First Look Review: AMD Showcases New Processors

If you're looking for a quick and dirty summary of what these new processors offer then here are the highlights:

The 2013 AMD "Elite Mobility" APU (formerly codenamed "Temash") is the world's first 28nm, quad-core x86 APU. AMD claims it delivers the best graphics and gaming experience of any System on a Chip (SoC) for touch-enabled, small form-factor notebooks, tablets and hybrids. This group of processors is available  in dual (A4) and quad-core (A6) configurations, combining "Jaguar" x86 Central Processing Unit (CPU) cores with Graphics Core Next AMD Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics.

The 2013 AMD "Mainstream" APU (formerly codenamed "Kabini") similarly offers best-in-class graphics and was designed to deliver the ideal balance between function and affordability for entry-level and small-form factor touch notebooks. Kabini combines either two or four Jaguar x86 CPU cores with Graphics Core Next AMD Radeon HD 8000 Series graphics.

The new, low power versions of the 2013 AMD "Elite Performance" APU (formerly codenamed "Richland") are the top-of-the-line AMD A-Series APUs with A8 and A10 models designed for the best possible graphics and compute performance and battery life for premium ultrathin notebooks.

"Kabini" is the successor to AMD's highly successful "Brazos" line of accelerated processing units (APUs) which combined traditional central processing units (CPUs) with graphics processing units (GPUs) on a single chip. Brazos was first introduced in January 2011 and has been the cournerstone of AMD's mobile processor offerings. The latest Mercury Research PC Processor Report, published in the second quarter of 2013, estimates total shipments of "Zacate", "Brazos" and "Brazos 2.0" were more than 48 million units. AMD expects to see even larger numbers of "Kabini" and "Temash" processors shipping as they deliver increased performance per watt, performance per dollar and have lower TDP so these processors can fit inside smaller form factors such as hybrid notebooks and "performance tablets" in 2013.

One of the biggest updates to these new processors is AMD's new "Turbo Core" technology. For Kabini and Temash the A6-1450 is the first product to support Turbo Core. This feature uses a multitude of power management techniques to deliver high performance with minimal heat increase and lower power concumption. In essence, Turbo Core dynamically analyzes the type of activity your PC is doing and can increase or decrease power to each individual processor core ... both on the CPU and GPU side of the processor.

So, if you're running an application that doesn't take advantage of a multicore CPU, Turbo Core will increase the speed of one core and completely power off the others. If you're playing a game that mostly involves the graphics performance of the GPU and not the CPU then Turbo Core will speed up the GPU and reduce power to the CPU.

This is a large part of the reason that an A4 chip from the Kabini family can outperform an A6 processor from last year.

Now let's take a closer look at how the A4-5000M Kabini processor performs in real life ...

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