AMD Launches New Mobile APUs

                                                

The new APUs supports 12 compute cores, Ultra HD resolutions and the Heterogeneous System Architecture

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Following Intel’s announcement earlier this week, arch rival AMD has announced the new Kaveri line of APUs at Computex in Taipei.

Bernd Lienhard, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Client Business Unit, AMD, said, “With a combination of superior total compute performance, stunning graphics and efficient power usage alongside industry-first technologies, these new APUs set a new bar for cutting-edge consumer and commercial PCs.”

As with the desktop version, the mobile Kaveri APU also features AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, which enables gamers experience high-performance video games with Mantle, a tool for alleviating CPU bottlenecks such as API overhead and inefficient multi-threading. Mantle, which is basically AMD's answer to Microsoft's Directx, enables improvements in graphics processing performance. AMD claims that Kaveri teamed with Mantle enables it to offer built-in Radeon dual graphics to provide performance boosts ranging from 49 percent to 108 percent.

The Kaveri mobile APU architecture features up to 12 compute cores—four CPU plus eight GPU—to deliver better performance and responsiveness on devices across various workloads and applications. It also supports Ultra HD (UHD) 4K resolutions and new video post-processing enhancements that can upscale HD 1080p videos to 4K quality on UHD-enabled monitors and TVs.

The new Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) allows the CPU and GPU to work together by quickly dividing and directing the tasks toward the appropriate cores and reducing the fetch cycles from the system memory. Analysts expect that HSA can be a potential game changer for AMD once the software platform makers start creating software that can take advantage of the new architecture.

In other news AMD announced new x86 AMD Embedded G-Series system-on-chip (SoC) for embedded applications, including early adoption by HP for thin client deployment in healthcare, finance, education and retail, as well as Advantech for industrial applications in rugged environments.

AMD Embedded G-Series platform, ships with features such as  error-correction code (ECC) memory support, dual- and quad-core variants, and a discrete-class GPU and I/O controller on the same die. The new G-Series processors are pin-compatible across the AMD G-Series SoC and works at around 5W TDP.

AMD has not announced pricing of the new SKUs. Broad availability is forecasted for Q32014.