It’s strange to see a platform get an official launch after products based on the platform have already shipped but that’s what’s just happened. AMD have launched the Temash APU for 13 inch or less touch tablets and hybrids, performance tablets. We’ve already published a huge set of performance tests so for Temash test results, jump here, or read on for a summary.
We’ve had the Acer V5 122P with the A6-1450 for a few weeks and are quite convinced that AMD has filled that gap in the market for a low-cost, well-rounded Windows 8 tablet or touch laptop experience, a new style of netbook in the gap left between Intel’s Clovertrail and Ivy Bridge. The graphics component of the platform is very efficient compared to HD4000 and has far better performance than Clovertrail. Our Aspire V5 gave us 40 fps on WoW which is nothing too thrilling but the fact that it did it using about 60% of the power that an Ultrabook takes to do the same thing is impressive.
The CPU component compares, on a clock-for-clock scale with the best that’s out there from Intel today. Our 1.4Ghz-capable sample in the Aspire V5-122P turned in some good scores. Sunspider: 456ms, CPU Mark:1840 about the same as a Core i3 2377M at 1.5Ghz. In Cinebench CPU test we saw 1.3, about half of what a well-tuned Ivy Bridge Ultrabook platform can do under an average 2.4Ghz Turbo boost which bodes well for the higher-clocked variants of this platform that come under the name Kabini. Anandtech have a performance review of that, here.
Full AMD Temash A6-1450 performance test results here.
More on the Acer Aspire V5 Windows 8 Touch notebook here.
There are two other APUs in the Temash range…
The A4-1200 is a 2-core version with 1.0Ghz limited clock in 3.9W TDP which makes it fanless-capable and something interesting for Windows 8 tablets although in terms of always-on battery life, it doesn’t have the same capabilities as Intel Clovertrail. It can’t enable the Connected Standby feature in Windows 8 and therefore platforms built on it will have a battery-hogging background drain. That lack of Connected Standby capability is something that could affect popularity of these products further down the line. As Haswell-based tablets come on-line and BayTrail fills the same performance gap there will be a very compelling selling-point for the new Intel platforms.
In the meantime though the AMD Temash platform provides badly needed competition and is right-sized for an acceptable Windows 8 tablet/touch experience something that CloverTrail really can’t provide.
Hat-tip: Anandtech
Wishing the AMD Temash to be as early as possible to hit in the Win 8 tablet market, with SATA SSD (mSATA or iSATA or uSATA), no eMMC, to be unlike the Atom z2760.