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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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.