The AMD Kabini Review: A4-5000 APU Tested
by Jarred Walton on May 23, 2013 12:00 AM ESTKabini: Competing in the Evolving Marketplace
Prior to the onslaught of Android tablets and the launch of Windows 8, I was pretty much done with Atom and Brazos—they simply didn’t provide enough performance to make them pleasant devices for me to use. What was rather anemic hardware for Windows Vista/7 starts to look much more palatable with the new OS, and Android on such a chip can run extremely well. AMD has Temash for that audience, but I suspect we’ll at least see some 15W Kabini tablets/hybrids at some point, and they should stack up quite well against the competition in terms of performance and features. That’s the real takeaway from today’s launch, and it shows that AMD is keen to carve out a market niche separate from the traditional desktop and laptop PCs.
In terms of the normal Windows experience, Kabini doesn’t make too many waves. Yes, it’s faster than any current Atom or Brazos laptop, and Windows runs reasonably well all things considered, but there are still applications where Kabini falls short. That's the problem with competing in the good enough part of the computing spectrum—everyone has a different definition of what's good enough.
CPU performance is appreciably better than anything Bobcat or Atom based at this point. If you're ok with Clover Trail, then Kabini will feel really quick. The big Ivy Bridge cores still maintain a significant performance advantage, but presumably Kabini's offer is that you can find it in an Ultrabook-like system but at a much more reasonable pricetag. If that ends up being the case, I suspect many would choose form factor over extra CPU performance. So much of Kabini's success will be tied to what OEMs do with the parts. It's unfortunate that AMD doesn't have any Kabini APUs with Turbo Core working as I suspect that could do wonders for further driving single threaded performance.
On the graphics front, Kabini's Radeon HD 8330 is stuck between a rock and a hard place. It's significantly faster than what we had with Brazos (and lightyears ahead of what you get with Clover Trail), but not faster than Intel's HD 4000 which we viewed as the minimum acceptable level of performance for processor graphics upon its introduction. However, if you're playing older titles, or when faced with more tablet-like 3D workloads, Kabini's GPU should do very well.
On the power front, Kabini is great. In our tests we found much better battery life than Brazos and even better battery life than 17W Ultrabook-class Ivy Bridge parts. The days of AMD being associated with poor battery life are long gone. Kabini manages compelling battery life and better performance than Brazos, which is exactly what AMD needs. Given how successful Brazos was (almost 50M units shipped), Kabini seems to have the right recipe.
The real question for me is what sort of laptops and devices we’ll see when manufacturers release Kabini into the wild. The prototype laptop is really weak on some areas I care about—the keyboard and touchpad just don’t impress, and build quality is flimsy at best—but what it does have is a great LCD for what will hopefully be a budget-friendly laptop. Give me a reasonable Ultrabook-style chassis (or maybe a dockable tablet) with Kabini and a decent quality 1080p touchscreen and do it at the right price and there are plenty of people that will jump at the offer.
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whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
kabini only has a single channel memory controller. Going to two DIMMS would not improve performance at all.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
He didn't mention dual channel memory not even once in his comment. He mentioned comparing a inexpensive chip that competes against Atoms/Pentiums in price/performance/TDP with an intel i5 which is a much more powerful chip.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I wonder how starvered the cores are for memory bandwith. Even the xbox one will be using quad channel memory (4 64 bit controllers) and 2133 mhz instead of 1600, that is over five times the bandwidth. The ps4 keeps the quad channel but uses gddr5 memorywhyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Well the xbox one has 6x the igp and the ps4 has 9x the igp.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I am not asking if the gpu is bandwidth starved but is the cpu bandwidth starvedI understand why amd went single channel, I am just curious if dual channel would make a difference
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
CPU is almost never bandwidth starved. Literally, you can run a 3770k on 1033 mhz ram and outside winrar you will never notice any differences compared to 2133 mhz ram. 3770k is dual channel but more than 4x as powerful as this kabini apu.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Your statement that an i7 does not need faster memory does not necessarily translate to this situation with jaguar and that is why I am curious if the cores are starved. I wish it was possible for anandtech to test this (but it is very hard to do so for there isn't really laptop ram faster than 1600 mhz for laptops). Here is why you can't just assume what works with an i7 translates with the jaguar chip.533 mhz dual channel is equivalent to 1066 single channel. (Remember i7-3770k is dual channel while amd jaguar in this implementation is single channel). Thus you can't just assume an i7 is fine with dual channel, than the jaguar would be fine with single channel for the i7 has 100% more bandwidth due to it being dual channel.
Furthermore i7-3770k is intels high performance architecture with large r&d vs amd's energy efficent architecture with small r&d chip. It is very likely intel has better data predictors in their i7 so there's less cache miss and thus you don't care about the memory speed. Intel R&D money is a big deal and translates into better IPC for many reasons including branch prediction.
Lets put it this way arm is going higher bandwidth for more ipc. Tegra 3 is a mere single channel 32 bit controller, Tegra 4 is likely to be a dual channel 32 bit controller, Exynos 5 uses a dual channel 32 bit controller. Apple on their Ipads now use a quad channel 32 bit controller. One reason why exynos and ipad were faster than tegra 3 was better memory bandwidth.
I am not saying you will see improvements greater than 20% but I am curious if faster memory speeds would cause ipc to go up from 5 to 20%. For example with bulldozer amd gets 8% faster encoding with x264 first pass with 2133 memory dual channel instead of 1333 dual channel according to vr-zone.
It may not be in amd best interest to make the jaguar chip dual channel 64 bit for cheap laptops that compete against intel's celeron or pentium lines, for laptops. Yet at the same time Jaguar is going to be AMD process for low power in the future. It is quite possible that AMD may in the future (if the tdp is low enough) make a 20nm dual channel chip for the higher margin tablets, high margin tablets would insist on higher ipc for the cpu and more bandwidith for the screen, while low margin cheap computers would not care about increase ipc. It is possible that in the future AMD can find a sweet spot between intel atom and intel haswell. (I am not saying this is likely, just merely possible all depends on intel's pricing to oems for haswell.)
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It is extremely unlikely for this chip's cpu to be hurt by memory bandwidth. Sure the i7 has 100% more bandwidth but you must factor in the power of the chip. The i7-3770k is going to be something like 6x more powerful (3.7 ghz turbo + IPC advantage + HT). Even if the kabini chip tested in this review was half as efficient as the 3770k in utilizing memory bandwidth it still wouldn't show any differences in cpu performance.Phone/tablet SOCs mainly need the bandwidth for the gpu portion of the die (the high res screen was the reason that apple needed such an interface). If they need more bandwidth it'll be for the igp portion of the die (definitely 1066 mhz ram on a single channel will hurt this thing) for kabini.
geoflouw - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Need a comparison against Haswell and Baytrail please. This data is misleading, i really would hope AMD can compete with 1 year old CPUs and SOCs.....smilingcrow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It’s hardly misleading. Haswell is still under NDA and Bay Trail is due around Q4 which is why they aren’t compared. The better comparison will be Bail Trail based on pricing and performance. AMD should still have a healthy lead for GPU but if Intel’s recent info is true it should be close on the CPU front. The main difference is that Bay Trail has a low enough TDP for a cheap fanless tablet whereas the chip reviewed today is 15W so Ultrabook class. So you get two out of four with AMD:The Good: GPU + Price
The Bad: power consumption + low IPC
So business as usual really.