AMD is launching a new line of chips aimed at mobile devices including notebooks, tablets, and other devices and the company says that we should start to see devices with the new chips in time for the 2014 back-to-school season.
The new chips, code-named “Beema” and “Mullins” are designed to offer up to twice the processing performance-per-watt as the Intel chips they’re competing against — but take that with a grain of salt. AMD is comparing even its 15W Beema chip against Intel’s 7.5W Pentium Bay Trail processors.
That said, AMD has a reputation for offering decent graphics performance, and the company has been working over the past few years to make its mobile chips both more powerful and more efficient. Beema and Mullins go further in that direction than any AMD chips to date.
Beema
AMD’s new Beema chips are aimed at notebooks and other mobile devices. The company will offer 10W dual-core models like the 1.35 GHz AMD E1-6010 with 350 MHz Radeon R2 graphics and 15W quad-core chips including:
- AMD E6-6010: 1.5 GHz quad-core CPU w/500 MHz Radeon R2 graphics
- AMD A4-6210: 1.8 GHz quad-core CPU w/600 MHz Radeon R3 graphics
- AMD A6-6310: 2.4 GHz quad-core CPU w/800 MHz Radeon R4 graphics
Each system-on-a-chip also includes hardware-level security courtesy of an ARM Cortex-A5 processor core dedicated to ARM TrustZone technology.
AMD says its Beema processors offer up to twice the graphics performance of last year’s “Kabini” chips, while offering a 20 percent power reduction. The new chips also add support for DDR3-1866 memory.
According to AMD, the new chips should also offer significantly better graphics performance than Intel Pentium Bay Trail M or Haswell U chips, but it’s noteworthy that the company’s press release doesn’t say much about Intel’s Core i3 or faster chips.
Mullins
The low-power Mullins chips are designed for tablets, notebooks, 2-in-1 systems, and other devices where you might find an Intel Atom processor. AMD says its chips offer up to 3 times the performance of an Atom chip, but that will probably depend on which Atom chip you’re looking at… there are quite a few. The new chips are also said to offer twice the performance-per-watt of AMD “Temash” chips, which is a welcome improvement from last year’s somewhat disappointing low-power processors.
Some of the first Mullins chips will include:
- AMD E1 Micro-6200T: 3.95W 1.4 GHz dual-core CPU w/300 MHz Radeon R2 graphics
- AMD A4 Micro-6400: 4.5W 1.6 Ghz quad-core CPU w/350 MHz Radeon R3 graphics
- AMD A10 Micro-6700T: 4.5W 2.2 GHz quad-core CPU w/500 MHz Radeon R6 graphics
According to AMD, while Lenovo and Samsung are among the first to introduce products based on its new chips, “many more” are expected to launch by this fall.
Want a better sense of what to expect from the new AMD chips? Check out the detailed write-up at AnandTech.
The A10 sounds promising. I would be really interested in an 8-10 inch Windows 8 tablet with an A10 and R6 graphics.
Not possible the powerconsumption needs to be much under 10 watts
4.5watts as per the article
8-9 inch laptops are not there ……. There can be a diagonal 10.1 ” laptop with that length
Another under engineered product from AMD, built on a poor process with several features missing like stand by connect,dual channel memory controller and HSA like was promised…the reality is that AMD ideas are good( like HSA) but always late and short on what is required to be truly competitive.This would have been impressive 18 months ago but instead we got Kabini & Temash, much like Trinity should have been Richland…the ressources and process tech just are not there VS Bay Trail & Haswell.
I am surprised they got such performance gains despite the crippled memory bus. No point in putting HSA into an APU with single channel memory support though. I don’t recall off the top of my head, but AMD has power saving features that are similar to stand by connect.
I do agree this would have been impressive even 12 months ago nevermind 18.
Edit for grammar.