The Kabini Deal: Can AMD Improve the Quality of Mainstream PCs with Its Latest APU?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 24, 2013 1:45 PM ESTFinal Words
AMD’s family of cat-cores began their lives as higher performing alternatives to Intel’s Atom. Ambition (and a desire for higher ASPs) drove them to compete with the lower end of Intel’s Pentium lineup. The Jaguar based Kabini APU continues the trend and even aims higher up the product stack, with the highest spec Kabini APU aiming for Intel’s Core i3.
When it comes to GPU performance, Kabini is absolutely there. Depending on the benchmark we either saw parity, a slight disadvantage or large advantage for Kabini’s integrated Radeon HD 8830 compared to Intel’s 22nm HD Graphics.
On the CPU front, we already established that Kabini runs laps around Brazos and Atom. The point of today’s article however, was to find out if comparing to a $320 notebook based on a Pentium 2020M would change things. The answer ends up being, not really. Kabini is very efficient for what it is, but the Ivy Bridge cores simply have better single threaded performance. Even a lower clocked/lower TDP Pentium part would maintain a healthy single threaded CPU performance advantage.
Whether that CPU performance advantage matters really depends on your usage model. Anyone who’d be happy with a Cortex A15 based Chromebook for example would likely be just fine with Kabini under the hood of their next notebook.
Where Kabini excels however is in its power consumption. Better battery life than a Brazos based notebook is a given, but in our earlier comparison we even noted better battery life than a 17W Ultrabook. I suspect AMD is indeed being a little conservative with its 15W TDP rating for the A4-1500.
That brings us to the deal that AMD is offering OEMs. A lower cost, lower power APU that’s better than Atom/Brazos, comparable to Pentium in GPU performance but behind it in single threaded CPU performance. Historically PC OEMs have taken the cost savings AMD offered them and delivered a lower priced system, my hope with Kabini is that we’ll finally get something different.
Kabini alone offers a power advantage, which itself may be enough, but if an OEM were to take Kabini's cost savings and put the money towards a better LCD or better storage that could significantly alter the balance of things. I agree with what Jarred said in his conclusion yesterday: "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."
The traditional approach would be for an OEM to offer a Kabini system at a lower price than a Pentium based system. The Kabini system might offer better battery life, while the Pentium machine delivers better single-threaded CPU performance. Should that same OEM offer both systems at the same price, but give the Kabini an appreciably better display, I think many users would be willing to overlook the difference in CPU performance entirely.
As it stands, I like Kabini. It’s a good part that could make for the foundation of a nice, affordable ultraportable system. The best selling notebook on Amazon remains the Cortex A15 based Samsung Chromebook. The second best selling? A Core i3 based ASUS X202E. Consumers are clearly willing to sacrifice CPU performance if the price is right and the rest of the machine/experience is well designed. I see no reason that a Kabini based platform couldn’t be up there as well. It’s just up to an enlightened OEM to do the right thing with what AMD has given them.
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ppeterka - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
My wife has an E-350 with an SSD. Ever since she got the SSD, she never forgets to mention how much she likes her laptop. Not a power user though, but very representative of an "average end-user".And I, being an Anandtech reader for 15+ years, and working professionally in IT, qualifying as a mid-power user, would like to have this in a small form factor chassis: 10.1" display with 1366x768 resolution, and as small footprint as possible. Oh, yes, and with 8+ GB RAM, and an at least second tier SSD. Throw in extended battery option, and I'll even try to sing to get that... (Ok, that last bit would actually be bad for everyone...)
DanNeely - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Same here. Even for casual goofing around use I regularly find myself doing enough typing that a physical keyboard is a must have. If any of these systems ship with a decent battery the atom based envy x2 I bought both because my old netbooks battery life has gotten anemic and to fiddle with win8 on a touchscreen system will end up with a shorter lifetime than I thought it would.OTOH 7W haswell might be able to get the same runtimes at better CPU and GPU performance levels at the cost of a higher purchase price.
flyingpants1 - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Take the Asus X202E for $399 from Amazon mentioned in the article (11.6" 1366x768, Core i3, 4GB) and add in a 128GB SSD for $60-100, you have MOST of what you want for $459-499. Netbook form factor, ultrabook performance, while keeping the price of a lower-end Celeron/AMD setup.Nothing wrong with an extended battery option, they'd simply need to provide a battery slice attachment for the bottom of the laptop.
At least you are willing to make some sacrifices. For me if I replace my current laptop, I just can't deal with anything smaller than 15" because it need to be just as functional as my desktop.. At that point might as well go for the 3630QM with nvidia dGPU because they start at around $700ish. Add full 1080p, and 128GB SSD. Need 6-8GB of RAM with option to expand, and I don't want battery life to be anemic, so why not use a 90Whr battery like in the rMBP? It ends up costing me $1200+.. I think I'll just keep the laptop I have.
HalloweenJack - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
thanks for the adition;AMD seem to be going very very well in the market its aiming for = 5w >25w (above ARM and below i3) and here it rules - and as shown , matches intels 30w parts @ 1/2 the power.
name99 - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
"matches intels 30w parts @ 1/2 the power."Let's be very careful here. What is matched is Intel's crappy low-end low-price 30W part. This thing is no match for a high performance (and high price) ULV i5.
Point is, AMD is competing on price, pure and simple. Don't try to pretend they're somehow specifically competing in the 5W..25W market with a technical edge. They're competing in the "low performance for a low price" market. No shame in that; but let's not pretend otherwise.
juhatus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
The price is same so they _are_ competing with pentiums and low I3's.RoyYoung - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
This would have been interesting back in the pre-tablet age. A cheap SOC that offers just enough performance for media consumption and light gaming, with good power efficiency to allow for 5+ hour battery life on hardware that is still reasonably cheap and light.The problem for this in the 2013 market place is the rise of tablets, along with the epic collapse in PC sales has leave no room for this class of x86 SOC. For media consumption and light gaming, an ARM tablet can be have with IPS screen, SSD storage, and a large library of games that are newer and optimized for the low power platforms. All these for comparable price, lower weight and better battery life. Why settle for crappy game play on 3~4 year old PC titles when you can get a much better experience from tablet games? For general computing, I see $299 pentium and celeron machines going on sale regularly, not just reserved for black Friday specials. Up at the $4xx price point it is not hard to find ivory b i-3s or sandy b i-5s. Go up to $5xx and there are even ULV i-3s and i-5s to choose from.
The Kabini is clearly designed to beat up the old intel atom and it does indeed look good in that comparison. The problem is the old atom power netbooks has already disappear from the market, and for good reason. Intel has now positioned atom SOCs for tablets and cell phones. Entry level laptop segment is now populated with pentiums, celerons, and even older generation i-3s and i-5s.
I am not an AMD fanboi but I really want to see them turn things around to keep Intel in check. May be Temash will fare better going up against atom in the tablet space, but Kabini is sadly not the hit that AMD desperately needs.
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Note that tablets at lower price points do NOT have SSD storage; they have flash storage, but almost always low performance eMMC. Even 5400RPM HDDs can outperform eMMC. Put Kabini/Temash in a tablet and run Android, though, and I suspect it will look very good against most ARM offerings. Or maybe in a Chromebook. But like Anand said: please give it a good screen and don't just skimp everywhere and go after the minimum cost market! The race to the bottom is already over, and the winner is...no one.tipoo - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Some of the faster tablets and probably soon smartphones (Nexus 10 for example) are getting up to 90MB/s sequential on the NAND, even if hard drives have higher peak transfer rates wouldn't other characteristics (seek time on a hard drive) make up for that? And the hard drives would rarely hit peak anyways.JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
In the future, we'll see more tablets start to trend towards faster NAND. My point is that the currently shipping stuff is mostly crap -- especially in the $300-$400 tablets. I wonder if Tegra 4 and SHIELD are going to be better? Tegra 3 so far has had horribly slow NAND every time I've seen it. (Yay for installs taking several minutes.)