the 7660G generally ties with the 630m in 3dmark but loses by about 20% in games. Thats a 25 watt part so it will do better than the 17 watt ULV but beat the living crap? NO. Even the 7660G only beats the HD4000 on average by 30%, move that down to ULV and the difference is less.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
And by the way. HP announced the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart for 400$ with this A4 and the A6 APU. So 20% less than those wonderful i3 Ivy Bridges of yours and with a 10 point touchscreen.Jeez, I wonder if it's good enough to compete?
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
There are already $400 ivy bridge touchscreen i3 ULV notebooks.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
With promotions. And there's no one saying that 400$ is the minimum price point that Kabini can achieve. Lets see what other OEMs will show in Computex. Because it can go lower.Ivy Bridge is an architecture in end of shelf life. Promotions are bound to happen. Those weren't the normal prices of notebooks of a freshly released architecture and if you were intelectually honest instead of trolling like a jackass you would recognize that.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Core i3 ULV laptops are routinely selling for $400 now. The ASUS VivoBook X202E for instance is at Amazon for $399 right now and comes equipped similarly to the Kabini prototype (other than the LCD of course), and it provides a touchscreen:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009F1I1C4/ref=as...
The closest I can come to that with an AMD APU right now has...a Kabini processor and it's on preorder. What's more, it's the A4-1250 Kabini that cuts the CPU and GPU clocks by about 30% relative to A4-5000. The A4-5000 might be competitive with an i3-3217U, but the A4-1250 won't be (other than battery life, which should be slightly higher).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CM1AAOG/ref=as...
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
You should refrain from commenting because you are just digging yourself deeper and showing bias against AMD. Which is pitiful since with a website with the reputation and impact that Anandtech has you should strive for impartiality. HP announced that the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart will come with a Temash and Kabini APU. Price will start at 400$ at launch.Less than that Acer, which I agree is a terrible deal and is overpriced because it is sporting hardware from a new generation. But again, you are just showing poor knowledge since that Acer doesn't bring a Kabini APU but a Temash APU. An APU with even lower TDP than what you reviewed in here - and you can also go check a decent review of the APU in that notebook in other websites since you guys don't seem to bother or care with those details since "it's AMD".
But you, more than anyone else should know that when a CPU generation is nearing the end of its shelf life you usually see a lot of deals of notebooks with that silicon. Good consumers will use that chance to get cheaper and great notebooks but that doesn't invalidate the launch of new hardware that, when launched will sell for higher prices.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
You're one to talk about bias; check the mirror please. All I'm saying is that Kabini (and Temash) need to offer compelling price/performance/features against the competition. It doesn't matter whether the competition is "nearing the end of its shelf life" -- it's there and AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, etc. have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. I recommend products based on what's best, at a given price, and right now a $400 Ivy Bridge ULV laptop is going to be difficult to beat with a slower APU and a similar price point.Your "Ivy Bridge ULV is EOL" comments are actually wrong as well. Did you know ULV Pentium and Celeron parts just launched last quarter? Did you know that Intel is still making and selling Core i3 Sandy Bridge parts? Of course you did, because you want comparisons against the two-year-old Sandy Bridge parts so that Kabini looks better. The truth is that laptops with Ivy Bridge are going to be around for a long time. Pretending otherwise is dreaming, and of course you'll disappear when proven wrong or come back as a new user to spread more FUD when your fantasy predictions don't pan out.
Ultimately, it will depend heavily on what the OEMs deliver -- and when they deliver it. The Pavilion 11 Touchsmart at $399 doesn't seem too bad, but what do you really get? Oh, that's right: it *starts* at $399, and that will almost certainly be with Temash as you're so keen to point out. But Temash is just Kabini at lower clocks and potentially two CPU cores instead of four. Do you know how bad an A4-1250 will look compared to an i-3217U, or a Pentium 2117U, or even a Celeron 1037U? Those should all be priced $400 or less, with the major difference being L2 cache and the lack of Quick Sync on Pentium and Celeron. I've seen some benchmarks elsewhere, and basically the A4-1250 is often half the performance of the Kabini A4-5000 reviewed here.
Kabini is much better than Brazos and Atom, no doubt about it. It's also slower than Ivy Bridge ULV in many tests, and areas where it does win (some GPU benchmarks) are often meaningless for the Windows laptop market. (“Oh, you’re faster at running games! I can get an unplayable 15FPS compared to an even more unplayable 13FPS!”) On an Android tablet, Kabini and Temash will do much better, but for Windows they're at best "fast enough", while other similarly priced laptops are going to be faster. Who buys a slower part for the same price? I’m not sure, but as an unbiased tech journalist I’m certainly not going to recommend doing so.
rocketbuddha - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
The reason why Kabini and Temash are good for AMD is the following.Clock for clock they are better than Sandy i3 ULVs and equal to Ivy i3 ULVs. They provide a better battery life than the ULVs but most importantly they have a smaller die size than their Core competition and are being made in a mature 2 + year 28nm Bulk HKMG process from TSMC.
For the first time, AMD is giving a good performance and a lower die-size than Intel. Previously AMD had to compete in price and/or price/performance with a large die-size. No longer is it handicapped in that manner and this time it can definetely make an impact.
Also JAGUAR architecture has made its way into both PS4 and XBox-one as semi custom APU and it will only make things better and easier for AMD.
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The name calling is uncalled for. I can respectfully disagree. Who cares about promotions or not? I care (and the consumer cares) about the price that they are paying out of their wallet; that is what matters in the market. Ivy Bridge is going to get discounts because its going EOL. That is the market that kabini will have to compete in.Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Yes, the consumer cares about promotions but my point is: Kabini notebooks won't have to compete against Ivy Bridge discounted notebooks except for a small portion of their commercial life.And if Kabini needs to compete with that, the same can be said about Haswell, Richland, etc, etc. Every new notebook that gets in the market now will compete with promotions for the older models being cleared out and it's not those promotions that will affect their success or not.
And that's the point I am making and that you fail to understand. Promotions happen all the time, they direct the consumer to one product above another but they are temporary. And the flaw in your reasoning is assuming that Kabini/Temash notebooks will face Ivy Bridge notebooks with promotional prices during all the time they are going to be for sale and not recognizing that promotions happen for all products and aren't exclusive of Ivy Bridge notebooks.
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No haswell will be more expensive but offer more performance.Promotions happen all the time but if they happen all the time then they might as well be considered as non temporary (like dell's discounts).
I have no doubt that promotions will happen for kabini I'm just saying that $500 is too much for a notebook of this class. Its not an i3 ULV competitor (see TH for i3 ULV comparison) and at this moment must be compared pricewise to the market its in.
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I'll beg to disagree with that. As a non-promotional price, for a notebook with a 1080p touchscreen display I think that 500$ is more than fair. As for promotions happening your line of reasoning seems to assume that discounts will only affect Intel notebooks which isn't clearly the case.While you may get cheap Ivy Bridge notebooks when in promotion, go search for cheap Trinity/brazos notebooks with promotions and you'll find them even cheaper. The same will be said of Temash/Kabini notebooks.
I fail to understand why you don't seem to acknowledge that.
Or the proposition of an APU that beats Pentiums and Celerons in performance (excluding single-thread performance, which is much less relevant nowadays) and has superior battery life.
Will Atom and Haswell Pentiums offer better performance/efficiency/price ratio? It remains to be seen.
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Depends really. With a 1080p screen its a good price. Sales happen all the time. Yes you can and will get i3 ULV systems for cheap and can get kabini systems for cheap. I'm simply saying given the fact that these promotion happen all the time literally (go to newegg laptops, sort by price-lowest and more than 75% of the notebooks on that page are on sale) you have to take these things into consideration. Kabini is competing against discounted but perfectly fine notebooks in this segment. You can get a nice lenovo g580 with SV i3 for $350. Any promotion that runs with a kabini notebook will have to match that price/perf and kabini is much weaker than SV i3.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Sale % was taken from .ca g580 price from .com for .ca about half are on sale.dusk007 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The performance quite poor and notebookcheck doesn't really tell a different story. An i5 is the right CPU to compare it too because it runs in the same performance envelope. With all the other stuff that goes into a decent notebook or tablet/hybrid the CPU cost alone does make that much of a difference.The problem with Kabini is Single Threaded performance which matters for responsivness in plain old office work loads. Which is what most of these notebooks do. x264, cinebench, ... none of that really matters.
And gaming. In game low settings don't do much for CPU requirements and that is why even at low many games aren't playable. Something Intel can offer despite its HD 4000 which has nowhere near the reputation of AMD's GCN. If all you want is an office notebook for some casual gaming like a bit of Starcraft. An i5 is still a worthwhile investment.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The i5 is the right CPU because it runs in the same performance envelope??????? How about no??How much more does the i5 cost?
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Well theres two arguements. One is cost, and yes amd will come in cheaper because intel likes their margins. So if cost is your primary motivator than this chip looks good.The other argument is performance/watt and peak performance, both of which make an i5 look much better than this chip.
Now it's true an i5 doesn't scale down to 3.9W, so in that market this chip appears to be a real contender and the one to beat. But that's not the version that was tested here today so we don't know that for sure.
Personally, I'm disappointed, and think haswell will compare very favorably in all metrics except price. I'm not sure haswell will be tablet suitable though, where some sku's of this chip should be.
Not saying this chip is terrible, just saying for anything 8-9W and up it seems to me haswell will be the clear choice if price isn't a major factor.
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
And this is a product that competes on price and battery life. Not performance as Haswell does.dusk007 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Just that it does compete on performance doesn't mean performance isn't valuable information. How much speed loss are you dealing with when going with cost effectiveness. This isn't a smartphone CPU that will ultimately end up running different software. It is still Windows and the same games and programs as an i5 is used for.The cost difference in the end product isn't that huge or insurmountable. The buyer would like to know how much they get when paying up or who much they loose when going cheap. Comparing it only with Atoms would be cheating and something marketing folks do not a review site that wants to have some reputation.
These chips don't go into Smartphones not even Tablets (that is Temash) they go where 15W Haswells will go and 2/3 of those sub $800 notebooks BOM is still none CPU related. So even if Kabini was given away for free the notebooks would still cost something.
Parhel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
But price is always a major factor. It's the "majorest" factor. This is a site for enthusiasts (read geeks) but think of the person at the AT&T store who picks the 2 or 3 generation old iPhone because it's $50 cheaper.tunaman - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD set the standard with x64 that Intel evetually agreed was superior and joined. With the introduction of these hUMA (fully shared CPU and GPU memory) chips AMD has again set the standard that Intel will have to copy.As I've said before; Intel hasn't been a tech leader in a decade and, again, they'll be playing catch up once they cave to AMD's superior design. But by then, just as has been true for years, Intel graphics and multitasking will continue to lag behind AMD. Intel's only bragging right is saving one or two watts and slapping an "Intel Inside" tatoo on products, but charging twice as much for it. http://goo.gl/OItwV
Gigaplex - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I don't think these chips are hUMA yet.silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I don't think we're even getting that until Kaveri, unless the console setups feature it.HalloweenJack - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
why are you including a cpu which isn't in the same market? `hey here's a good AMD APU , but were going to ignore that and put an IB in the graphs for lol factor cause its far better and we don't want AMD to look good for once`. seriously anandtech.haukionkannel - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This could be really nice in 7" to 8" windows8 tablet! Faster than atom, cheap and eat less power. Finally one can get surface pro tablet near 300-400$ and still get resonable good performance...Yeah Haswell ULV will be much faster, but then the cost will be near 1000$ for tablet, I am not so interested in that alternative!
Fanny how AMD can beat intel in ultra portable devices! We really need a new version of Atom to compete with this. Luckily it is coming so we will see some old fachioned competition in that sector! Competetion is good! We just have to see what has happened in highend CPU and see stalling situation in there...
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
This is using way more power than the atom z2760.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Go check benchmarks for Temash.whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Its still using about twice as much power.z2760 tdp is 1.7-3 watts.
axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD Jaguars destroys Atom Z2760 in performance while costing the same. Consumers win.
silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
With Toms, they were told by AMD that Kabini should be compared to stuff within the same price bracket, hence the Pentium and i3 in their review.Here, AT doesn't have comparable hardware (they don't get sent it).
CajunArson - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Dude.. AMD put together a laptop and shipped it to Anandtech for benchmarking. How is it Anandtech's fault that AMD intentionally chose not to put dual-channel memory into a prototype notebook that it built itself? Instead of blaming Anandtech for being "biased," maybe we should be looking at why AMD chose not to equip its own prototype with dual channel memory?whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
kabini only has a single channel memory controller. Going to two DIMMS would not improve performance at all.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
He didn't mention dual channel memory not even once in his comment. He mentioned comparing a inexpensive chip that competes against Atoms/Pentiums in price/performance/TDP with an intel i5 which is a much more powerful chip.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I wonder how starvered the cores are for memory bandwith. Even the xbox one will be using quad channel memory (4 64 bit controllers) and 2133 mhz instead of 1600, that is over five times the bandwidth. The ps4 keeps the quad channel but uses gddr5 memorywhyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Well the xbox one has 6x the igp and the ps4 has 9x the igp.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I am not asking if the gpu is bandwidth starved but is the cpu bandwidth starvedI understand why amd went single channel, I am just curious if dual channel would make a difference
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
CPU is almost never bandwidth starved. Literally, you can run a 3770k on 1033 mhz ram and outside winrar you will never notice any differences compared to 2133 mhz ram. 3770k is dual channel but more than 4x as powerful as this kabini apu.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Your statement that an i7 does not need faster memory does not necessarily translate to this situation with jaguar and that is why I am curious if the cores are starved. I wish it was possible for anandtech to test this (but it is very hard to do so for there isn't really laptop ram faster than 1600 mhz for laptops). Here is why you can't just assume what works with an i7 translates with the jaguar chip.533 mhz dual channel is equivalent to 1066 single channel. (Remember i7-3770k is dual channel while amd jaguar in this implementation is single channel). Thus you can't just assume an i7 is fine with dual channel, than the jaguar would be fine with single channel for the i7 has 100% more bandwidth due to it being dual channel.
Furthermore i7-3770k is intels high performance architecture with large r&d vs amd's energy efficent architecture with small r&d chip. It is very likely intel has better data predictors in their i7 so there's less cache miss and thus you don't care about the memory speed. Intel R&D money is a big deal and translates into better IPC for many reasons including branch prediction.
Lets put it this way arm is going higher bandwidth for more ipc. Tegra 3 is a mere single channel 32 bit controller, Tegra 4 is likely to be a dual channel 32 bit controller, Exynos 5 uses a dual channel 32 bit controller. Apple on their Ipads now use a quad channel 32 bit controller. One reason why exynos and ipad were faster than tegra 3 was better memory bandwidth.
I am not saying you will see improvements greater than 20% but I am curious if faster memory speeds would cause ipc to go up from 5 to 20%. For example with bulldozer amd gets 8% faster encoding with x264 first pass with 2133 memory dual channel instead of 1333 dual channel according to vr-zone.
It may not be in amd best interest to make the jaguar chip dual channel 64 bit for cheap laptops that compete against intel's celeron or pentium lines, for laptops. Yet at the same time Jaguar is going to be AMD process for low power in the future. It is quite possible that AMD may in the future (if the tdp is low enough) make a 20nm dual channel chip for the higher margin tablets, high margin tablets would insist on higher ipc for the cpu and more bandwidith for the screen, while low margin cheap computers would not care about increase ipc. It is possible that in the future AMD can find a sweet spot between intel atom and intel haswell. (I am not saying this is likely, just merely possible all depends on intel's pricing to oems for haswell.)
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It is extremely unlikely for this chip's cpu to be hurt by memory bandwidth. Sure the i7 has 100% more bandwidth but you must factor in the power of the chip. The i7-3770k is going to be something like 6x more powerful (3.7 ghz turbo + IPC advantage + HT). Even if the kabini chip tested in this review was half as efficient as the 3770k in utilizing memory bandwidth it still wouldn't show any differences in cpu performance.Phone/tablet SOCs mainly need the bandwidth for the gpu portion of the die (the high res screen was the reason that apple needed such an interface). If they need more bandwidth it'll be for the igp portion of the die (definitely 1066 mhz ram on a single channel will hurt this thing) for kabini.
geoflouw - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Need a comparison against Haswell and Baytrail please. This data is misleading, i really would hope AMD can compete with 1 year old CPUs and SOCs.....smilingcrow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It’s hardly misleading. Haswell is still under NDA and Bay Trail is due around Q4 which is why they aren’t compared. The better comparison will be Bail Trail based on pricing and performance. AMD should still have a healthy lead for GPU but if Intel’s recent info is true it should be close on the CPU front. The main difference is that Bay Trail has a low enough TDP for a cheap fanless tablet whereas the chip reviewed today is 15W so Ultrabook class. So you get two out of four with AMD:The Good: GPU + Price
The Bad: power consumption + low IPC
So business as usual really.
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Given AMD's traditional design wins and how those systems end up, I suspect this is not going to matter much. I have more hope of Bay Trail providing a solid deal for once than I do this.It's a shame because this really should be AMD's niche to dominate, but I doubt any OEM'll give them a serious try.
Desperad@ - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
On competitive positioning, is it even near IB Pentium?brainee - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I think so, yes. IB Pentium 2117U (17 Watt TDP) should be around 33 % faster in legacy Intel-optimised CPU benchmarks doing the math and according to say Techspot. I would think ULV Pentiums are more expensive for OEMs, notebooks is a different story. Not to mention Kabini should cost a fraction to make for AMD compared with even crippled 2C Ivybridges aka Celeron / Pentium. Kabini wins in games and Open CL, and in AVX-enabled applications it should eat the Pentium alive since the latter doesn't support AVX extensions (should be mentioned at least). I'd prefer AVX extensions to Cinebench but this site seems to suggest I am a minority...yhselp - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Comparing a 3W SoC (Z2760) to a 15W SoC (A4-5000), and calling the former laughable... not really fair.Sure, Kabini is definitely faster than the old Atom architecture and, yes, I understand this is not a definitive comparison; nevertheless - it seems misleading.
What would happen if we compare a 3W Kabini to a 15W Haswell? Laughable wouldn't even begin to describe the performance difference.
silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
But... an A4-5000 doesn't use anywhere near 15W, as far as I've heard. Still, let's consider the evidence - the Z2760 is a 32-bit, dual core, hyperthreaded CPU at 1.8GHz with a low powered graphics unit and 1MB of L2. The A4-5000 is a 64-bit, quad core CPU at 1.5GHz with a far stronger graphics unit and 2MB of dynamic L2. Temash would be a different proposition I expect as the A4-1200 is only clocked at 1GHz.yhselp - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Yes, absolutely, I agree - it's just that the direct comparisons and conclusions made are a bit stark.There's always another side to an argument; in your case, I could argue that comparing the brand new Jaguar to a terribly old Atom architecture isn't the way to go. Consider the following evidence - Silvermont is 64-bit, quad-core, 2MB L2 cache, OoO, 2GHz+, 22nm, far more energy efficient, supports 1st gen Core instructions and Turbo Boost; it would decimate Jaguar.
In the article, I also discovered that the 2020M is referred to as a 1.8GHz 35W part, when it's actually 2.4GHz. Are the benchmarks done on a underclocked 2020M or was that simply a typo?
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, not AMD vs. Intel.
jcompagner - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
So this is the core that will be in the next 2 big consoles?Am i the only one that think that these are quite weak, even if you have 8 of them?
That does mean now that if one of those 2 consoles are the lead in the development that the games will be forced to be really good multi threaded. (So i guess the next games for the pc will also be using multiply cores way more)
Why did they go for the jaguar core thats really targetted for ver low end or mobile stuff?
Why didn't they just go for a Richland 8 core system with a very good gpu that lets say is a 100W part?
What is the guess that the TDP is of the xbox one or ps4? A console can take 100W just easily that doesn't matter, so why choose for a core that is dedicated for mobile?
yhselp - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Yes, the Jaguar core is 'weak', but what does 'weak' mean? That is such a vague definition. For one usage scenario Jaguar might be unacceptable, for another it might be overkill. Remember, Sony/MS are not building a contemporary PC. Jaguar might seem slow to us, and in a gaming desktop it would be, but that's not the point. Think of consoles, in this case the PS4 and the Xbox One, as non-PC devices such as tablets. Would you say the latest Samsung/Apple running on a Cortex A15 is slow? No, you would say it's super fast. Well, Jaguar is even faster. Yes, a console has to deal with different workloads than a tablet, but that's why it has very different hardware.Why did Sony/MS choose Jaguar? Jaguar is easier to integrated, more power efficient and most importantly cheaper than Richland. It's a far simpler architecture than Richland, and probably easier to work with in a console's life. Also, it's very important to note that Sony/MS wanted an integrated solution - they weren't going to build a system with a dedicated video card like a gaming PC.
Cost, cost, cost - everything is about the cost. A console cannot be expensive (the way a gaming PC is) - it has to sell very well in order to establish an install base to sell games to. Sony/MS will probably sell their 8th gen consoles at a loss initially - AMD's Jaguar/GCN was their best/only choice. What else could they do at the same price or even at all? Silvermont isn't ready yet and NVIDIA probably wouldn't be willing to integrate a GPU of theirs the way AMD did, and both of those would be more expensive than Jaguar/GCN. Not to mention, MS has had a ton of trouble with NVIDIA in the original Xbox - they are probably not willing to go down that road again.
It's not really an 8-core solution - it's two quad-core modules and communication between the two might be problematic; so games on the new PS/Xbox would probably run on four Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz. However, don't forget that neither of the two consoles has a ton of raw graphics power under the hood - the Xbox GPU is roughly equivalent to an HD 7770 (but with better memory bandwidth), and the PS to an HD 7850. Games would be specifically developed for this kind of hardware (unlike PC games) and would most probably be GPU limited so the Jaguar cores would really be sufficient.
I hope this answers your questions.
Kevin G - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
A Pile Driver module is much larger than a Jaguar core. For die size concerns, it going with Jaguar made sense if core counts are the same. Steam Roller cores are due out in 2014 which are expected to bring higher IPC and a slight clock speed increase compared to Pile Driver.Power consumption is also an issue. The bulk of the power consumption from the XBox One and PS4 SoC's will come from their GPU's. Adding a high power CPU core like Pile Driver would have ballooned power consumption close to 200W which makes cooling impractical and expensive. Jaguar still adds power but it is far more manageable in comparison.
In addition, Steam Roller is tied to processes from Global Foundries (though IBM could likely manufacture them if need be). TSMC is the preferred foundry for bulk processes due to cost and a slight edge in density. Jaguar has been prepared to be manufactured at TSMC from the start. AMD could have stuck with GF but it would have had to port GCN functional units to that same process. Such efforts are currently underway for Kaveri that is looking to be a 2014 part. So for any type of 2013 launch, going that route was not an option.
aikyucenter - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - link
Great OpenCL performance ... love it ... just make it faster launch and decrease TDP too = PERFECT :D