The AMD Kabini Review: A4-5000 APU Tested
by Jarred Walton on May 23, 2013 12:00 AM ESTKabini vs. Clover Trail & ARM
Kabini is a difficult SoC to evaluate, primarily because of the nature of the test system we're using to evaluate it today. Although AMD's Jaguar cores are power efficient enough to end up in tablets, the 15W A4-5000 we're looking at today is a bit too much for something the size of an iPad. Temash, Kabini's even lower power counterpart, will change that but we don't have Temash with us today. Rather than wait for AMD to get us a Temash based tablet, I wanted to get an idea of how Jaguar stacks up to some of the modern low-power x86 and ARM competitors.
To start, let's characterize Jaguar in terms of its performance compared to Bobcat as well as Intel's current 32nm in-order Saltwell Atom core. As a reference, I've thrown in a 17W dual-core Ivy Bridge. The benchmarks we're looking at are PCMark 7 (only run on those systems with SSDs), Cinebench (FP workload) and 7-Zip (integer workload). With the exception of Kabini, all of these parts are dual-core. The Atom and Core i5 systems are dual-core but have Hyper-Threading enabled so they present themselves to the OS as 4-thread machines.
| CPU Performance | ||||||||||||||||
| PCMark 7 | Cinebench 11.5 (Single Threaded) | Cinebench 11.5 (Multithreaded) | 7-Zip Benchmark (Single Threaded) | 7-Zip Benchmark (Multithreaded) | ||||||||||||
| AMD A4-5000 (1.5GHz Jaguar x 4) | 2425 | 0.39 | 1.5 | 1323 | 4509 | |||||||||||
| AMD E-350 (1.6GHz Bobcat x 2) | 1986 | 0.32 | 0.61 | 1281 | 2522 | |||||||||||
| Intel Atom Z2760 (1.8GHz Saltwell x 2) | - | 0.17 | 0.52 | 754 | 2304 | |||||||||||
| Intel Core i5-3317U (1.7GHz IVB x 2) | 4318 | 1.07 | 2.39 | 2816 | 6598 | |||||||||||
Compared to a similarly clocked dual-core Bobcat part, Kabini shows a healthy improvement in PCMark 7 performance. Despite the clock speed disadvantage, the A4-5000 manages 22% better performance than AMD's E-350. The impressive gains continue as we look at single-threaded Cinebench performance. Again, a 22% increase compared to Bobcat. Multithreaded Cinebench performance scales by more than 2x thanks to the core count doubling and increased multi-core efficiency. The current generation Atom comparison here is just laughable—Jaguar offers more than twice the performance of Clover Trail in single threaded Cinebench.
The single threaded 7-Zip benchmark shows only mild gains if we don't take into account clock speed differences. If you normalize for CPU frequency, Jaguar is likely around 9% faster than Bobcat here. Multithreaded gains are quite good as well. Once again, Atom is no where near AMD's new A4.
The Ivy Bridge comparison is really just for reference. In all of the lightly threaded cases, a 1.7GHz Ivy Bridge delivers over 2x the performance of the A4-5000. The gap narrows for heavily threaded workloads but obviously any bigger core going into a more expensive system will yield appreciably better results.
For the next test I expanded our comparison to include an ARM based SoC: the dual-core Cortex A15 powered Samsung Exynos 5250 courtesy of Google's Nexus 10. These cross platform benchmarks are all browser based and run in Google Chrome:
Here we see a 14% improvement over Bobcat, likely closer to 20% if we normalized clock speed between the parts—tracking perfectly with AMD's promised IPC gains for Jaguar. The A4-5000 completes the Kraken benchmark in less than half the time. The 1.7GHz Ivy Bridge part is obviously quicker, but what's interesting is that if we limit the IVB CPU's frequency to 800MHz Kabini is actually a near identical performer.
Jaguar seems to be around 9-20% faster than Bobcat depending on the benchmark. Multithreaded workloads are obviously much better as there are simply more cores to run on. In practice, using the Kabini test system vs. an old Brazos machine delivers a noticeable difference in user experience. Clover Trail feels anemic by comparison and even Brazos feels quite dated. Seeing as how Bobcat was already quicker than ARM's Cortex A15, its no surprise that Jaguar is as well. The bigger problem here is Kabini needs much lower platform power to really threaten the Cortex A15 in tablets—we'll see how Temash fares as soon as we can get our hands on a tablet.
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Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
And by the way. HP announced the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart for 400$ with this A4 and the A6 APU. So 20% less than those wonderful i3 Ivy Bridges of yours and with a 10 point touchscreen.Jeez, I wonder if it's good enough to compete?
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
There are already $400 ivy bridge touchscreen i3 ULV notebooks.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
With promotions. And there's no one saying that 400$ is the minimum price point that Kabini can achieve. Lets see what other OEMs will show in Computex. Because it can go lower.Ivy Bridge is an architecture in end of shelf life. Promotions are bound to happen. Those weren't the normal prices of notebooks of a freshly released architecture and if you were intelectually honest instead of trolling like a jackass you would recognize that.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Core i3 ULV laptops are routinely selling for $400 now. The ASUS VivoBook X202E for instance is at Amazon for $399 right now and comes equipped similarly to the Kabini prototype (other than the LCD of course), and it provides a touchscreen:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009F1I1C4/ref=as...
The closest I can come to that with an AMD APU right now has...a Kabini processor and it's on preorder. What's more, it's the A4-1250 Kabini that cuts the CPU and GPU clocks by about 30% relative to A4-5000. The A4-5000 might be competitive with an i3-3217U, but the A4-1250 won't be (other than battery life, which should be slightly higher).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CM1AAOG/ref=as...
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
You should refrain from commenting because you are just digging yourself deeper and showing bias against AMD. Which is pitiful since with a website with the reputation and impact that Anandtech has you should strive for impartiality. HP announced that the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart will come with a Temash and Kabini APU. Price will start at 400$ at launch.Less than that Acer, which I agree is a terrible deal and is overpriced because it is sporting hardware from a new generation. But again, you are just showing poor knowledge since that Acer doesn't bring a Kabini APU but a Temash APU. An APU with even lower TDP than what you reviewed in here - and you can also go check a decent review of the APU in that notebook in other websites since you guys don't seem to bother or care with those details since "it's AMD".
But you, more than anyone else should know that when a CPU generation is nearing the end of its shelf life you usually see a lot of deals of notebooks with that silicon. Good consumers will use that chance to get cheaper and great notebooks but that doesn't invalidate the launch of new hardware that, when launched will sell for higher prices.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
You're one to talk about bias; check the mirror please. All I'm saying is that Kabini (and Temash) need to offer compelling price/performance/features against the competition. It doesn't matter whether the competition is "nearing the end of its shelf life" -- it's there and AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, etc. have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. I recommend products based on what's best, at a given price, and right now a $400 Ivy Bridge ULV laptop is going to be difficult to beat with a slower APU and a similar price point.Your "Ivy Bridge ULV is EOL" comments are actually wrong as well. Did you know ULV Pentium and Celeron parts just launched last quarter? Did you know that Intel is still making and selling Core i3 Sandy Bridge parts? Of course you did, because you want comparisons against the two-year-old Sandy Bridge parts so that Kabini looks better. The truth is that laptops with Ivy Bridge are going to be around for a long time. Pretending otherwise is dreaming, and of course you'll disappear when proven wrong or come back as a new user to spread more FUD when your fantasy predictions don't pan out.
Ultimately, it will depend heavily on what the OEMs deliver -- and when they deliver it. The Pavilion 11 Touchsmart at $399 doesn't seem too bad, but what do you really get? Oh, that's right: it *starts* at $399, and that will almost certainly be with Temash as you're so keen to point out. But Temash is just Kabini at lower clocks and potentially two CPU cores instead of four. Do you know how bad an A4-1250 will look compared to an i-3217U, or a Pentium 2117U, or even a Celeron 1037U? Those should all be priced $400 or less, with the major difference being L2 cache and the lack of Quick Sync on Pentium and Celeron. I've seen some benchmarks elsewhere, and basically the A4-1250 is often half the performance of the Kabini A4-5000 reviewed here.
Kabini is much better than Brazos and Atom, no doubt about it. It's also slower than Ivy Bridge ULV in many tests, and areas where it does win (some GPU benchmarks) are often meaningless for the Windows laptop market. (“Oh, you’re faster at running games! I can get an unplayable 15FPS compared to an even more unplayable 13FPS!”) On an Android tablet, Kabini and Temash will do much better, but for Windows they're at best "fast enough", while other similarly priced laptops are going to be faster. Who buys a slower part for the same price? I’m not sure, but as an unbiased tech journalist I’m certainly not going to recommend doing so.
rocketbuddha - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
The reason why Kabini and Temash are good for AMD is the following.Clock for clock they are better than Sandy i3 ULVs and equal to Ivy i3 ULVs. They provide a better battery life than the ULVs but most importantly they have a smaller die size than their Core competition and are being made in a mature 2 + year 28nm Bulk HKMG process from TSMC.
For the first time, AMD is giving a good performance and a lower die-size than Intel. Previously AMD had to compete in price and/or price/performance with a large die-size. No longer is it handicapped in that manner and this time it can definetely make an impact.
Also JAGUAR architecture has made its way into both PS4 and XBox-one as semi custom APU and it will only make things better and easier for AMD.
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The name calling is uncalled for. I can respectfully disagree. Who cares about promotions or not? I care (and the consumer cares) about the price that they are paying out of their wallet; that is what matters in the market. Ivy Bridge is going to get discounts because its going EOL. That is the market that kabini will have to compete in.Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Yes, the consumer cares about promotions but my point is: Kabini notebooks won't have to compete against Ivy Bridge discounted notebooks except for a small portion of their commercial life.And if Kabini needs to compete with that, the same can be said about Haswell, Richland, etc, etc. Every new notebook that gets in the market now will compete with promotions for the older models being cleared out and it's not those promotions that will affect their success or not.
And that's the point I am making and that you fail to understand. Promotions happen all the time, they direct the consumer to one product above another but they are temporary. And the flaw in your reasoning is assuming that Kabini/Temash notebooks will face Ivy Bridge notebooks with promotional prices during all the time they are going to be for sale and not recognizing that promotions happen for all products and aren't exclusive of Ivy Bridge notebooks.
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No haswell will be more expensive but offer more performance.Promotions happen all the time but if they happen all the time then they might as well be considered as non temporary (like dell's discounts).
I have no doubt that promotions will happen for kabini I'm just saying that $500 is too much for a notebook of this class. Its not an i3 ULV competitor (see TH for i3 ULV comparison) and at this moment must be compared pricewise to the market its in.