AMD will be at MWC next week to highlight their Temash range of Windows 8 tablet SoCs. They’ve release a teaser for what they call a Turbo Dock system and given away a few performance specs at the same time. It looks nicely positioned between Intel Clovertrail and Ivy Bridge solutions.
AMD announced the new tablet-level SoCs at CES in Jan. Temash, is promising 100% better graphics power than Hondo (Z-series) APUs but with the new test figures from AMD we can see that the AMD A6-1450 Quad Core 1.0GHz APU SKU (with Radeon HD 8280 Series graphics) is very much an Ultrabook-class CPU. It’s down-clocked like some of the recent Ultrabook/Hybdrid offerings from Intel and will have a TDP range of 4-6W.
The 1Ghz clock means that you won’t see that same performance as a 1.7Ghz Ultrabook but clock-for-clock AMD could be ahead of, say, a 1Ghz clocked Ivy Bridge Part.
The teaser video shows a docking station allowing the tablet CPU to boost as it’s given extra cooling. There’s nothing new there though because that’s what the Lenovo Helix does. Lenovo says that the Helix generates the equivalent of 7W TDP when in tablet mode which would indicate that Lenovo are simply enforcing ‘TDP-down’ when undocked. It’s likely to be an 800Mhz system.
The video has some small print though and we have to tip our hats to AMD for being so open about their claims because the small-print contains some performance data.
The 40% CPU boost is claimed with the following statistics.
AMD A6 1450 Cinebench 11.5 multi-CPU performance: 0.99 in 1Ghz tablet mode. When docked with 1.4Ghz “Turbo” the Cinebench score is 1.39.
AMD A6 1450 Cinebench 11.5 multi-CPU performance
- 1.39 Ciniebench at 1.4Ghz
- 0.99 Cinebench at 1Ghz assume 6W tdp
- approx 1 per GHz
Core i5 3317U Cinebench 11.5 multi-CPU performance (in Samsung Series 5)
- 1.63 at 1700Mhz
- 0,67 at 800mhz
- approx 0.9 per GHz
A 3DMark 11 score was given too and the results look better than what the HD 4000 can produce.
AMD A6 1450 3DMark 11
- 537 at 1.4Ghz
- 379 at 1.0Ghz
Recent Ultrabook tests indicate a 3DMark of around 600 when using a 1.7Ghz part and Turbo boost.
Temash seems well positioned to work in lightweight Windows 8 tablets that are much more powerful than Atom Clovertrail tablets and more price competitive than Intel Core-based tablets. It’s good to see AMD pushing hard and providing the competition.
Haswell could walk all over this segment in 2014, especially if they enabled Connected Standby on Windows 8 but for the second half of 2013, AMD might have a nice well-balanced product that offers value pricing and good competition even when the first Intel Haswell tablets are introduced.
We’re at MWC next week where we’ll do our best to check out what AMD has to offer. We wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a new AMD-based Acer Iconia Tab to replace the W500. A W600(?) would sit will between the Clovertrail/Connected Standby capable W510 and the High-end W700.
Wow, I can’t believe I’m excited about an AMD product. But x86/x64 compat + what seems to be good perf in the areas that matter most + good battery life and lower prices; this is EXACTLY what the Win8 camp needs!
I want to see prices and battery life numbers, though.
Adam
Yes, just getting a low (for the performance range) max TDP doesn’t mean much in the tablet space where devices need to be very efficient and able to idle into the low mw ranges to get the kind of run times people expect from tablets.
Unfortunately, AMD isn’t mentioning many details like whether they have anything equivalent to Intel’s s0ix power management. So we may have to wait for actual hands on tests to be sure…
Though AMD did claim to have improved its power-gating technology that completely cuts power to inactive cores, to conserve battery life.
However, that still leaves the question of what the lowest power state will be… along with system performance as turning processors on and off can increase latency as system ramps up and down in performance.
Even for ARM this is becoming tricky as they steadily move towards higher end performance products and why they’ve started deploying BIG.Little processor arrangements. Since it’s hard to provide a dynamic range of both performance and power efficiency in a single architecture and so they instead just use two.
While timing is important as well, with Intel set to start releasing their next gen 22nm ATOM before the end of the year.
What kind of battery life would these systems have per Wh of battery during some usage scenarios? Don’t really care about Connected Standby but do they have very long regular standby battery life?
The thing is that Connected Standby is the mark of a very efficient architecture. AMD devices built on this won’t have that level of efficiency and power control. Expect similar to current Ultrabooks in power-saving mode. A good 800gm design might have 6hr web-working life. (my estimate at this stage)
For me, I care more about the low power architecture required for Connected Standby not necessarily the part about actually being connected to the internet during standby.
I have the Dell Latitude 10 and it’s hardly ever connected to a WiFi network during standby and I don’t use anything that requires constant up to the minute updates. A quick download on wakeup is all I need. The battery life during both active and standby states is excellent.
I hope AMD at least does have very low power standby and active states even without having a constant network connection. That should be what most people would care about. At least for me.
Cinebench scales VERY GOOD with multi-cores, and it likely represents upper bound of performance for the chip.
Single thread results show that it gets about 1/2.5 of Ivy Bridge. This is same case as with Desktop with Bulldozer using sheer number of cores to equalize in heavy multi-threading, but behind in those that aren’t as much.