AMD Mullins Preview: A New Windows Tablet Paradigm?

A Primer on Beema & Mullins

Last year saw AMD introduce Kabini and Temash, the company’s low-power APUs targeted at low-power computing applications - tablets, ultra-thin notebooks, entry-level desktop systems and Mini-PCs.

The new APUs were launched to much fanfare and high expectations, but unfortunately under delivered on their performance promise and were therefore unpopular to OEMs. As we had discovered during our preview of Kabini last year, overall performance was disappointing in light of Intel's impending Haswell launch. To further compound matters, the PC industry in general - desktops and notebooks - has suffered a steady decline in recent times, resulting in even poorer uptake on Kabini.

As for Temash, despite being the world’s first quad-core SoC, finds itself in a market dominated by the iPad and various Android tablets. A recent study by Gartner indicates that Windows tablets only have a paltry 2.1% share of the tablet market. As a result, it has been largely overlooked by OEMs and users alike.

However, not one to be discouraged, AMD has followed up on Kabini and Temash with Beema and Mullins. Beema replaces Kabini while Mullins replaces Temash, and like their predecessors, are targeted at low-power and mainstream applications (again for thin mobile platforms like notebooks and tablets respectively).

Briefly put, the new Beema and Mullins APUs are an incremental update of Kabini and Temash. The headline change here is the use of new Puma+ cores and other hardware improvements and optimizations to reduce power leakage and boost CPU frequencies. Also new to Beema and Mullins is the addition of an ARM Cortex-A5 with ARM TrustZone technology for security. And to improve power efficiency, the new APUs will support DDR3L (low-voltage) and various hardware optimizations and enhancements have also been undertaken to reduce power leakage.

To add on to these are also two new power management ideologies. The first is called Skin Temperature Aware Power Management (STAPM), which looks at the 'surface temperature' of the tablet to determine whether it can boost clock speeds. This allows the APU to remain in a boosted state for a longer period of time as it often takes a bit longer before surface temperatures of the tablet to increase to the point where it becomes uncomfortable to handle.

In a nutshell, STAPM looks at the 'surface temperature' of the tablet as opposed to the chip's temperatures to determine whether it can boost clock speeds. Oddly though, this isn't achieved via another monitoring sensor on the tablet surface, but via algorithms and system temperature instead of just that of the APU. As such, STAPM isn't exactly monitoring surface temperature as we would ideally like it to. However, this implementation allows STAPM to work with any device and doesn't require specific hardware designs to track actual surface temperatures.

The second is called Intelligent Boost Control, in which the APU looks at what tasks are worth boosting its clock speeds so that it can complete them faster and return to an idle state quicker. Think of it as a car that is accelerating quickly so as to get to its most efficient cruising speed. The net result of these improvements is performance increases without sacrificing on TDP (similar ideals to Intel's Turbo Boost).

Here are the various SKUs that users can expect to see from Beema and Mullins.

On the graphics front, Beema and Mullins will employ GPU parts using AMD’s latest GCN architecture and as you can see from the table above, are all comprised of 128 Radeon cores, with the only differentiating factor being GPU core clock speeds. According to AMD, the higher clock speeds coupled with power optimizations is enough to give the new APUs up to 10% better graphics performance at 40% lower TDP when compared to Kabini and Temash. However, these new integrated GPU parts will have a new branding that will hopefully make it clearly for users when deciding which APU to pick.

Speaking of branding, AMD’s new Mullins part will have a new nomenclature as evidenced in the table above. Mullins APD will feature “Micro” in their model name, which will clearly differentiate it from its Beema counterparts.

We had the opportunity to spend some time with AMD’s reference Mullins tablet, to find out how it performs head over to the next page.

The AMD Mullins Reference Tablet

The AMD Mullins reference tablet was first seen at CES 2014 where we showed it with a special docking controller and running FIFA 14 as part of AMD's Discovery Project - a showcase of how its Mullins and Beema APUs can be incorporated into devices. Also on show at CES 2014 was AMD’s reference design for a pocket-friendly nano PC, which was pretty amazing since it functions as a full-fledged PC, complete with ports (albeit via an accompanying DockPort breakout box), and is just about the size of a large smartphone or phablet.

With us today is that exact same reference tablet and we were given the chance to run some quick benchmarks with it to find out how it performs and where it stands against other comparable systems and tablets. We have discovered that the tablet is powered by the flagship Mullins APU, the A10 Micro-6700T that runs at 1.2GHz and is complemented by 2GB of RAM.

Here are the results:-

One thing to note about PCMark 8 is that while the AMD Mullins reference tablet was tested using the latest PCMark 8 Version 2.0, the other results were obtained with an older version of PCMark 8. Although Futuremark has stated that the results are not directly comparable between the two versions, we found that the difference in performance between Version 2 of PCMark 8 and older versions of PCMark 8 to be rather small. In any case, the difference in performance between the Mullins reference tablet and the rest of the systems are far too great to be attributed to the difference in PCMark 8 versions.

That said, the discrepancy in results can be mainly attributed to the fact that Mullins reference tablet is being faced off against notebooks with more powerful and higher TDP mobile processors. For instance, the ASUS Zenbook UX302 and ASUS Transformer Book Trio are both powered by dual-core Core i5-4500U processors that have a rated TDP of 15W, much greater than the A10 Micro-6700T APU. which has a rated TDP of just 4.5W. Unfortunately, we don't have PCMark 8 results from tablet-class Windows systems to put up a better comparison.

Mullins’ graphics performance was somewhat disappointing as it scored lower than the current crop of tablets in the market right now, including Apple’s iPad Air, Microsoft’s new Surface 2 and Samsung’s Galaxy Note Pro. It was also no match for its older Kabini and Trinity counterparts, though admittedly those are more powerful APUs, and also Intel’s integrated HD Graphics GPUs.

Closing Thoughts

To be fair, we only had a short amount of time with the Mullins reference tablet - enough only to run a couple of benchmarks - and it is too premature for us to draw any solid conclusions. That said, judging from the results obtained, it is not looking very promising, especially when you consider that its graphics performance - according to 3DMark 2013, at least - is poorer than that of tablets that are already in the market, even if they are running on different operating systems. With Mullins-powered devices expected to hit retail only in a few months time, it might be a case of too little too late.

Still, benchmarks only paint a small part of the story and in our short time spent with the Mullins reference tablet, we thought that it performed rather smoothly and briskly. Furthermore, while the idea of a dockable controller is not entirely new, it is still very attractive concept and Mullins could provide a lower-power but more value-oriented alternative to devices that are already out the in market, such as the Razer Edge.

As it stands, Mullins seems to us to be an incremental but welcomed update for AMD’s low-power APUs. The problem it faces, as its predecessor Temash has, is scoring design wins with OEMs. This might be tricky considering that the market for Windows tablets is just not as big and lucrative as that as the one for Android and iOS. Perhaps more will be revealed in a month's time at Computex where the major OEMs will be showcasing their latest for the coming year.

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