AMD Launches Mobile Kaveri APUs | Hacker News Reader

AMD Launches Mobile Kaveri APUs

anandtech.com

43 pointszerny14 comments

All in all, I'm surprised with the very respectable performance AMD managed to reach. Price, power and thermals will probably play a big part in how successful these parts will become.

I've heard many people comparing the TDP of the Intel solution tested in the article (i7-4500U & Nvidia Geforce 750M) to the new APU tested.

The 15W reported by Intel is not directly comparable to the 35W claimed by AMD. The APU includes, among others, the more powerful GPU on the CPU die, which is handled on the Intel system in the benchmarks by the Nvidia card. The power budget of the Nvidia is not included in the 15W figure.

The methodology used to derive these TDP specs is also not known and likely differs between the manufacturers.

The only proper way to compare the power consumption would be to do a full system power measurement of two comparable devices.

Intel Haswell has integrated GPU. I have been using one for ~ 1 year. It supports VGA, DVI, HDMI output all at the same time. Works well. Power is better than the I7 I used before.

It is also disabled when external gpu is present. At least it should be.

There were plans not to disable the on-chip GPU and use it as a power saving feature. When the gpu work load can be handled by the on-chip GPU, disabling the external GPU saves you quite a lot of energy.

There is an integrated GPU, but it doesn't really compete with the APU's GPU. For the benchmarks, it has been augmented with a much more powerful Nvidia chip, taking thermal load away from the CPU/iGPU and freeing that space up for CPU-only load.

I run an i7 4500 in my laptop (same as the one in the article), and my parents have a desktop APU comparable to the one presented here. Their GPU's are not in the same ballpark. Intel does have powerful GPU's now, but they are only available in CPU's of 47W and up, and at a much steeper price as well. (Price is unrelated to my previous argument, but I'm pretty confident that the price per part of an AMD A7600 will be far below that of the i7-4500u)

Also, for the benchmarks presented here, we have no details about actually consumed energy by the devices, and we don't know what the devices consume during "typical" usage either.

BTW, the ARM cell phone SOC I worked with everyday has integrated GPU, video processor (HW base), 2,4,6,8 ARM Cores, with integrated CP (Cellular processor), almost all the necessary IO such as USB (OTG, 3.0), SD, Display controller etc are all integrated inside the SOC.

DDR are POP soldered on top of SOC directly - similar to raspberry pie's SOC's RAM.

The power are way lower.

All package (With DDR) in size of the thumbnail. A PCB with SOC + EMMC (Flash) + PMIC + Wifi is size of the postage stamp.

And they are selling billions of them every year.

It is amaze how far ahead of for ARM SOC as compare to x86 camp. (In my point of view.)

>The power are way lower.

In more ways than TDP.

> First, you're sure to notice the use of the FX branding. Make no mistake: this is the same APU as the other Kaveri parts and it has no relation to the desktop FX processors; AMD marketing simply feels the FX brand has a good reputation among enthusiasts and consumers and they wanted to carry that over into the mobile world.

I don't think customers are going to appreciate the confusion.

There's already insane confusion about laptop CPUs. Every time someone asks me my opinion about some laptop - I have to lookup some CPUMark score, because you can't tell anything from name, generation or GHz anymore.

My "favorite" latest (intentional) confusion is from Intel who decided to name chips "Celeron" that are both Haswell-based and Atom-based. Why intentional you may ask? Because they can begin offering Haswell-based ones at first, get high praises for the performance of budget laptops, and then in new generations switch to the Atom-based Celerons, which can be anywhere from 2x as weaker to slightly less weaker, but costs Intel half the price to make them, and they could be offering them for the same price to OEMs, since it's "Celeron" after all.

I'm going to go ahead and say that even if these chips are good, they will be saddled with terrible displays, cheap hard drives, and horrible touch pads in oversized cases for $500 crappy laptops.

AMD needs to basically own the $500-800 space with a good APU, SSD, and outstanding form factor. Basically if they could make a 13" Macbook Air with one of these CPU's for around $500-750 they would have a winner on their hands.

I fully expect that to not happen.

It really is a ripe market.

The MBA is nice and all, but has an absolutely godawful screen compared to everything else in its price segment, especially if you bump up above base specs.

PC laptops with decent displays don't seem to exist below around the $900-1000 mark currently. I don't need an i7 in a notebook, but shopping around, it's been the only way for me to get something with the SSD and 8GB of RAM that I do need.

Yeah, what's amazing is Chromebooks are WAY nicer machines at the $200-300 price range than the comparable Windows PC. It's just so bizarre the choices Windows PC makers make that are just junk.

It seems that to get a SSD in a Windows laptop, I need to either spend $1,000 or buy a decently spec'ed $500-700 laptop, and drop in my own SSD for $100.

HP's Sleekbooks were almost there but didn't quite get there.

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