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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takeship - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
True, price will keep most budget buyers out of Haswell powered ultrabooks. Not so for the now-on-clearance-sale Ivy Bridge Dell & HPs though. And in that market Kabini loses most of it's price advantage, while still giving worse performance & marginal battery life improvements. There it's the new $500 plastic Kabini laptop, vs. the $600 aluminum IVB Lenovo. I just don't see that being a win.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The HP Pavilion 11 Touchsmart costs 400$. It has a 10-point touchscreen. So, the 400$ touch enabled Kabini seems mighty atractive compared to the 600$ Lenovo now.axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Touche! Thanks to AMD for providing alternatives to Intel's Atoms and higher priced CPUs.
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Besides the price issue, you seem to be quite missing the point of a low-power architecture like Jaguar. Let me know when ULV Ivy Bridge can scale down to 3.9W.Also, a lot of people seem to have trouble comprehending the fact that TDP doesn't really have much in common with the actual power draw of the chip (or the heat output). We've already seen what happens when you try to cram even the lowest wattage Ivy Bridge into a modern tablet form factor: high temperatures w/ fans, low battery life, high price.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
It competes with an Sandy Bridge ULV i3 and it gets quite close to a i3 Ivy, while offering better battery life.Seems like a clear proposition to me: if Pentium like performance is what you need this offers you that and better GPU performance. Perfect for the low-end of the ultrathin/ultrabook market.
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
yeah, pretty much how I read it as well. Assuming you can afford to pay an extra $200 dollars there's not much reason (other than possibly graphics drivers) to not get haswell instead.aryonoco - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Very interesting article. Just a few notes:I'm not sure that Exynos 5250 is the best representative of Cortex A15. For one, it's dual core without any HT so at a massive disadvantage in a test like Kraken. Secondly, it came out in actual device in the market about 7 months ago. By the time Kabini shows in products, it will probably be over 8 months later. We'll have other Cortex A15 parts by then, and if the Tegra 4 Kraken scores that I'm hearing (~6000) is right, and if something Tegra 4 is using about half as much power as this 15W Kabini, then Kabini suddenly doesn't look that competitive.
Of course as you say, the success of Kabini will depend on what OEMs do with it, but traditionally these cheap AMD parts find themselves in devices that are compromised in everyway. Even if we get a 1080p screen this time around (which I'm hopeful), we'll still have to deal with sub-optimal keyboards, trackpads that work only half the time, and other cost-cutting measures we are familiar with. For this to succeed, someone needs to put it in a Ultrabook-style laptop, with good display, good keyboard and no software glitches, and price it under $500. That's a tall task.
HP just announced a very interesting Slatebook X2 running Android (not skinned) on Tegra 4 with 1080p IPS screen and a Transformer-style detachable dock for $479, including the dock (sidenote, I was disappointed there was no coverage of this on AT). If the performance claims for Tegra 4 (and other future more optimized Cortex A15 parts) are accurate, with such devices on the horizon, will there even be a cheap Ultrabook-style market left for Kabini to compete in? Can Kabini find its way into similar designs by major OEMs? I hope, for everyone's sake that AMD can succeed, but I am doubtful.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
I certainly think Kabini can go into the same designs that we're seeing Tegra 4 target. Which will end up being faster? That's a different question, and I'm not sure we have enough information to come to a conclusion right now. If Kabini/Temash can get into tablets sooner rather than later, they've got a chance. If it takes 6-8 months, you're right: it may not matter at that point.Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
HP just announced their back to school products and there is a successor to the HP dm1 that will cary A4's and A6's.Exophase - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
No Cortex-A15 has HT, and Kraken is single threaded anyway. I think Kraken just isn't a great benchmark. Although its makers say it's a lot better than Sunspider it shares a lot of the same sorts of problems:1) It's Javascript which has its own unique (pretty severe) overheads which can dominate run-time to the extent that it drowns out a lot of the variation from the type of JS code you're running. JS is used and it's important, but even today on good JITs most JS code is several times (think 5 times) slower than an equivalent written in something like C++ or even Java, making it a bad representation of performance of more efficient software.
2) Much of what it does - path finding, signal processing, and crypto - is not the kind of stuff Javascript is usually used for.
3) Its test durations are really short, which is bad for benchmarks in general but can be especially bad for JITs where it
4) The variation in current browsers is extreme (http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&... where you can see some tests are substantially faster and others substantially slower. This again highlights the big overheads of Javascript and the impact of different JIT strategies, but also that the state of performance is still pretty volatile. A similar sort of variation could manifest between different backends (ie, x86 vs ARM) even for the same browser.
Cross-architecture comparisons are hard and I don't blame people for using JS when there's not a lot else available (although at least some other inclusions would be nice).. but you shouldn't draw a very broad conclusion from a Kraken comparison alone. And if you did that it'd also make the Kabini vs i5 comparison look a lot worse than a lot of other tests show.