AMD Stakes Out Mobile Territory With New Low-Power Chips

 

 

 

 

AMD sees where the trends are heading with tablets, hybrids and thin laptops, so it has planted its flag in this neighborhood of the mobile sector with three new APU lines. The company is touting lower power consumption but a considerable boost in graphics performance, so it's not just the smaller devices that are all the rage, but gaming-centric and touchscreen laptops that are targets for AMD's new chips.

Perennial Intel competitor AMD on Thursday launched three additions to its 2013 A-Series and E-series mobile accelerated processing unit family.

They include the Elite Mobility APU, previously code-named "Temash," and the Mainstream APU, formerly code-named "Kabini."
Both are system on a chip solutions based on AMD's "Jaguar" microarchitecture for low-power processors.
They "are the first single-chip quad-core x86 SoCs in the industry, designed for touch small form-factor Windows notebooks, tablets and hybrids [with screens measuring] 13 inches and below," Gary Silcott, a senior manager at AMD, told TechNewsWorld.
Jaguar "is a higher performance follow-on CPU to 'Bobcat,' the core inside 'Brazos,' our top-selling APU of all time," Silcott said.
"This is a new generation of processor cores that are more power-efficient than anything AMD has produced," said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research. "However, it isn't just about the CPU, it's about the entire chip, especially the graphics."