I don't understand what the market is for one of these. Pretty poor CPU performance and untenable graphics performance for anything more than video streaming/web surfing. Seems to me like a faster CPU with less emphasis on GPU (i3-3XXX) paired with a low-power, low-profile discrete GPU would be the better way to go.
This is really the market here. I'm fine with my 17 watt Ivy Core i5 Ivy bridge thanks, and my sister will be good with a 15 watt Haswell when she gets a new laptop next month. The key here is price, not performance per watt, in which case you'd just go with a Core i-whatever (possibly with a dedicated Nvidia GPU) and call it good.
So what kind of apps does our sister run, to justify need for a faster performing CPU? (and doh, just i5 won't cut it, you need a ULW part, or you are losing on longevity vs Kabini; So we are talking what, twice or triple the price?)
I see, so these are like Netbook 2.0, I figured it was the first step to making AMD's Fusion a huge success with the APU, offering much faster graphics than ever before on a CPU. But it's really AMD's version of the Atom?
AMD has two main Fusion lines. This line is the Atom competitor, which uses the low power CPU architecture (Bobcat derivative). The APUs that offer the high end graphics use the higher performance architecture (Bulldozer derivative). It sounds like you'd be more interested in the upcoming Kaveri chips.
I'm with chizow. AMD is trying to sell a sub-par device upmarket. These things really belonged in netbooks from 2 years ago. Their performance and and pricepoint is irrelvant today when a $200-300 Android tablet is a better ancillary computing device than a $300-400 netbook.
The tablet may have less computing power and not be able to run the full suite of x86 productivity software, but will have a better screen, better battery life, more portability, and more importantly, said tablet would be better suited to running its native lightweight Android apps and games than Kabini, which is burdened with full-fat x86 programs targeted at more powerful CPUs/GPUs.
If you're not gaming, this would be quite nice for a little laptop. Most laptops with these apus won't have dvd drives, so they won't be used for ripping. If I'm going to play a game, it'll be on my desktop.
I have an e-350 based laptop that I bought a few years ago. Under windows, it was plenty fast enough to do coding on and run VMs (vs no VM on atom). It was too slow to run an android ARM emulator, but native x86 android worked fine for testing apps. I recently switched it to Ubuntu, which is quite a bit more responsive than Win7.
The point is that most apps on Android are simpler and less resource-intensive because they are designed for: a. lower power CPUs b. lower feature set You can do more with most windows program suites than the comparable alternatives on Android, but if you want to do anything beyond basic editing/viewing, you'd be better off with a Corei/Richland laptop anyway.
Not everyone wants to type with a tablet. I've tried full size iPad, or a 7" android one with SwiftKey for tablet. Both makes me want to chuck it against the wall.
When you factor in a half decent tablet keyboard to go with that tablet, it's not all that different.
What you need to do is imagine your mother wants a new laptop and would like a nice little light one for email, surfing and maybe writing letters in a word processor. That's just one use, there are a lot of people who aren't computer enthusiasts that these will be great for.
I think it would be great in a student laptop as well. It could easily survive a day at campus on battery and still have enough power for normal usage like words, edocs, mail and such. Lets just hope somebody gives it a good enough screen and wrapping to be usable in that environment.
HP already announced new 10-point touchscreen laptops based on AMD Jaguar chips that are incredibly priced at $399 MSRP. These are going to sell in the millions.
Just odd to me is all, I figured there were tablets in that sub-$300 range, and something like Surface or various hybrids at that $500 and above price point. I guess this is going to go for super cheap laptop/hybrids in the sub-$300 range to compete with tablets again?
I thought this was going to be more in that $500+ bracket with good enough CPU perf and much better GPU than Intel, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
I don't think you understand the core of what Anand likes about the Kabini, its going to be in a tablet that people can use all day with out having to recharge unlike a comparable Intel solution which would use ALL the battery in half the time, which means you need to recharge it twice a day type scenario... Kabini gives similar performance that can go ALL day.
Similar GPU performance, but not similar CPU. Single-core performance is still very relevant, in spite of the marketing hoopla. And the Intel has twice the single-core performance, so will be snappier. So, no surprise. Half the power and so half the performance. Both suck at games anyway, and at this price point who cares? If the AMD would have similar CPU performance at half the power, even at the expense of GPU performance, they would be a hands down winner. But that is probably not possible, so they are leveraging their superior GPU performance per Watt. But playing games in slow motion is not impressing anyone. A $300 netbook 2.0 could easily get by with 2D graphics only if it was snappy and the battery lasted all day. I don't see much use for a slow GPU with an even slower CPU. At least the Intel has a marginally fast enough CPU, but it sucks down power. Neither are adequate.
that 10" in there previous netbook was also a selling hit. Once that brazos was introduced by HP, many vendors stopt offering the atom based netbooks in volume.
for the rest kabine perf wise is fine for its market intention. Those who bark about unusable daily use have no idea about what was brazos in usage when paired even with a 7.2k rpm hd. THey probbaly only worked with nice atom's....
Its a bit pitty that turbo mode doesn't work here. They either need to fix that in next update or need to bring a dual core higher ghz bin in the same TDP.
I have to agree the graphics for either Intel or AMD on these platforms are abysmal. I still have an old laptop from 5 years ago now serving up as a media server that has an Nvidia 9800GTXm and it used to pull around a 10,000 score on 3Dmark06 from what I can recall and this was years and years ago. Granted that was discrete but I would have thought things would have improved immensely on the integrated side by now.
So You have a highest-performing discrete laptop GPU from five years ago, which on its own pulls ~6x the whole system consumption of this netbook-APU, all the while being 3x as fast?
Well, you probably pulled 100W and more with that notebook for the GPU and CPU alone. Current high end Intel/AMD APUs use 35 to 45W and achieve 80% of that score.
I use an Asus transformer prime a lot and this would make a very good alternative to that and I get the option of a full windows setup to boot. In the last paragraph the Author talks about the X202E from ASUS. Kabini could give me another option.
At the price they are talking about there is a plenty big market for something like this.
Not everyone's playing the latest demanding 3D games, so even on budget systems there's room for usable low end graphics. Imagine this thing in a tablet form factor, and think about tablet-marketed 3D games. I think this gives a good balance for full-fledged Windows 8 tablets, though I doubt it'll ever make it in one (or many).
A very interesting comparison, thanks for picking up a system so you could do this. Seems like the Jag competes pretty well at the low end.
If it's truly a much cheaper SKU, it would bee nice to see some better quality / construction on a low spec laptop, but I'm afraid that the way the majority of the market shops you won't see it. I wanted an IPS atom or brazos laptop for some sideline work I do, but had to settle on a TN... after all, who would buy a low spec machine with a high spec display? (everyone with an iPad2 / mini...)
Most laptops are ridiculously over-specced on CPU, as it's what many people look for. A Kabini CPU with an SSD is always going to be a better experience for office or multimedia use than an i3 with an HDD.
My wife has an E-350 with an SSD. Ever since she got the SSD, she never forgets to mention how much she likes her laptop. Not a power user though, but very representative of an "average end-user".
And I, being an Anandtech reader for 15+ years, and working professionally in IT, qualifying as a mid-power user, would like to have this in a small form factor chassis: 10.1" display with 1366x768 resolution, and as small footprint as possible. Oh, yes, and with 8+ GB RAM, and an at least second tier SSD. Throw in extended battery option, and I'll even try to sing to get that... (Ok, that last bit would actually be bad for everyone...)
Same here. Even for casual goofing around use I regularly find myself doing enough typing that a physical keyboard is a must have. If any of these systems ship with a decent battery the atom based envy x2 I bought both because my old netbooks battery life has gotten anemic and to fiddle with win8 on a touchscreen system will end up with a shorter lifetime than I thought it would.
OTOH 7W haswell might be able to get the same runtimes at better CPU and GPU performance levels at the cost of a higher purchase price.
Take the Asus X202E for $399 from Amazon mentioned in the article (11.6" 1366x768, Core i3, 4GB) and add in a 128GB SSD for $60-100, you have MOST of what you want for $459-499. Netbook form factor, ultrabook performance, while keeping the price of a lower-end Celeron/AMD setup.
Nothing wrong with an extended battery option, they'd simply need to provide a battery slice attachment for the bottom of the laptop.
At least you are willing to make some sacrifices. For me if I replace my current laptop, I just can't deal with anything smaller than 15" because it need to be just as functional as my desktop.. At that point might as well go for the 3630QM with nvidia dGPU because they start at around $700ish. Add full 1080p, and 128GB SSD. Need 6-8GB of RAM with option to expand, and I don't want battery life to be anemic, so why not use a 90Whr battery like in the rMBP? It ends up costing me $1200+.. I think I'll just keep the laptop I have.
AMD seem to be going very very well in the market its aiming for = 5w >25w (above ARM and below i3) and here it rules - and as shown , matches intels 30w parts @ 1/2 the power.
Let's be very careful here. What is matched is Intel's crappy low-end low-price 30W part. This thing is no match for a high performance (and high price) ULV i5.
Point is, AMD is competing on price, pure and simple. Don't try to pretend they're somehow specifically competing in the 5W..25W market with a technical edge. They're competing in the "low performance for a low price" market. No shame in that; but let's not pretend otherwise.
This would have been interesting back in the pre-tablet age. A cheap SOC that offers just enough performance for media consumption and light gaming, with good power efficiency to allow for 5+ hour battery life on hardware that is still reasonably cheap and light. The problem for this in the 2013 market place is the rise of tablets, along with the epic collapse in PC sales has leave no room for this class of x86 SOC. For media consumption and light gaming, an ARM tablet can be have with IPS screen, SSD storage, and a large library of games that are newer and optimized for the low power platforms. All these for comparable price, lower weight and better battery life. Why settle for crappy game play on 3~4 year old PC titles when you can get a much better experience from tablet games? For general computing, I see $299 pentium and celeron machines going on sale regularly, not just reserved for black Friday specials. Up at the $4xx price point it is not hard to find ivory b i-3s or sandy b i-5s. Go up to $5xx and there are even ULV i-3s and i-5s to choose from. The Kabini is clearly designed to beat up the old intel atom and it does indeed look good in that comparison. The problem is the old atom power netbooks has already disappear from the market, and for good reason. Intel has now positioned atom SOCs for tablets and cell phones. Entry level laptop segment is now populated with pentiums, celerons, and even older generation i-3s and i-5s. I am not an AMD fanboi but I really want to see them turn things around to keep Intel in check. May be Temash will fare better going up against atom in the tablet space, but Kabini is sadly not the hit that AMD desperately needs.
Note that tablets at lower price points do NOT have SSD storage; they have flash storage, but almost always low performance eMMC. Even 5400RPM HDDs can outperform eMMC. Put Kabini/Temash in a tablet and run Android, though, and I suspect it will look very good against most ARM offerings. Or maybe in a Chromebook. But like Anand said: please give it a good screen and don't just skimp everywhere and go after the minimum cost market! The race to the bottom is already over, and the winner is...no one.
Some of the faster tablets and probably soon smartphones (Nexus 10 for example) are getting up to 90MB/s sequential on the NAND, even if hard drives have higher peak transfer rates wouldn't other characteristics (seek time on a hard drive) make up for that? And the hard drives would rarely hit peak anyways.
In the future, we'll see more tablets start to trend towards faster NAND. My point is that the currently shipping stuff is mostly crap -- especially in the $300-$400 tablets. I wonder if Tegra 4 and SHIELD are going to be better? Tegra 3 so far has had horribly slow NAND every time I've seen it. (Yay for installs taking several minutes.)
"Why settle for crappy game play on 3~4 year old PC titles when you can get a much better experience from tablet games?"
LMFAO!!!!!!
Okay... now that I've calmed down.. The reason to settle for crappy gameplay on 3-4 year old PC titles, (which isn't that long ago btw, there are bajillions of good PC titles released before 2009), is because it absolutely DESTROYS tablet gaming. Hell, even Playstation 1 destroys tablet gaming. Just the incredibly massive selection, full 3D everything, an actual method of inputting your controls.
By comparison, there is no such thing as tablet gaming. A few good titles here and there, but an overwhelming number of 2D or free-to-play/adware/begware titles with poor gameplay. (Candy Crush Saga, mentioned in these comments!) And hilariously pathetic touch-based controls.
I have no problems with tablets in general. But there is no such thing as a "tablet gaming" experience that competes in any way with a PC or console gaming experience. I wish there was, but it's not there yet.
I'm also no fan of AMD lately. Your post had the opposite effect on me, now I see why Kabini may actually deserve a chance in hell, even it if doesn't really stand one.
The people who are going to use this will not play Oblivion or Diablo III on it. They are going to play Candy Crush Saga and other FB games. Why not add it to the benchmarks? My wife can't use her two year old SB laptop with GT 540M due to the excess heat and have been bugging me for some time now that I'll clean her laptop heat sink. iPad is not an option since the only levels she can play now are only available in FB.
Is that laptop by chance an Acer TimelineX? I've had one and Acer just pushed too hard on getting the CPU and dGPU in there. It's a shame, as it was otherwise a compelling option. I'm going to try some FB gaming today on Kabini and maybe do a short Pipeline on it.
Cool I'm looking forward to it. It's Asus n53sv and it is running around 80c when playing Candy Crush. Probably needs a new thermal paste application but don't really want to fix something that is not really broken. It just runs very hot under FB games.
eh, equal to my notebook. Core i7 Sandy Bridge with a overclocked 540M (it's just an underclocked 550M so I placed it at the 550M frequencies). Installed an SSD in it, increased RAM to 8Gb, and it will last me a long time. Perfectly satisfied with it since I play a few games every now and then.
I'm looking at Kabini (or Temash or Richland), and I sure as heck am not going to be playing FB games on it. One of the great appeals of an x86 tablet or ultraportable notebook to me is having the entire library of games from Steam, GOG, my old CDs, emulators, etc. to choose from instead of being limited to whatever is in an app store.
If it could play Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 or Civ 5 on low settings, that'd be cool too, though it looks like you still need to step up to Trinity/Richland for that.
I could play diablo 3 on my e-350 at around 20fps iirc. Civ 5 was barely playable on low on the smallest map. If these could turbo 1 or 2 cores up to 2.0 GHz, it'd probably make low end gaming feasible.
Where did you get that platform power consumption from? Because I've done some pretty extensive measurements on my own laptop (a not-really-ultrabook Medion, i5-3317U, UM77 chipset, 4GB RAM, Samsung 840, crappy display on eDP) and I got an idle total platform power of 3.3W. Of course that's with a 3.0W TDP UM77 chipset and not one of the 4.1W TDP non-ultramobile chipsets, but I don't think the gap should be *that* big! You're saying 8.14W for your Pentium 2020M setup, there must be some power hog or some software setting that you missed.
> There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license.
The Windows license is becoming a bit optional. With Steam on Linux, lots of indie games with Linux support, and wine emulation (Starcraft II!), running Linux is becoming possible for gamers willing to limit their game library a bit.
100% agreed with your conclusion. While cheaper-than-Pentium Kabini laptops would be okay (and will happen), I would like to see a Kabini laptop priced the same with a slightly larger battery, better/higher-res display and maybe more RAM or a small-ish SSD at the same price than competing Intel based laptops.
This is more like it. The previous review was just pitiful. Considering that Notebookcheck.net had a much more extensive review, Notebookreview had an awesome review with glowing conclusions to Kabini, that Tomshardware managed to make a comparison with a 35W Pentium and an i3 Ivy Bridge you guys just had to do damage control.
Kabini is a great piece of hardware. Super efficient and with enough performance for the majority of users not to notice an impact in daily use. Especially if options with an SSD exist. Considering how it competes with a 35W Pentium and how efficient it is (it puts to shame the Ivy Bridge i3) this is an awesome chip. And then there's the matter of price. Considering this is a SoC, it is much cheaper than anything that Intel has to offer.
So, yes AMD has a great product here. And you guys will have to change your tune and stop using them as punching bags.
The previous review was under a severe time crunch, and while we'd love to have performance scores from every noteworthy CPU/APU out there (hello ULV Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Trinity...) the fact is no one ever sent us laptops with those parts, and nearly all of the laptops we've reviewed over the past two years have gone back to the manufacturers.
This follow-up isn't about damage control, it's about hoping -- praying! -- that the OEMs won't do with Kabini what they've done with every other low-cost APU out there. I'm skeptical that we can get leopard to change their spots (i.e. budget laptop manufacturers to give us decent displays and chassis to go with the Kabini/Temash SoCs), but we shall see. For the price, Kabini has something to offer, but history suggests that most OEMs will take the cost savings and cut corners everywhere else to create mediocre laptops. The best CPU/APU/SoC in the world married to a lousy design is not a compelling product.
The simple fact of the matter is that you can't handle a the reality of the price/performance equation. Kabini laptops (and Temash tablets) will need to offer either better features/quality and/or lower cost than Core i3 in order to truly impress. They'll likely sell fine regardless, just like Brazos, but speaking of Brazos I actually managed to borrow a C-50 from a friend today, and I had forgotten just how bad the experience can be. E-350 was tolerable; C-50, not so much. Compared to C-50, the A4-5000 is amazingly fast! That's the problem with living in a vacuum where you only look at the comparisons a product wins: there are a lot of options out there to consider.
If there are two laptops with the same design, features, and components at the same price, and one has Kabini A4-5000 while the other has i3-3217U, it's a tossup. We know i3-3217U will have better CPU performance, and in many cases it will have better GPU performance as well. Kabini should have a slight edge in power use. Depending on the user's needs, either laptop could be a good fit, but personally I'd take Core i3 with HD 4000 and slightly worse battery life since I rarely need 7+ hours off the mains. On the other hand, if the Kabini option has a better LCD, or an SSD, that would be enough to give it the nod. This is exactly what we said in the original review, but you keep overlooking that fact.
I'm fully aware that Kabini can't beat an i3. But you should also be fully aware that AMD in their slides doesn't point the A4-5000 as competing with i3 Ivy Bridge but with Pentiums. They mention the 25W A6 as competition for the i3's. Would that APU be competitive with the i3 still in performance/power consumption/GPU/price? I remain a bit more skeptical of that. Will the OEMs use it in compelling designs instead of using it in the crappiest notebooks in the market? I certainly hope so, just like you.
As for what the OEMs do, the only one that used a AMD APU in a premium case was Asus with their U38N and U38DT. It's a 13,3'' Zenbook with Trinity APUs. It has a Full HD multi-touch IPS displays, aluminum body, and offers a lower price than comparable ultrabooks from Intel (obviously with lower CPU performance). I would expect for a Kabini/Richland refresh though. What I would love to see, is if you want that type of notebooks so much ask OEMs to send them to you for review if they're available.
In my case, I am not blind and if I had to pick a cheap notebook I would go for the Asus x202e. I always go for high performance notebooks (that's why my picks have always been Intel/Nvidia notebooks). However, while you may get the Asus x202e in the US for 400$ in my country it's available for 600€! A comparable Kabini notebook would cost probably 400-450€ since it doesn't have the Intel sticker.
Not sure if you get Vizio offerings, but Vizio looks to have some compelling Richland (maybe Kabini as well?) touchscreen laptops launching soon. We'll certainly try to get them, but sadly a lot of OEMs are very particular over what laptops they send for review, hence the lack of i3 ULV, Pentium, Celeron, Trinity ULV, etc. If I had the money, I'd just go buy the damn things for review, but that's not generally practical.
Unfortunately there's no Vizio offerings in Europe. :( They are beautiful and seem to be one of the few OEMs that use AMD APUs in atractive designs similar to Intel ultrabooks. With the trend that we are seeing, it would be interesting to see more reviews of low-power APUs.
Do they? The recent refresh used Trinity, and they haven't even started shipping the 14" Trinity model yet. Plus the prices ballooned to over a grand for the cheapest model.
I think the big story here is that AMD is meeting and sometimes besting Intel IVB parts on performance per watt. I cannot remember the last time that happened. Or am I misunderstanding something? If they can scale up Jaguar, they might really have something here. It's kinda like the second coming of Core, while Barcelona and its progeny are the corresponding repeat of NetBurst.
My take-away is much the same as yours: AMD is punching it's way back into the game, which now also happens to feature more, (as well as many more moving), targets. (The "moving ≈ mobile ≈ more rapidly paced product cycle" pun is intended, though as I've advised my kids, if you have to explain it, well then it's just not funny!)
I'm a relative late comer to the ranks of tech obsessed / tech aficionados. Since my arrival, maybe 4-5 years ago, Intel has always been the widely dominant force, though I always enjoy rooting for an underdog; in this case AMD.
My desire to root for AMD has increased significantly within the last couple of months, due in large part to several Anand-authored profiles on new arrivals, or employees returning, to AMD. This rationale for wishing AMD well was further solidified by a brief history of AMD, written by Andrew Cunningham & posted in Ars Technica at the following link:
Lacking extensive personal knowledge with which to gauge or critique the article, it at least gave me a greater sense of the significant role occupied by AMD & their summary impact within the industry. With some much valued platform infrastructure still in place, the recent influx of quite formidable talent & experience is, I think, cause for at least guarded optimism over AMD's fortunes.
The scale up is easier said than done, scaling down is much easier. Jaguar can only clock to 2GHz due to the architecture, they'd have to significantly change it to scale that up, and once they do the IPC may suffer.
Your right, if they could just double the performance per core, doubling everything, they could have a great mobile cpu for everything. they sure have an exess of tdp to use. I always wonder how hard it would be to do that, but im sure it´s easier to say then do.
Any chance Anand that you could swap some performance memory in for that single stick, say something with 8-8-8 24 or 9-9-9 27 timings, and see if we get any graphical boost out of ti?
I wonder if we could see one of these in a lower priced x86 Surface, given the market's clear preference for the full version of Windows and the high price of the original Surface Pro. Seems like a Kabini chip could make for a nice intermediary.
A Surface tablet running off Kabini -- with the consequence of much better battery life and a lower price -- would be great. I hope Microsoft is looking at Kabini/Temash for the v2 Surfaces.
I hope they are, though I expect Bay Trail to have better performance, thermals, and battery life in a fanless tablet form factor. May the best SoC win!
Just as a related comment: I tried several FB Flash games on Kabini and Core i7 ULV. (I know: i7 ULV is a bit much, but it's all I have right now in the ULV segment.) Bejeweled Blitz averages around 24FPS on Kabini, with dips into the low teens at times; on i7 ULV it's pretty much locked in at 30FPS. Zuma Blitz ups the maximum frame rate to 60, and i7 once again hits that pretty much constantly; on Kabini, it's usually above 30 but not always at 60, but at least it's playable. The last game I tried is Solitaire Blitz, and it also tops out at 60FPS; i7 comes close (usually in the 50s), Kabini is lower, like in the 30s. I didn't really have a good way to do apples-to-apples frame rate comparisons, so take these initial numbers with a margin of error. Kabini is definitely better than Brazos and Atom here, but it's not going to handle all the "light" Flash games. And for that matter, ULV Celeron and Pentium are likely in the same boat, but I can't say for certain as I lack the hardware to verify this.
If you look at the Tom's Hardware review, it's pretty apparent that the 15W TDP is *very* conservative. Compared to a 17W ULV Ivy Bridge, the 15W Kabini uses significantly less power.
100% agree with your conclusion though -- we need an enlightened OEM to use this silicon to build a low cost but good quality ultraportable/thin+light/whatever design. That's the sort of thing I've been waiting to jump on but the OEMs just haven't delivered anything.
Enlightened and OEM do not mix together. (Apart from apple, maybe). I am very sure that cheaper silicon=cheaper notebook. OEM's arent going to improve the quality of the chassis and display.
I agree that "enlightened OEM" is, unfortunately, something of an oxymoron. There's always the hope that we'll get surprised, though. Hopefully the downturn in PC sales will make OEMs consider different designs, as it becomes plain that their previous ethos are not going to work anymore.
I'm very interested to see what would (will?) be done with these AMD APU series in the hands of Vizio, as I very much like the stylistic directions they have taken. By most accounts I believe their initial product launch, (while not exactly awe inspiring), was generally considered to be a reasonably sound first effort, and a well executed one. Reviews I've read suggest that Vizio is indeed serious and directed in their approach toward product improvement in successive iterations.
Operating at a much smaller scale than the Big Boys and Girls in the consumer space, in theory Vizio should be more nimble and capable of quicker product deployment to market. This assumes of course, that they have the necessary technical personnel and funding available, and that both their supply and manufacturing resource chains are solid. In light of resource requirements and flagging PC sales, I have to wonder if the favor they've generated with MicroSoft (eg. products sans bloatware, etc.) might pay some dividends.
Given their strengths in design, displays, and the degree to which Vizio employs word of mouth to generate buzz, one or two very solid thin & light notebooks built on an AMD platform (to say nothing of a tablet or two) might provide significant product and brand differentiation, and could really help to build upon a reputation for quality and for responsiveness to market inputs.
With any luck, before too long we'll be reading in AT of something(s) Vizio that is(are) the absolute Bees Knees!
Asus already has a great chassis for these APUs. The Asus x202e. If they used a Kabini APU in this chassis they could offer it at an even lower price point.
Because Intel is able to share TDP budget between CPU and GPU. Because AMD cannot, it must 'reserve' TDP for the GPU even when a CPU-only benchmark is running.
I noticed that a few of THG's Kabini numbers appear off -- specifically PCMark 7 is clearly using an SSD on Kabini and not on the others. Which is horribly unfair, as that's the benchmark that benefits most from an SSD. For reference: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/826?vs=823
"Although we used a number of different notebooks for our benchmarks, we used the same hard drive and memory in all of them to keep our comparisons as valid as possible. We want to zero in on platform performance after all, and not the difference between a mechanical disk and SSD."
This is clearly not true, as the Kabini laptop has an SSD for PCMark 7 while the others are HDDs. The configuration tables also make no mention of SSDs. I understand the difficulty of getting all the tests run under a time crunch, but at least we try to acknowledge the shortcomings and are honest in the configuration details.
I think Kabini is in a similar position as Sandybridge HD 3000 was 2 years ago for gaming. Barely there in playability, but so close!
For me, the Intel HD4000 is the bottom line for basic gaming performance (low res and quality for current gen games), I hope that AMD can pass that threshold with the next generation. With the mentality of "good enough", many people like students would find it very attractive.
I also appreciate the improvement in efficiency and price. It's a good direction.
that's why A6 is there.... you see anandtech doesn't have the right HW to comapare and now all a sudden people start to see this as a counterpart of I series...
its a a4 meant to be replacement of barzos, which it clearly does and against Atom which it destroys in any matter.
Well they should be compared to Atoms, that's their price bracket. And they destroy Atom, so thoroughly it is beyond the scales. And on the GPU side things are even worse. Atom GPUs are the biggest nightmare on the planet. So they should go in $200-$400 small systems with a 10 or 11" screen. Kinda like the netbooks we wanted for 5 years but we only got Atom. Cheers M.
By the way is Kabini made on a cheap bulk process? If so I think the costs for the chip would be lower than a same surface Intel Chip. So of course they can beat their prices easily. M.
Same area == less transistors, and higher power per transistor when comparing Intel's best to GF or TSMC's best. If the costs are similar, an AMD chip will be worse--less performance due to less transistors--so it will have to price it lower. It's design teams are at a distinct disadvantage, so AMD is forced to focus on seams in Intel's product lineup. Not an enviable position.
Those who don't understand Anand's analysis aren't qualified to even make comments on Kabini vs. Intel. The bottom line is once again AMD is offering more than intel and for substantially less cost. More in this case equals:
1. Better user experience 2. Better run time/longer battery life 3. Better grahics performance by a huge amount 4. Better price 5. Potential for better display or SSD
I hope to see this SoC in the next version of HPs popular Microserver, or even something that is so cheap mb+Kabini combo that I can build a comparable sized and priced HP Microserver.
nah HP has fallen again for the Intel pressure and has chosen for a sandy in the next generation Gen8 of microservers, which will make it offcourse again way more expensive.
Too little too late. They have few weeks till Haswell (Upper limit) and a quarter or two till new Atoms. (Lower limit) Not sure if there will be much left after that.
It will still fit its niche, baytrail will still be slower, albeit a bit more efficient, and haswell will be way more expensive. Intel likes their profit margins high, even on low end products, baytrail has good chances of being more expensive. The profit margin for AMD is much thinner, they are just happy to move some product.
Haswell is not going to compete on price, and the jury is still out on how low it will be able to scale power-wise since we have not seen any actual review hardware for ULV Haswell.
As far as Atom... we have a lot of promises but Intel has yet to show any ability to do anything worthwhile with Atom. Even assuming Bay Trail lives up to promises, in a quarter or two AMD will be well on its way to releasing improved Jaguar-based silicon.
I bought a full sized $280 15.4" Lenovo laptop on sale several months ago. It has a Intel Sandy Bridge 2.4GHz i3 dual core with 4M of memory. I'm really happy with the performance and thrilled about the price. Very tough to beat this price/performance
"Give me a reasonable Ultrabook-style chassis (or maybe a dockable tablet) with Kabini and a decent quality 1080p touchscreen and do it at the right price and there are plenty of people that will jump at the offer."
If you think Angela`s story is inconceivable,, a month-back my auntiez girl-friend basically also got a cheque for $8689 workin a sixteen hour week from home and there co-worker's mother`s neighbour has been doing this for 7-months and got a cheque for more than $8689 part-time on- line. applie the instructions available on this page, Bow6.comTAKE A LOOK
"There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license" this was a joke right? Intel has very nice CPU's so I'll agree with that, but MS? Linux helps You save those $ for better hardware :)
"There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license" You are joking right? Intel CPU's are great so OK with that, but Microsoft? Why is it a non-negotiable? I always choose more ram/better CPU and Linux instead of Windows. Unless You work with professional CAD software (< 0.1% of users) Windows is VERY negotiable.
I am a bit disappointed that you guys call yourselves PC experts, yet you guys are comparing this architecture's power consumption as bad for performance vs. an Core i3. The issue is you guys ignored the fact that Kabini is A SYSTEM ON A CHIP. BIG DIFFERENCE!!! If you want to properly compare the Core i3 to Kabini, then you guys should also include the power consumption of the support chips that the Core i3 requires since it is just the CPU. You guys should know better!!! You are not the ignorant consumer that goes to Wal-Mart and believes the sales guy. At least I hope not!!
This is good for mobile, but a desktop APU, AMD needs major improvements because so far Intel takes the cake in the desktop! I would like to see AMD make an APU with 1.56 single thread performance and take advantage of the latest 7000 series graphic cards with there APU for desktops!
PC Perspective Podcast #267 - 09/05/2013, This pod cast AMD should listen to! I got an AMD Rig and I'm sick and tried of people bashing them!
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chizow - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I don't understand what the market is for one of these. Pretty poor CPU performance and untenable graphics performance for anything more than video streaming/web surfing. Seems to me like a faster CPU with less emphasis on GPU (i3-3XXX) paired with a low-power, low-profile discrete GPU would be the better way to go.jeffkibuule - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Uhh... these are going into $300 laptops. There will be no discrete GPUs here.Frenetic Pony - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
This is really the market here. I'm fine with my 17 watt Ivy Core i5 Ivy bridge thanks, and my sister will be good with a 15 watt Haswell when she gets a new laptop next month. The key here is price, not performance per watt, in which case you'd just go with a Core i-whatever (possibly with a dedicated Nvidia GPU) and call it good.medi02 - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
So what kind of apps does our sister run, to justify need for a faster performing CPU? (and doh, just i5 won't cut it, you need a ULW part, or you are losing on longevity vs Kabini; So we are talking what, twice or triple the price?)chizow - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I see, so these are like Netbook 2.0, I figured it was the first step to making AMD's Fusion a huge success with the APU, offering much faster graphics than ever before on a CPU. But it's really AMD's version of the Atom?Gigaplex - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
AMD has two main Fusion lines. This line is the Atom competitor, which uses the low power CPU architecture (Bobcat derivative). The APUs that offer the high end graphics use the higher performance architecture (Bulldozer derivative). It sounds like you'd be more interested in the upcoming Kaveri chips.Voldenuit - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
I'm with chizow. AMD is trying to sell a sub-par device upmarket. These things really belonged in netbooks from 2 years ago. Their performance and and pricepoint is irrelvant today when a $200-300 Android tablet is a better ancillary computing device than a $300-400 netbook.The tablet may have less computing power and not be able to run the full suite of x86 productivity software, but will have a better screen, better battery life, more portability, and more importantly, said tablet would be better suited to running its native lightweight Android apps and games than Kabini, which is burdened with full-fat x86 programs targeted at more powerful CPUs/GPUs.
glsunder - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
If you're not gaming, this would be quite nice for a little laptop. Most laptops with these apus won't have dvd drives, so they won't be used for ripping. If I'm going to play a game, it'll be on my desktop.I have an e-350 based laptop that I bought a few years ago. Under windows, it was plenty fast enough to do coding on and run VMs (vs no VM on atom). It was too slow to run an android ARM emulator, but native x86 android worked fine for testing apps. I recently switched it to Ubuntu, which is quite a bit more responsive than Win7.
hyperspaced - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
"Full-fat x86 programs"? Are you talking about the CISC-RISC age-old comparison?So, what's your point? The same software will run better on RISC architecture?
Voldenuit - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
The point is that most apps on Android are simpler and less resource-intensive because they are designed for:a. lower power CPUs
b. lower feature set
You can do more with most windows program suites than the comparable alternatives on Android, but if you want to do anything beyond basic editing/viewing, you'd be better off with a Corei/Richland laptop anyway.
calyth - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Not everyone wants to type with a tablet. I've tried full size iPad, or a 7" android one with SwiftKey for tablet. Both makes me want to chuck it against the wall.When you factor in a half decent tablet keyboard to go with that tablet, it's not all that different.
Flunk - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
What you need to do is imagine your mother wants a new laptop and would like a nice little light one for email, surfing and maybe writing letters in a word processor. That's just one use, there are a lot of people who aren't computer enthusiasts that these will be great for.Granseth - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I think it would be great in a student laptop as well. It could easily survive a day at campus on battery and still have enough power for normal usage like words, edocs, mail and such. Lets just hope somebody gives it a good enough screen and wrapping to be usable in that environment.axien86 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
HP already announced new 10-point touchscreen laptops based on AMD Jaguar chips that are incredibly priced at $399 MSRP. These are going to sell in the millions.chizow - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Just odd to me is all, I figured there were tablets in that sub-$300 range, and something like Surface or various hybrids at that $500 and above price point. I guess this is going to go for super cheap laptop/hybrids in the sub-$300 range to compete with tablets again?I thought this was going to be more in that $500+ bracket with good enough CPU perf and much better GPU than Intel, but that doesn't seem to be the case?
thebeastie - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I don't think you understand the core of what Anand likes about the Kabini, its going to be in a tablet that people can use all day with out having to recharge unlike a comparable Intel solution which would use ALL the battery in half the time, which means you need to recharge it twice a day type scenario...Kabini gives similar performance that can go ALL day.
Jaybus - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Similar GPU performance, but not similar CPU. Single-core performance is still very relevant, in spite of the marketing hoopla. And the Intel has twice the single-core performance, so will be snappier. So, no surprise. Half the power and so half the performance. Both suck at games anyway, and at this price point who cares? If the AMD would have similar CPU performance at half the power, even at the expense of GPU performance, they would be a hands down winner. But that is probably not possible, so they are leveraging their superior GPU performance per Watt. But playing games in slow motion is not impressing anyone. A $300 netbook 2.0 could easily get by with 2D graphics only if it was snappy and the battery lasted all day. I don't see much use for a slow GPU with an even slower CPU. At least the Intel has a marginally fast enough CPU, but it sucks down power. Neither are adequate.HisDivineOrder - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Too expensive to sell in the millions.duploxxx - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
that 10" in there previous netbook was also a selling hit. Once that brazos was introduced by HP, many vendors stopt offering the atom based netbooks in volume.for the rest kabine perf wise is fine for its market intention. Those who bark about unusable daily use have no idea about what was brazos in usage when paired even with a 7.2k rpm hd. THey probbaly only worked with nice atom's....
Its a bit pitty that turbo mode doesn't work here. They either need to fix that in next update or need to bring a dual core higher ghz bin in the same TDP.
warezme - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I have to agree the graphics for either Intel or AMD on these platforms are abysmal. I still have an old laptop from 5 years ago now serving up as a media server that has an Nvidia 9800GTXm and it used to pull around a 10,000 score on 3Dmark06 from what I can recall and this was years and years ago. Granted that was discrete but I would have thought things would have improved immensely on the integrated side by now.Iketh - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
wow.... don't you know these are chips for ultra portable systems?? this article does not cover normal integrated laptop/desktop graphics...ikeke1 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
So You have a highest-performing discrete laptop GPU from five years ago, which on its own pulls ~6x the whole system consumption of this netbook-APU, all the while being 3x as fast?Yea, you win internet.
Death666Angel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Well, you probably pulled 100W and more with that notebook for the GPU and CPU alone. Current high end Intel/AMD APUs use 35 to 45W and achieve 80% of that score.dhartnell - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I use an Asus transformer prime a lot and this would make a very good alternative to that and I get the option of a full windows setup to boot. In the last paragraph the Author talks about the X202E from ASUS. Kabini could give me another option.At the price they are talking about there is a plenty big market for something like this.
johnny_boy - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
Not everyone's playing the latest demanding 3D games, so even on budget systems there's room for usable low end graphics. Imagine this thing in a tablet form factor, and think about tablet-marketed 3D games. I think this gives a good balance for full-fledged Windows 8 tablets, though I doubt it'll ever make it in one (or many).ThomasS31 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
What about GPU accelerated applications?Concillian - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
A very interesting comparison, thanks for picking up a system so you could do this. Seems like the Jag competes pretty well at the low end.If it's truly a much cheaper SKU, it would bee nice to see some better quality / construction on a low spec laptop, but I'm afraid that the way the majority of the market shops you won't see it. I wanted an IPS atom or brazos laptop for some sideline work I do, but had to settle on a TN... after all, who would buy a low spec machine with a high spec display? (everyone with an iPad2 / mini...)
Blibbax - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Most laptops are ridiculously over-specced on CPU, as it's what many people look for. A Kabini CPU with an SSD is always going to be a better experience for office or multimedia use than an i3 with an HDD.tech6 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
+1Mugur - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
+2ppeterka - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
My wife has an E-350 with an SSD. Ever since she got the SSD, she never forgets to mention how much she likes her laptop. Not a power user though, but very representative of an "average end-user".And I, being an Anandtech reader for 15+ years, and working professionally in IT, qualifying as a mid-power user, would like to have this in a small form factor chassis: 10.1" display with 1366x768 resolution, and as small footprint as possible. Oh, yes, and with 8+ GB RAM, and an at least second tier SSD. Throw in extended battery option, and I'll even try to sing to get that... (Ok, that last bit would actually be bad for everyone...)
DanNeely - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Same here. Even for casual goofing around use I regularly find myself doing enough typing that a physical keyboard is a must have. If any of these systems ship with a decent battery the atom based envy x2 I bought both because my old netbooks battery life has gotten anemic and to fiddle with win8 on a touchscreen system will end up with a shorter lifetime than I thought it would.OTOH 7W haswell might be able to get the same runtimes at better CPU and GPU performance levels at the cost of a higher purchase price.
flyingpants1 - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Take the Asus X202E for $399 from Amazon mentioned in the article (11.6" 1366x768, Core i3, 4GB) and add in a 128GB SSD for $60-100, you have MOST of what you want for $459-499. Netbook form factor, ultrabook performance, while keeping the price of a lower-end Celeron/AMD setup.Nothing wrong with an extended battery option, they'd simply need to provide a battery slice attachment for the bottom of the laptop.
At least you are willing to make some sacrifices. For me if I replace my current laptop, I just can't deal with anything smaller than 15" because it need to be just as functional as my desktop.. At that point might as well go for the 3630QM with nvidia dGPU because they start at around $700ish. Add full 1080p, and 128GB SSD. Need 6-8GB of RAM with option to expand, and I don't want battery life to be anemic, so why not use a 90Whr battery like in the rMBP? It ends up costing me $1200+.. I think I'll just keep the laptop I have.
HalloweenJack - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
thanks for the adition;AMD seem to be going very very well in the market its aiming for = 5w >25w (above ARM and below i3) and here it rules - and as shown , matches intels 30w parts @ 1/2 the power.
name99 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
"matches intels 30w parts @ 1/2 the power."Let's be very careful here. What is matched is Intel's crappy low-end low-price 30W part. This thing is no match for a high performance (and high price) ULV i5.
Point is, AMD is competing on price, pure and simple. Don't try to pretend they're somehow specifically competing in the 5W..25W market with a technical edge. They're competing in the "low performance for a low price" market. No shame in that; but let's not pretend otherwise.
juhatus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
The price is same so they _are_ competing with pentiums and low I3's.RoyYoung - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
This would have been interesting back in the pre-tablet age. A cheap SOC that offers just enough performance for media consumption and light gaming, with good power efficiency to allow for 5+ hour battery life on hardware that is still reasonably cheap and light.The problem for this in the 2013 market place is the rise of tablets, along with the epic collapse in PC sales has leave no room for this class of x86 SOC. For media consumption and light gaming, an ARM tablet can be have with IPS screen, SSD storage, and a large library of games that are newer and optimized for the low power platforms. All these for comparable price, lower weight and better battery life. Why settle for crappy game play on 3~4 year old PC titles when you can get a much better experience from tablet games? For general computing, I see $299 pentium and celeron machines going on sale regularly, not just reserved for black Friday specials. Up at the $4xx price point it is not hard to find ivory b i-3s or sandy b i-5s. Go up to $5xx and there are even ULV i-3s and i-5s to choose from.
The Kabini is clearly designed to beat up the old intel atom and it does indeed look good in that comparison. The problem is the old atom power netbooks has already disappear from the market, and for good reason. Intel has now positioned atom SOCs for tablets and cell phones. Entry level laptop segment is now populated with pentiums, celerons, and even older generation i-3s and i-5s.
I am not an AMD fanboi but I really want to see them turn things around to keep Intel in check. May be Temash will fare better going up against atom in the tablet space, but Kabini is sadly not the hit that AMD desperately needs.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Note that tablets at lower price points do NOT have SSD storage; they have flash storage, but almost always low performance eMMC. Even 5400RPM HDDs can outperform eMMC. Put Kabini/Temash in a tablet and run Android, though, and I suspect it will look very good against most ARM offerings. Or maybe in a Chromebook. But like Anand said: please give it a good screen and don't just skimp everywhere and go after the minimum cost market! The race to the bottom is already over, and the winner is...no one.tipoo - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Some of the faster tablets and probably soon smartphones (Nexus 10 for example) are getting up to 90MB/s sequential on the NAND, even if hard drives have higher peak transfer rates wouldn't other characteristics (seek time on a hard drive) make up for that? And the hard drives would rarely hit peak anyways.JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
In the future, we'll see more tablets start to trend towards faster NAND. My point is that the currently shipping stuff is mostly crap -- especially in the $300-$400 tablets. I wonder if Tegra 4 and SHIELD are going to be better? Tegra 3 so far has had horribly slow NAND every time I've seen it. (Yay for installs taking several minutes.)tipoo - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Fair enough. But I'll trade you ANY Tegra 3 device you have for my Nexus S :Pflyingpants1 - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
I almost fell on the floor laughing..."Why settle for crappy game play on 3~4 year old PC titles when you can get a much better experience from tablet games?"
LMFAO!!!!!!
Okay... now that I've calmed down.. The reason to settle for crappy gameplay on 3-4 year old PC titles, (which isn't that long ago btw, there are bajillions of good PC titles released before 2009), is because it absolutely DESTROYS tablet gaming. Hell, even Playstation 1 destroys tablet gaming. Just the incredibly massive selection, full 3D everything, an actual method of inputting your controls.
By comparison, there is no such thing as tablet gaming. A few good titles here and there, but an overwhelming number of 2D or free-to-play/adware/begware titles with poor gameplay. (Candy Crush Saga, mentioned in these comments!) And hilariously pathetic touch-based controls.
I have no problems with tablets in general. But there is no such thing as a "tablet gaming" experience that competes in any way with a PC or console gaming experience. I wish there was, but it's not there yet.
I'm also no fan of AMD lately. Your post had the opposite effect on me, now I see why Kabini may actually deserve a chance in hell, even it if doesn't really stand one.
yellowblue - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
The people who are going to use this will not play Oblivion or Diablo III on it. They are going to play Candy Crush Saga and other FB games. Why not add it to the benchmarks? My wife can't use her two year old SB laptop with GT 540M due to the excess heat and have been bugging me for some time now that I'll clean her laptop heat sink. iPad is not an option since the only levels she can play now are only available in FB.JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Is that laptop by chance an Acer TimelineX? I've had one and Acer just pushed too hard on getting the CPU and dGPU in there. It's a shame, as it was otherwise a compelling option. I'm going to try some FB gaming today on Kabini and maybe do a short Pipeline on it.yellowblue - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Cool I'm looking forward to it. It's Asus n53sv and it is running around 80c when playing Candy Crush. Probably needs a new thermal paste application but don't really want to fix something that is not really broken. It just runs very hot under FB games.Gaugamela - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I have a N43, but never had that type of issues...Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
eh, equal to my notebook. Core i7 Sandy Bridge with a overclocked 540M (it's just an underclocked 550M so I placed it at the 550M frequencies). Installed an SSD in it, increased RAM to 8Gb, and it will last me a long time. Perfectly satisfied with it since I play a few games every now and then.flyingpants1 - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Right, it does not replace your Core i7 with dGPU.kyuu - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I'm looking at Kabini (or Temash or Richland), and I sure as heck am not going to be playing FB games on it. One of the great appeals of an x86 tablet or ultraportable notebook to me is having the entire library of games from Steam, GOG, my old CDs, emulators, etc. to choose from instead of being limited to whatever is in an app store.If it could play Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 or Civ 5 on low settings, that'd be cool too, though it looks like you still need to step up to Trinity/Richland for that.
glsunder - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
I could play diablo 3 on my e-350 at around 20fps iirc. Civ 5 was barely playable on low on the smallest map. If these could turbo 1 or 2 cores up to 2.0 GHz, it'd probably make low end gaming feasible.nunomoreira10 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
try turning off turbo-boostit did wonders for mine
select 99% maxprocesserspeed on power management
ssj3gohan - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Where did you get that platform power consumption from? Because I've done some pretty extensive measurements on my own laptop (a not-really-ultrabook Medion, i5-3317U, UM77 chipset, 4GB RAM, Samsung 840, crappy display on eDP) and I got an idle total platform power of 3.3W. Of course that's with a 3.0W TDP UM77 chipset and not one of the 4.1W TDP non-ultramobile chipsets, but I don't think the gap should be *that* big! You're saying 8.14W for your Pentium 2020M setup, there must be some power hog or some software setting that you missed.DanNeely - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
It's a 35W CPU in a $3xx system; unlike your not-really-an-ultrabook I doubt power consumption was a major vendor concern.repoman27 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
"As a more fully integrated SoC, Kabini’s IO duties are handled by an on-die North Bridge."On die northbridge is nothing new. Kabini has an on die FCH—both the north and south bridges are now integrated.
repoman27 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Oops, sorry DanNeely. That was supposed to be a comment, not a reply. Still getting used to the new site layout.thuejk - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
> There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license.The Windows license is becoming a bit optional. With Steam on Linux, lots of indie games with Linux support, and wine emulation (Starcraft II!), running Linux is becoming possible for gamers willing to limit their game library a bit.
Calinou__ - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
It always was optional. There were lots of games before there was Steam, too.But well, you know, that's Anandtech. If it's non-commercial then it sucks. 8)
Death666Angel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
100% agreed with your conclusion. While cheaper-than-Pentium Kabini laptops would be okay (and will happen), I would like to see a Kabini laptop priced the same with a slightly larger battery, better/higher-res display and maybe more RAM or a small-ish SSD at the same price than competing Intel based laptops.Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
This is more like it. The previous review was just pitiful. Considering that Notebookcheck.net had a much more extensive review, Notebookreview had an awesome review with glowing conclusions to Kabini, that Tomshardware managed to make a comparison with a 35W Pentium and an i3 Ivy Bridge you guys just had to do damage control.Kabini is a great piece of hardware. Super efficient and with enough performance for the majority of users not to notice an impact in daily use. Especially if options with an SSD exist.
Considering how it competes with a 35W Pentium and how efficient it is (it puts to shame the Ivy Bridge i3) this is an awesome chip. And then there's the matter of price. Considering this is a SoC, it is much cheaper than anything that Intel has to offer.
So, yes AMD has a great product here. And you guys will have to change your tune and stop using them as punching bags.
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
[Rolls eyes]The previous review was under a severe time crunch, and while we'd love to have performance scores from every noteworthy CPU/APU out there (hello ULV Celeron, Pentium, Core i3, Trinity...) the fact is no one ever sent us laptops with those parts, and nearly all of the laptops we've reviewed over the past two years have gone back to the manufacturers.
This follow-up isn't about damage control, it's about hoping -- praying! -- that the OEMs won't do with Kabini what they've done with every other low-cost APU out there. I'm skeptical that we can get leopard to change their spots (i.e. budget laptop manufacturers to give us decent displays and chassis to go with the Kabini/Temash SoCs), but we shall see. For the price, Kabini has something to offer, but history suggests that most OEMs will take the cost savings and cut corners everywhere else to create mediocre laptops. The best CPU/APU/SoC in the world married to a lousy design is not a compelling product.
The simple fact of the matter is that you can't handle a the reality of the price/performance equation. Kabini laptops (and Temash tablets) will need to offer either better features/quality and/or lower cost than Core i3 in order to truly impress. They'll likely sell fine regardless, just like Brazos, but speaking of Brazos I actually managed to borrow a C-50 from a friend today, and I had forgotten just how bad the experience can be. E-350 was tolerable; C-50, not so much. Compared to C-50, the A4-5000 is amazingly fast! That's the problem with living in a vacuum where you only look at the comparisons a product wins: there are a lot of options out there to consider.
If there are two laptops with the same design, features, and components at the same price, and one has Kabini A4-5000 while the other has i3-3217U, it's a tossup. We know i3-3217U will have better CPU performance, and in many cases it will have better GPU performance as well. Kabini should have a slight edge in power use. Depending on the user's needs, either laptop could be a good fit, but personally I'd take Core i3 with HD 4000 and slightly worse battery life since I rarely need 7+ hours off the mains. On the other hand, if the Kabini option has a better LCD, or an SSD, that would be enough to give it the nod. This is exactly what we said in the original review, but you keep overlooking that fact.
Gaugamela - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I'm fully aware that Kabini can't beat an i3. But you should also be fully aware that AMD in their slides doesn't point the A4-5000 as competing with i3 Ivy Bridge but with Pentiums. They mention the 25W A6 as competition for the i3's. Would that APU be competitive with the i3 still in performance/power consumption/GPU/price? I remain a bit more skeptical of that. Will the OEMs use it in compelling designs instead of using it in the crappiest notebooks in the market? I certainly hope so, just like you.As for what the OEMs do, the only one that used a AMD APU in a premium case was Asus with their U38N and U38DT. It's a 13,3'' Zenbook with Trinity APUs. It has a Full HD multi-touch IPS displays, aluminum body, and offers a lower price than comparable ultrabooks from Intel (obviously with lower CPU performance). I would expect for a Kabini/Richland refresh though. What I would love to see, is if you want that type of notebooks so much ask OEMs to send them to you for review if they're available.
In my case, I am not blind and if I had to pick a cheap notebook I would go for the Asus x202e. I always go for high performance notebooks (that's why my picks have always been Intel/Nvidia notebooks). However, while you may get the Asus x202e in the US for 400$ in my country it's available for 600€! A comparable Kabini notebook would cost probably 400-450€ since it doesn't have the Intel sticker.
JarredWalton - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Not sure if you get Vizio offerings, but Vizio looks to have some compelling Richland (maybe Kabini as well?) touchscreen laptops launching soon. We'll certainly try to get them, but sadly a lot of OEMs are very particular over what laptops they send for review, hence the lack of i3 ULV, Pentium, Celeron, Trinity ULV, etc. If I had the money, I'd just go buy the damn things for review, but that's not generally practical.Gaugamela - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Unfortunately there's no Vizio offerings in Europe. :(They are beautiful and seem to be one of the few OEMs that use AMD APUs in atractive designs similar to Intel ultrabooks.
With the trend that we are seeing, it would be interesting to see more reviews of low-power APUs.
kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Do they? The recent refresh used Trinity, and they haven't even started shipping the 14" Trinity model yet. Plus the prices ballooned to over a grand for the cheapest model.Is there another refresh coming up?
dbwells - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I think the big story here is that AMD is meeting and sometimes besting Intel IVB parts on performance per watt. I cannot remember the last time that happened. Or am I misunderstanding something? If they can scale up Jaguar, they might really have something here. It's kinda like the second coming of Core, while Barcelona and its progeny are the corresponding repeat of NetBurst.Bobs_Your_Uncle - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
My take-away is much the same as yours: AMD is punching it's way back into the game, which now also happens to feature more, (as well as many more moving), targets. (The "moving ≈ mobile ≈ more rapidly paced product cycle" pun is intended, though as I've advised my kids, if you have to explain it, well then it's just not funny!)I'm a relative late comer to the ranks of tech obsessed / tech aficionados. Since my arrival, maybe 4-5 years ago, Intel has always been the widely dominant force, though I always enjoy rooting for an underdog; in this case AMD.
My desire to root for AMD has increased significantly within the last couple of months, due in large part to several Anand-authored profiles on new arrivals, or employees returning, to AMD. This rationale for wishing AMD well was further solidified by a brief history of AMD, written by Andrew Cunningham & posted in Ars Technica at the following link:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/04/amd-on-rop...
Lacking extensive personal knowledge with which to gauge or critique the article, it at least gave me a greater sense of the significant role occupied by AMD & their summary impact within the industry. With some much valued platform infrastructure still in place, the recent influx of quite formidable talent & experience is, I think, cause for at least guarded optimism over AMD's fortunes.
tipoo - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
The scale up is easier said than done, scaling down is much easier. Jaguar can only clock to 2GHz due to the architecture, they'd have to significantly change it to scale that up, and once they do the IPC may suffer.nunomoreira10 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Your right, if they could just double the performance per core, doubling everything, they could have a great mobile cpu for everything. they sure have an exess of tdp to use.I always wonder how hard it would be to do that, but im sure it´s easier to say then do.
takeship - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Any chance Anand that you could swap some performance memory in for that single stick, say something with 8-8-8 24 or 9-9-9 27 timings, and see if we get any graphical boost out of ti?woofersus - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I wonder if we could see one of these in a lower priced x86 Surface, given the market's clear preference for the full version of Windows and the high price of the original Surface Pro. Seems like a Kabini chip could make for a nice intermediary.kyuu - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
A Surface tablet running off Kabini -- with the consequence of much better battery life and a lower price -- would be great. I hope Microsoft is looking at Kabini/Temash for the v2 Surfaces.FwFred - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
I hope they are, though I expect Bay Trail to have better performance, thermals, and battery life in a fanless tablet form factor. May the best SoC win!vision33r - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Since when do we need high performance CPUs for Facebook, Reddit, and Porn.nunomoreira10 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
since flash :pJarredWalton - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Just as a related comment: I tried several FB Flash games on Kabini and Core i7 ULV. (I know: i7 ULV is a bit much, but it's all I have right now in the ULV segment.) Bejeweled Blitz averages around 24FPS on Kabini, with dips into the low teens at times; on i7 ULV it's pretty much locked in at 30FPS. Zuma Blitz ups the maximum frame rate to 60, and i7 once again hits that pretty much constantly; on Kabini, it's usually above 30 but not always at 60, but at least it's playable. The last game I tried is Solitaire Blitz, and it also tops out at 60FPS; i7 comes close (usually in the 50s), Kabini is lower, like in the 30s. I didn't really have a good way to do apples-to-apples frame rate comparisons, so take these initial numbers with a margin of error. Kabini is definitely better than Brazos and Atom here, but it's not going to handle all the "light" Flash games. And for that matter, ULV Celeron and Pentium are likely in the same boat, but I can't say for certain as I lack the hardware to verify this.kyuu - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
If you look at the Tom's Hardware review, it's pretty apparent that the 15W TDP is *very* conservative. Compared to a 17W ULV Ivy Bridge, the 15W Kabini uses significantly less power.100% agree with your conclusion though -- we need an enlightened OEM to use this silicon to build a low cost but good quality ultraportable/thin+light/whatever design. That's the sort of thing I've been waiting to jump on but the OEMs just haven't delivered anything.
mayankleoboy1 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Enlightened and OEM do not mix together. (Apart from apple, maybe).I am very sure that cheaper silicon=cheaper notebook. OEM's arent going to improve the quality of the chassis and display.
kyuu - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I agree that "enlightened OEM" is, unfortunately, something of an oxymoron. There's always the hope that we'll get surprised, though. Hopefully the downturn in PC sales will make OEMs consider different designs, as it becomes plain that their previous ethos are not going to work anymore.Bobs_Your_Uncle - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I'm very interested to see what would (will?) be done with these AMD APU series in the hands of Vizio, as I very much like the stylistic directions they have taken. By most accounts I believe their initial product launch, (while not exactly awe inspiring), was generally considered to be a reasonably sound first effort, and a well executed one. Reviews I've read suggest that Vizio is indeed serious and directed in their approach toward product improvement in successive iterations.Operating at a much smaller scale than the Big Boys and Girls in the consumer space, in theory Vizio should be more nimble and capable of quicker product deployment to market. This assumes of course, that they have the necessary technical personnel and funding available, and that both their supply and manufacturing resource chains are solid. In light of resource requirements and flagging PC sales, I have to wonder if the favor they've generated with MicroSoft (eg. products sans bloatware, etc.) might pay some dividends.
Given their strengths in design, displays, and the degree to which Vizio employs word of mouth to generate buzz, one or two very solid thin & light notebooks built on an AMD platform (to say nothing of a tablet or two) might provide significant product and brand differentiation, and could really help to build upon a reputation for quality and for responsiveness to market inputs.
With any luck, before too long we'll be reading in AT of something(s) Vizio that is(are) the absolute Bees Knees!
Gaugamela - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Asus already has a great chassis for these APUs. The Asus x202e. If they used a Kabini APU in this chassis they could offer it at an even lower price point.kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
The x202e does seem like a great platform for Kabini. Something similar as a dockable tablet design would be even more interesting.FwFred - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Because Intel is able to share TDP budget between CPU and GPU. Because AMD cannot, it must 'reserve' TDP for the GPU even when a CPU-only benchmark is running.JarredWalton - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
I noticed that a few of THG's Kabini numbers appear off -- specifically PCMark 7 is clearly using an SSD on Kabini and not on the others. Which is horribly unfair, as that's the benchmark that benefits most from an SSD. For reference:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/826?vs=823
kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Yes, I believe THG noted that some of the numbers were skewed to due them not using an SSD across the board.JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Where did they say that? What I see is this:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kabini-a4-5000...
"Although we used a number of different notebooks for our benchmarks, we used the same hard drive and memory in all of them to keep our comparisons as valid as possible. We want to zero in on platform performance after all, and not the difference between a mechanical disk and SSD."
This is clearly not true, as the Kabini laptop has an SSD for PCMark 7 while the others are HDDs. The configuration tables also make no mention of SSDs. I understand the difficulty of getting all the tests run under a time crunch, but at least we try to acknowledge the shortcomings and are honest in the configuration details.
yensteel - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I think Kabini is in a similar position as Sandybridge HD 3000 was 2 years ago for gaming. Barely there in playability, but so close!For me, the Intel HD4000 is the bottom line for basic gaming performance (low res and quality for current gen games), I hope that AMD can pass that threshold with the next generation. With the mentality of "good enough", many people like students would find it very attractive.
I also appreciate the improvement in efficiency and price. It's a good direction.
duploxxx - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
that's why A6 is there.... you see anandtech doesn't have the right HW to comapare and now all a sudden people start to see this as a counterpart of I series...its a a4 meant to be replacement of barzos, which it clearly does and against Atom which it destroys in any matter.
mschira - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Well they should be compared to Atoms, that's their price bracket. And they destroy Atom, so thoroughly it is beyond the scales.And on the GPU side things are even worse. Atom GPUs are the biggest nightmare on the planet.
So they should go in $200-$400 small systems with a 10 or 11" screen.
Kinda like the netbooks we wanted for 5 years but we only got Atom.
Cheers
M.
mschira - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
By the way is Kabini made on a cheap bulk process?If so I think the costs for the chip would be lower than a same surface Intel Chip.
So of course they can beat their prices easily.
M.
Roland00Address - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Intel foundries are also on a bulk process.FwFred - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Same area == less transistors, and higher power per transistor when comparing Intel's best to GF or TSMC's best. If the costs are similar, an AMD chip will be worse--less performance due to less transistors--so it will have to price it lower. It's design teams are at a distinct disadvantage, so AMD is forced to focus on seams in Intel's product lineup. Not an enviable position.casteve - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Would love to see HQV scores for this device.Beenthere - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Those who don't understand Anand's analysis aren't qualified to even make comments on Kabini vs. Intel. The bottom line is once again AMD is offering more than intel and for substantially less cost. More in this case equals:1. Better user experience
2. Better run time/longer battery life
3. Better grahics performance by a huge amount
4. Better price
5. Potential for better display or SSD
xenol - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
At first I saw the benchmark numbers and went "so what's AMD trying to prove here?" But then I saw the power consumption and went ô_o.Similar performance for a lot less power? That's good news for mobile devices.
thebeastie - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
I hope to see this SoC in the next version of HPs popular Microserver, or even something that is so cheap mb+Kabini combo that I can build a comparable sized and priced HP Microserver.duploxxx - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
nah HP has fallen again for the Intel pressure and has chosen for a sandy in the next generation Gen8 of microservers, which will make it offcourse again way more expensive.Klimax - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Too little too late. They have few weeks till Haswell (Upper limit) and a quarter or two till new Atoms. (Lower limit) Not sure if there will be much left after that.ddriver - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
It will still fit its niche, baytrail will still be slower, albeit a bit more efficient, and haswell will be way more expensive. Intel likes their profit margins high, even on low end products, baytrail has good chances of being more expensive. The profit margin for AMD is much thinner, they are just happy to move some product.kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Haswell is not going to compete on price, and the jury is still out on how low it will be able to scale power-wise since we have not seen any actual review hardware for ULV Haswell.As far as Atom... we have a lot of promises but Intel has yet to show any ability to do anything worthwhile with Atom. Even assuming Bay Trail lives up to promises, in a quarter or two AMD will be well on its way to releasing improved Jaguar-based silicon.
Hector2 - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - link
I bought a full sized $280 15.4" Lenovo laptop on sale several months ago. It has a Intel Sandy Bridge 2.4GHz i3 dual core with 4M of memory. I'm really happy with the performance and thrilled about the price. Very tough to beat this price/performanceetre - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
"Give me a reasonable Ultrabook-style chassis (or maybe a dockable tablet) with Kabini and a decent quality 1080p touchscreen and do it at the right price and there are plenty of people that will jump at the offer."I concur
PatriciaBau42 - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
If you think Angela`s story is inconceivable,, a month-back my auntiez girl-friend basically also got a cheque for $8689 workin a sixteen hour week from home and there co-worker's mother`s neighbour has been doing this for 7-months and got a cheque for more than $8689 part-time on- line. applie the instructions available on this page, Bow6.comTAKE A LOOKredross - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
"There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license" this was a joke right? Intel has very nice CPU's so I'll agree with that, but MS? Linux helps You save those $ for better hardware :)redross - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
"There are two non-negotiables in building a PC these days: the cost of Intel silicon and the cost of the Windows license" You are joking right? Intel CPU's are great so OK with that, but Microsoft? Why is it a non-negotiable? I always choose more ram/better CPU and Linux instead of Windows. Unless You work with professional CAD software (< 0.1% of users) Windows is VERY negotiable.redross - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
oops double post. Seems strange that a new post appears at the top and after a refresh its gone to the bottom :)PCpowerman - Friday, May 31, 2013 - link
I am a bit disappointed that you guys call yourselves PC experts, yet you guys are comparing this architecture's power consumption as bad for performance vs. an Core i3. The issue is you guys ignored the fact that Kabini is A SYSTEM ON A CHIP. BIG DIFFERENCE!!! If you want to properly compare the Core i3 to Kabini, then you guys should also include the power consumption of the support chips that the Core i3 requires since it is just the CPU. You guys should know better!!! You are not the ignorant consumer that goes to Wal-Mart and believes the sales guy. At least I hope not!!random2 - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link
"AMD will take less of the BoM,"Please if you are going to force us to read leet speak, please allow us less than high IQ types the benefit of a definition. Thank you. :)
ezjohny - Sunday, September 8, 2013 - link
This is good for mobile, but a desktop APU, AMD needs major improvements because so far Intel takes the cake in the desktop! I would like to see AMD make an APU with 1.56 single thread performance and take advantage of the latest 7000 series graphic cards with there APU for desktops!PC Perspective Podcast #267 - 09/05/2013, This pod cast AMD should listen to! I got an AMD Rig and I'm sick and tried of people bashing them!