New Temash and Kabini Chips Released; Nothing to Be Excited About

AMD has been busy improving their Temash and Kabini lines to compete with Intel's hot new Bay Trail architecture. This February one new APU has been added to the Temash family, and Kabini picked up three new models.

The A4-1350 is basically the same as the A6-1450, but without the Turbo function. The E1-2200 trades low-voltage DDR3 support for a 50 MHz CPU clock bump, hardly worth it in my opinion. The first quad-core APU in the E-series is the E2-3800, which is basically a slower version of the A4-5000 without low-voltage RAM support. The A4-5100 is to the A4-5000 what the A4-1350 is to the A6-1450: the CPU runs 50 MHz faster, and low-voltage RAM support has been removed. Will these new models make a dent in Intel's market share? Probably not. There aren't any groundbreaking features added, and performance is still not enough for the latest AAA games. Rumor has it, though, that AMD's next-generation ultramobile APU's, codenamed Beema and Mullins, will be a gamechanger. We shall see.

The Future of Netbooks: AMD Beats Intel to Market with Temash and Kabini

Before I start, I want to give a big thank-you to monstercameron, who alerted me to the existence of Temash long before I would've known about it otherwise.

Intel's Bay Trail is all fine and good, but it has one major problem.

It's not here yet.

Fortunately for netbook gamers, AMD's next generation of ultramobile processors is here, and improvements abound. More processing power, more CPU and GPU cores, faster memory controller, lower power consumption, you name it. If you're fed up with your old single-core netbook with crappy graphics, now is a great time to upgrade.

Temash: Quad Core at 8 Watts!

In my opinion, single-core processors in netbooks should disappear forever. AMD, it seems, agrees. Unlike Ontario with the C-30 before it, Temash shuns single-core processors intended for netbooks and tablets and only offers dual or quad-core CPU's. Good thing, too; multitasking on a single-core netbook is no fun at all. But more CPU cores aren't the only things that give AMD a leg up in the ultraportable market. Power consumption is another key element.

As you can see from this table from Liliputing, max power consumption for the two higher-end APU's has dropped to 8W, down a watt from the previous-gen Ontario. That doesn't sound like much, but when you factor in the DDR3L memory support (the L stands for 'low voltage'), it's a pretty big deal for road warriors. Even better is the A4-1200 APU, which has a TDP of 3.9W. A netbook/laptop with this APU would be perfect for a business professional that wants a cheap notebook with very long battery life (and functional graphics drivers).

AMD increased the number of integrated graphics cores in Temash (and Kabini) from 80 to 128. While newer games can take advantage of more cores, it's questionable whether or not a netbook can play these games anyway. After all, Temash's maximum memory bandwidth hasn't changed since Ontario, and neither has its pixel or texture fillrates. Fillrate is very important for older games that rely less on complex shaders and more on textures. For this reason, gaming bottlenecks might move from the CPU to the GPU. I shouldn't complain, though; Temash is faster than Ontario at a lower power consumption, and that's what counts.

Kabini: Skyrim on a Netbook is Now Enjoyable

Have you ever tried to play Skyrim on a netbook? There are videos on YouTube that say it's possible, but how much fun will you really get out of it? Most likely, not much. Kabini will change that. With fast quad-core and dual-core options, more memory bandwidth, and more performance per watt, Kabini will take netbook gaming to a whole new level.

Don't let the names of the new APU's fool you. The E1-2100 is not faster than the E1-1200. But with a TDP of 9W, it shouldn't be. The E1-2100 does a better job of replacing the C-50. Because of architectural changes, the CPU portions of Temash and Kabini are 22% at the same clock speed compared to their last-gen counterparts. Thus, the E1-2500 is 22% faster than the E1-1200, and the E2-3000 is 15% faster than the E2-2000. More exciting are the quad-core options. The A6-5200 should be faster than AMD's own Phenom X3 8650, which was released in mid-2008. To be able to get better performance in a small laptop than a 95W desktop processor is impressive, even if the latter is 5 years old. This new CPU performance is critical for newer games like Skyrim and Rift, and should give those 48 additional GPU cores something to do.

Desktop Equivalents

Since games cite desktop parts in their system requirements, I thought it would be a good idea to compare these new APU's with said desktop parts.

CPU portion:

A4-1200, A4-1250, & E1-2100 = Athlon 64 3500+ (early 2007)
A6-1450 = Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (2007) (can go faster if thermals allow)
E1-2500 = Athlon X2 3250e (late 2008)
E2-3000 = between Athlon X2 3250e and 4050e (mid-late 2008)
A4-5000 = faster than Athlon X2 7550 (late-2008)
A6-5200 = Phenom X3 8650 (mid-2008)

The GPU portion of the APU will perform between a Radeon HD 8350 and a desktop Radeon HD 8400 at the same clock speed. The HD 8180 will be significantly slower than the HD 8350, while the mobile HD 8400 will be only slightly slower than the desktop HD 8400.

The Future of Netbooks: Upcoming Chips from Intel and AMD

It's been said in many places that the netbook is dead. That may be true, but future processors from AMD and Intel could make the netbook drought a temporary hibernation. Intel finally seems to be focusing on jacking up the performance of its Atom processors (as opposed to further reducing power consumption), which will give AMD a run for its money and netbooks a desparately needed shot in the arm.

Intel: Bay Trail Promises Quad Core and 3x Better Graphics

Hot Hardware posted some leaked Intel slides on the 3rd of this month on their upcoming Bay Trail platform. To date, Intel has put the highest priority on shrinking the Atom's energy footprint, going from 8.5 W in the original Diamondville + 945GSE chipset combination to 5.6 W with Cedar Trail and the NM10 chipset (both worst-case scenarios), while making only small performance increases. Now, Intel is finally trying to clear the stigma of poor performance from its Atom line with performance-focused upgrades.

 The new Atoms, scheduled for release sometime in 2014, feature an architecture redesigned from the ground up. First, Intel is moving to a 22 nm process technology, which means the processor's transistors are smaller and packed together more densely. Secondly, the Bay Trail Atoms will be SoC's (system-on-a-chip). This means that the chipset, graphics, and CPU are all on the same die, which reduces power consumption and makes for a more efficient manufacturing process. The CPU itself will be a out-of-order quad-core solution, with burst speeds of up to 2.7 GHz. For an Atom, that's super fast, although I suspect the mobile parts (the ones netbook enthusiasts care about) won't be boosted that high. Current Atoms use in-order execution, which means the CPU runs all commands in the order they are presented, which reduces performance. Out-of-order execution allows Bay Trail to select the most efficient order to process data. The Bay Trail platform will support up to 8 GB of memory, the same as AMD's Brazos line. Memory speeds for Bay Trail-M remain at a maximum of 1066 MHz, just like Cedar Trail. It's unclear whether dual-channel memory will be supported. 

Perhaps the most exciting upgrade is to the graphics. Intel is leaving PowerVR graphics behind, and instead using their own HD Graphics processor. That means all of the graphics driver issues that haunt Cedar Trail are no more, and Intel netbooks will finally get the DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.3 support they need. The clock rate for the new GPU has not been disclosed yet, but I suspect it won't matter, because Intel's HD Graphics on the market now are lightyears beyond any netbook GMA GPU. Also included is hardware-accelerated H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV encoding, as well as accelerated decoding/playback for more video formats than Cedar Trail supported.

Because the chipset will be fused with the processor, Bay Trail enjoys some small reductions in power consumption over previous generations of Atoms. Power consumption for Bay Trail-M is estimated to be between 4 and 6.5 W for low-end parts and 10 W for the high-end. Cedar Trail currently takes about 5 to 8 W.

AMD: Temash & Kabini Deliver Much Improved Performance

AMD demoed its upcoming Temash and Kabini APU's at CES 2013. According to Trusted Reviews, both designs are SoC's, just like Intel's Bay Trail.  Temash is intended to be used in tablets and hybrid tablets/laptops. It will replace the current-gen Hondo chips. (In case you're wondering why I've never mentioned Hondo before, it's because Hondo is nearly identical to the Brazos C-series chips.) AMD expects    Temash to have double the graphical power of Hondo, as well as dual-core and quad-core configurations. 

Kabini is set to replace today's Brazos 2.0 as the platform of choice for power-hungry netbook users (power-hungry is a relative term). Like Temash, it will have 2-core and 4-core options. Power consumption is expected to drop by 17% compared to Brazos 2.0, while delivering 50% more performance. Both Temash and Kabini are moving to 28nm processes, essential for competing with the threats of Intel and ARM. Also, AMD's APU's are reaching the market this year, far before Intel.

In-depth data on AMD's future platforms is not available at the moment, but I expect a major battle from ARM, AMD, and Intel. This competition will drive up performance and drive down prices, and that's a big win for consumers. The question is, can netbooks be revived by newer hardware?

We'll just have to wait and see.

AMD Makes Small Improvements to Brazos 2.0 Line

Before they unleash their Temash and Kabini platforms (more on that in a future post), AMD has released some small upgrades for their current-gen Brazos 2.0 platform. The new processors, the E1-1500 and E2-2000, are direct replacements to the existing E1-1200 and E2-1800, respectively.  Compared to the E1-1200, the E1-1500 gets a speed boost of 80 MHz (1.48 GHz vs 1.4), which is hardly noticeable. The GPU also gets a small push of 29 MHz (529 MHz vs 500). You might notice this difference, but it's not enough to get you playing any new games. On the high end, the E2-2000's CPU is 50 MHz faster than its predecessor (1.75 GHz vs 1.7 GHz); again, insignificant. The GPU gets clocked up to 700 MHz over the previous 680 MHz. Both new processors retain the RAM speeds of the procs they replace (DDR3/1066 for E1-1500, DDR3/1333 for E2-2000).

On the whole, these new platform bumps are nothing to be excited about. If all other factors are the same, however, there's no reason to buy a netbook/laptop with the older processors. If you need a computer soon (i.e. you can't wait for the next generation), now's a good time.