Notebooks with AMD’s new low-voltage “Beema” processors should start to arrive during the second quarter of 2014. AMD officials say we could also see Beema-powered tablets soon, along with tablets featuring lower-power AMD Mullins chips.

AMD officials confirmed that devices with Beema chips are on the way during the chip-makers quarterly earnings call.

AMD 2014 Beema, Mullins, Kaveri

According to CPU-World, the upcoming Beema chips will come in dual and quad-core varieties and feature integrated security and more efficient performance than the AMD Kabini chips they’ll gradually replace.

The new processors are 28nm chips that will be available with 10W through 25W TDPs, and which will feature AMD Radeon graphics.

Pricing hasn’t been announced, but it’s likely we’ll continue to see AMD position its ULV chips as alternatives to Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core i3 chips which means we could see the new processors in entry-level and mid-range Windows notebooks and tablets.

via Fudzilla

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

13 replies on “AMD’s low-power Beema chips for notebooks, tablets on the way”

  1. Haven’t seen much of the previous gen (Gigabyte was supposed to launch a tablet using them but it has yet to materialize) so i can’t say i have much hope of ever seeing this in any actual products.

  2. If they make it into UMPCs then I’d buy an AMD Beema or Mullins based device. Unless they are more expensive or lower performing (CPU only tasks) than Intel devices.

  3. Doubt these will be competitive vs The Haswell & Bay trail refresh coming in at various price points for the back to school sales. These have no HSA component and are stuck with a single channel memory controller, Intel has the process advantage with it’s 22nm finfet delivering performance with low power.

    1. I doubt even HSA could have made a difference for these little chips. The biggest issue will be with graphics memory bandwidth. The lack of dual channel memory will be the platform’s undoing.

      1. May be, may be not. But i don’t believe it would matter much because of the target costumers for the products. You won’t buy something with this SoC for video editing or gaming, it is designed for office and internet and for those proposes you don’t need much horse power. It’s always welcome a powerful chip, but for those activities you won’t notice the difference.

        I read an article, i don’t remember where, but it said that these SoC will support HSA.

        1. Well, considering these chips share main memory with graphics, dual channel memory should theoretically have an impact on whole system performance as well (I hear graphics memory bandwidth is what is holding back the potential of the GPU) as graphics. HSA just seems to be a memory management system that is also aimed at GPU performance. Neither of those features appear to be particularly necessary for the use cases you mention. If I could have my choice of features. I’d definitely choose dual channel memory over HSA though and not just for gaming (the idea of gaming on a Kabini machine does not thrill me) 🙂

          Considering even bay trail supports dual channel memory, not having it would appear to be a disadvantage at this point. If someone would make the case that adding dual channel memory would add significantly to soc and motherboard costs that would be a perfectly understandable point from a cost conscious perspective.

          Edited for more commentary.

          1. From the reviews i’ve seen, the main reason the GPU is underperforming is because of the CPU (of course the dual channel would add more performance to the GPU).
            I really would like to try an AMD low power laptop, but here in Mexico the stores sell them at the same price as Intel ultrabooks or even more. They offer you a temash laptop at the same price as ci3 ULV ivy bridge.
            I like AMD (not at fanboy level), but my current laptop is a ci5 ivy bridge just because of the price.

          2. Thats not too bad. Here in the US there is very little price difference between Intel and AMD laptops at the low end. I tend to do my testing on mitx motherboards due to their lower prices rather than full laptops

          3. The problem here is that they try to sell us low-end AMD laptops as high end ones. I’ve seen AMD E-300 laptops priced at the same as and core i3 or i5.
            Many people don’t know about hardware, so they see numbers only: 750GB HDD 4 GB of RAM and other stuff and they end buying an over priced laptop.

    2. kabini and temash were faster than baytrail in cpu and gpu performance with only single channel memory, that is not the issue, the issue is power optimization on the platform level by oems, AMD has always gotten the crappy screens and components that arent as optimized for long battery life.

      1. You are right about power optimization being the main thing they had to fix but it was their SoC that had the issue… AMD didn’t support Connected Standby and other advance power sipping states before the Beema and Mullins update… And you can’t blame the OEMs for that…

        Also, AMD didn’t really have a Temash CPU advantage when the mobile SoC, with 2W SDP, Z3770 gave about the same performance as the 15W A4-5000 Kabini… And Intel has higher performing Bay Trails now…

        So the AMD advantage was mainly GPU…

        1. AMD does support advanced sleep states, just not CS and its definitely not fair comparing 2w sdp to actual 15W tdp, I am sure were we measuring power directly from the cpu rails they wouldn’t be much higher in amds case. however you are right that baytrail was a bit faster cpu than temash.

          1. Sorry but AMD didn’t support the really advance power states that both ARM and Intel support for mobile SoCs… Beema and Mullin are the first to truly do so…

            Temash and Kabini mainly just improved from the previous Brazos offerings but they were never fully optimized for mobile devices… They also didn’t support running Android and that’s another reason why they didn’t get many mobile design wins… Even now, AMD only supports Android through Bluestacks, albeit they made a deal to ensure optimization for Bluestack but that still limits them to be mainly offered for W8 devices…

            And it’s perfectly fair to compare, Intel mobile SoCs rarely go over the SDP and mobile SoCs for fanless tablets are typically below 5W TDP… While the only AMD Temash SoC that went that low was the dual core A4-1200… AMD couldn’t really push their CPU performance except for the 8W and higher models with Temash and Kabini…

            Though. A good portion of it is because of the GPU but that’s part of the cost of prioritizing graphical performance…

            Now Beema and Mullins should really fix those deficiencies and finally put it on a more equal footing…

            Only problem is Intel will start shipping the 14nm Cherry Trail update to OEMs around 2-3 months from now and that doesn’t give AMD much time to take advantage of their update… Especially, if Intel comes through on the promised graphical performance boost for Cherry Trail…

Comments are closed.