AMD Kabini APU Preview - Combating a Changing Computing Landscape

A Changing Computing Landscape

The computing landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. Before the iPhone, computing was by and large limited to desktop systems and notebooks. Mobile phones did not register in the general computing landscape and tablets for mainstream consumption were no where to be seen.



However that all changed now that the iPhone has heralded the era of mobile computing. Henceforth, traditional chipmakers like Intel and AMD have had to adopt their strategies to accommodate a shrinking desktop and notebook market, and also make plans to venture into the mobile computing space by having their products in ultra-thin notebooks, smartphones and tablets.

AMD has always competed from a value perspective and prides itself on offering bang for buck processors. Additionally, thanks to their acquisition of ATI Technologies in 2006, AMD offerings (chipsets back then) have traditionally offered better graphics performance than the competition from Intel.



The purpose behind the acquisition of ATI was always to create a processor that merges both CPU and GPU processing elements on a single chip and it was not until 2011 with the arrival of the Llano APU and Sabine platform that we finally saw the fruits of this acquisition. The Llano APU uses K10 processing cores and an integrated Radeon HD 6000 series graphics core. Although it was a viable alternative to users who did not require Ivy Bridge’s computing or a discrete graphics cards, the Llano APUs failed to make significant inroads in the desktop computing market.



Fortunately, the Brazos platform, which was targeted at low-power was much more successful. In fact, Brazos is AMD’s best-selling notebook platform ever. And at last year’s Computex, AMD further refreshed the Brazos lineup with two new E-Series APUs - the E2-1800 and E1-1200.



Just last year, AMD followed up with the "Trinity" APU which uses the new Piledriver architecture processors and integrated Radeon HD 7000 series graphics. We reviewed the flagship desktop processor, the A10-5800K “Black Edition” as well as the A10-5700 APUs and found them to be decent products for mainstream users. In fact, before these desktop parts were made available, we tested the AMD Trinity mobile processor on a reference platform which we found to be quite promising.



Along with the APUs, AMD also introduced their HSA (heterogenous system architecture), an architecture which leverages both CPU and GPU components in their APUs to execute tasks in parallel. The idea is to distribute workloads as evenly and as efficiently as possible between both CPU and GPU.

Although, AMDs APUs and HSA have not quite caught on in a big way, the signs are there that AMD do have the foundation in place to succeed. Mobile computing, tablets in particular, are driving growth for the computing industry and these devices have completely different requirements from your traditional processors. AMD’s strengths in integrating both traditional CPU processing elements along with graphics processing elements can give it the edge against its competitors.



Which brings us to today.



Today, AMD is officially lifting the wraps off its new Temash and Kabini platforms. These are the world’s first quad-core SoCs and are specifically targeted at low-power computing applications. Specifically, the Temash platform will be marketed at the performance tablets space, while Kabini, as the successor to Brazos, will be powering ultra-thin touchscreen notebooks and entry-level AIO (All-in-One) systems.

Introduction to Kabini

AMD is very proud of the fact that Brazos is the company’s best selling notebook platform ever. Conceived to do battle with Intel’s Atom offerings back in the days of the netbook, Brazos-equipped netbooks were often preferred thanks to their superior graphics performance. The powerful integrated Radeon GPUs made short work of HD videos, making them excellent for as a device for media consumption and light computing.

Unfortunately for Brazos, sales of netbooks dipped considerably after the launch of the iPad, which subsequently led to a boom of tablets. Thanks to their sexier form factor, intuitive touch interfaces and excellent battery life and portability, in 2011, sales of tablets overtook netbooks for the first time.

However, tablets could not provide the same kind of computing experience as a full-fledged computer and realizing that there was still a market there, Intel introduced the Ultrabook concept when they launched Sandy Bridge, their processor to integrate both compute and graphics processing elements on the same die - though not with the same purpose of AMD’s APU. The idea for Intel was to create an ultra-portable notebook that had decent performance but with a long battery life.

This gave Brazos a fresh purpose. But by then, Intel has already made considerable headway, and so a new brand new APU was required. Enter Kabini, the successor to Brazos.

Much like Brazos, Kabini is an APU meant mostly for entry-level, mainstream low-power PCs, notebooks and HTPC applications. AMD is offering five SKUs at launch which will do battle with Intel’s low-end Core i3, Pentium and Celeron offerings. One should expect to find these APUs in entry-level notebooks and mini PCs.

In terms of updates, the most significant improvements to Kabini comes in the form of the new Jaguar microarchitecture and also the upgraded integrated GPU, which now utilizes AMD’s new GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, as seen in the current performance Radeon 7000 series GPUs for the desktop. And thanks to these updates, AMD is claiming performance increases of up to 88%. We will elaborate more on these upgrades in the following page.

Jaguar Roars

Named after a river in Southern India (and perhaps telling of which target market AMD wants to strike hard), the new Kabini platform and its APUs feature two crucial and major improvements. First of all, it will be utilizing AMD’s new Jaguar microarchitecture.



To be sure, Jaguar can be best thought of as a refinement over the older Bobcat architecture that was used in the older Brazos platform (and the forerunner of the AMD Fusion initiative). The main objectives of Jaguar was to improve on instructions per clock, better frequency and power efficiency.

To do that, the Jaguar cores received improved prefetchers, integer execution and floating point execution units (128-bit up from 64-bit), and a shared L2 interface. The shared L2 cache is one of the major design additions to Jaguar. In the higher end SKUs - A6-5200 and A4-5000 - the L2 cache is 2MB and it is supported by four L2D banks of 512KB each. Each core also has its own L2 stream prefetcher, thereby improving overall bandwidth and instruction per clock. That aside, the 'floor plan' has been mildly tweaked to improve data flow.



Additionally, Jaguar also features improved instruction set support over Bobcat, adding support for SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, AES and many more.

The Unified Northbridge (UNB)

Taking a cue from the Trinity APUs, the new Kabini APUs will also see the introduction of a Unified Northbridge (UNB). In the new UNB, PCIe replaces the old HyperTransport technology as the interconnect between memory and I/O subsystems. According to AMD, this is more efficient at handling and scheduling memory-related requests from both the CPU and GPU.

As part of the new UNB, the memory controller in Jaguar supports 1.25V, 1.35V and 1.5V SO-DIMM memory modules of up to DDR3-1600MHz speeds, giving it a maximum total memory bandwidth of around 10.3GB/s. The controller also supports memory P-states, allowing it to adapt to memory speed changes on the fly for better power efficiency. Finally, maximum memory support on the platform is a healthy 32GB.

Graphics Core Next (GCN)

Previously, we lamented that the new Trinity APUs were not getting integrated GPUs built using AMD’s latest Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. Finally, AMD has decided to implement GCN-derived Radeon 8000-series integrated GPUs into the Kabini APUs.



The older VLIW architecture is good for graphics work, but poor for compute. They excel in high instruction level parallelism, which is the exact opposite of typical compute tasks. This meant that the processing pipeline was never really fully populated, thus not utilizing the core to its full ability. In getting GPUs to take on traditional computing tasks, this has been the perennial problem. With the new GCN architecture, however, AMD attempts to address some of the shortcomings of its older VLIW architecture in taking on compute tasks.   

A GCN compute unit is the basic processing block of AMD’s new generation GPUs, and the new GCN architecture promotes greater independency amongst the various GCN compute units, thereby relieving bottlenecks. This is achieved by moving scheduling from the compiler to the hardware.



Overall, the move to the new GCN architecture is vital to the performance o the new Kabini APUs, as it allows compatible workloads to tap into the vast raw computing powers of GPUs. Crucially, this is also consistent with the GCN architecture of AMD’s discrete offerings, thereby ensuring full compatibility with all AMD GPUs.



That aside, the new Radeon 8000 series integrated GPUs will support up to 4K output resolution via HDMI and DisplayPort, and also in AMD EyeFinity mode.

The AMD Reference Kabini Notebook

The reference Kabini notebook given to us from AMD is a simply designed, no frills machine. It has a 1080p full HD, 15-inch display and just about 20 mm thick and weighs 1.75kg. Of course, this being a showcase of the processing platform and not the kind of notebooks one can expect, we didn't really mind its physical attributes.

Under the hood is AMD’s new A4-5000 APU, which is the second most powerful model in the Kabini lineup. This quad-core APU runs at 1.5GHz, has a 2MB L2 cache and an integrated Radeon HD 8330 GPU with 128 stream processors running at a GPU clock speed of 500MHz. The A4-5000 APU has a TDP of just 15W and according to AMD literature, was designed to go head to head with Intel’s Pentium offerings.

For comparison, the top of the line A6-5200 APU has a clock speed of 2GHz and an integrated Radeon HD 8400 GPU that has the same 128 stream processors but running at a higher 600MHz GPU clock speed. The TDP of this A6-5200 is also much higher at 25W. This more powerful APU was designed to compete against Intel’s entry-level Core i3 processors.

Here’s a look at the reference Kabini notebook from AMD.

Test Setup

While we haven't really reviewed many entry-level systems, we've put together some test comparisons to get a better idea where exactly does the new Kabini A4-5000 APU stand. For starters, we will be compariing it against AMD’s own A10-4600M from our review of the Trinity notebook platform last year and also the recently reviewed Sapphire Edge VS8 Mini-PC, which has a mid-level Trinity A8-4555M APU. Additionally, from Intel, we will be including results from the Intel NUC Mini-PC and the ASUS Vivobook X202, both of which are powered by the Intel Core i3-3217U processor.

Here's a summary of the various systems' key specifications.

The systems were tested using the following benchmarks:

• BAPco SYSmark 2012
• PCMark 7
• Cinebench
• Handbrake
• 3DMark 11
• 3DMark 2013
• Powermark

SYSmark 2012 Results

Last year, BAPco recently released SYSMark 2012, the latest edition of their popular benchmarking software. SYSMark 2012 puts the system through a rigorous series of various workloads ranging from office productivity, data analysis, media creation and 3D modeling, and is a good gauge of a system’s overall performance in heavy multitasking.

Worryingly, the new AMD Kabini reference notebook scored just 43 points, barely half of the 85 points which the AMD Trinity reference notebook managed, showing the gulf in performance between AMD’s Kabini and Trinity chips. Even factoring in the advantage of the SSD, the difference in scores is still pretty wide. Furthermore, the Intel NUC Mini-PC and ASUS Vivbook scored 81 and 73 points respectively, significantly higher than the AMD Kabini reference notebook. It seems that from a general computing standpoint, the new A4-5000 APU is still some ways off from challenging Intel’s entry-level Core i3 CPUs.

PCMark 7 Results

On PCMark 7, the AMD Kabini reference notebook managed to restore some lost pride, scoring 2239 PCMarks, a good 20% more than the ASUS Vivobook’s 1857. It also managed to see off the Sapphire Edge VS8 Mini-PC and its A8-4555M APU, which recorded just 1631 PCMarks - the lowest score. However, the AMD Kabini reference notebook was still some ways off when compared to the AMD Trinity reference book and its A10-4600M APU and the Intel NUC Mini-PC - both of which have SSDs, which would have contributed to their higher scores.

Handbrake 0.9.4 Results

Handbrake is one of the more popular video conversion software and video transcoding is a good indication of a processor’s performance. In this benchmark, we measured the time taken to encode a large video file.

Here, the Trinity A10-4600M managed to complete the transcoding process the quickest, taking 277 seconds. This was followed by the Intel NUC Mini-PC, which took nearly two minutes more. The new Kabini A4-5000 APU was disappointing, taking 8.5 minutes to complete.

Cinebench 11.5 Results

We also used Cinebench’s CPU-intensive rendering benchmark to measure the system’s performance. The benchmark disregards the GPU and renders scenes using solely just the CPU’s raw processing power.

Once again, the Trinity A10-4600M APU came out tops with a score of 2.07. Following behind were the two Intel machines, and rounding up the pack were the Kabini reference notebook and Sapphire Edge VS8 with scores of 1.36 and 1.38 respectively. We can see that the Kabini A4-5000 is simply no match for even Intel’s most basic Core i3 processor.

3DMark 2013 Results

3DMark 2013 is the latest graphics benchmarking utility from FutureMark and we will be gauging the systems’ performance using the Cloud Gate benchmark, which was designed to measure the performance of integrated and entry-level GPUs, as well as mobile GPUs.

The AMD Trinity reference notebook, with its A10-4600M APU and integrated Radeon 7660G graphics, scored the highest with 4377 3DMarks. The AMD Kabini reference notebook, on the other hand, scored just half of that with 2103 3DMarks. Again, the disparity in performance between the Trinity and Kabini APUs is pretty wide. Even against the Sapphire Edge VS8 and its less powerful A8-4555M APU, the Kabini reference notebook scores was still a good 33% lower. Oddly, it's only as good as Intel's integrated GPU in this test.

3DMark 11 Results

So far, the new Kabini A4-5000 APU in the reference notebook from AMD has been disappointing, but with AMD traditionally performing well in graphics benchmarks, 3DMark 11 will give it a chance to make up for lost ground.

On 3DMark 11, the AMD Kabini reference notebook scored 592 3DMarks in the Performance preset, comfortably seeing off the ASUS Vivobook and was about on a par with the Intel NUC Mini-PC. However, its score was significantly less than the other two Trinity systems, showing just how great the disparity in performance between the Trinity and Kabini APUs is. Another worrying matter is that it's not any better than Intel's integrated graphics engine - something that AMD proudly likes to compete against Intel, but it's just not proving itself yet. This trend unfortunately continues in actual game tests as you'll see on the following page.

Far Cry 2

On Far Cry 2, the AMD Kabini reference notebook recorded 20.27 fps, which puts it about 53% ahead of the ASUS Vivobook. However, this was well below the 30 fps threshold for playability. And when you consider that Far Cry 2 has been around for so long and that our test settings weren’t so demanding, the performance of the A4-5000 APU and its integrated Radeon HD 8330G GPU was actually quite disappointing. Even Intel's HD Graphics 4000 engine on the Intel NUC system fared much better. Fortunately for AMD, the Trinity A10-4600M put in a decent showing, recording a respectable 46.42 fps, but that's a more powerful APU competing against mainstream Intel Core i3 and Core i5 processors.

Battlefield Bad Company 2

Battlefield Bad Company 2 was one of the first DirectX 11 titles to be released, and the AMD Kabini reference notebook showed improved performance here, clocking 21.65 fps. This was double that of the ASUS Vivobook and about on a pair with the Sapphire Edge VS8 and Intel NUC Mini-PC. However, the flagship A10-4600M Trinity notebook APU was still the best performer, showing the great disparity between AMD’s Kabini and Trinity offerings.

Battery Life Test

Battery life and power consumption are two important considerations when it comes to ultra-thin notebooks. And to test the AMD Kabini reference notebook, we are using Powemark, a utility which drains the battery of a notebook by running various tasks such as word processing, web browsing and watching videos.

In our test, we found that the AMD Kabini reference notebook has a battery life of around 4 hours and 9 minutes. The Trinity reference notebook managed 3 hours and 38 minutes, while the ASUS Vivobook did 3 hours and 30 minutes. While it is true that the AMD Kabini reference notebook has the longest battery life, its battery was also the largest and has a rating of 45Wh, as opposed to the Vivobook’s 38Wh. If we calculate its power consumption, the two are actually nearly identical. Considering the A4-5000 slightly lower TDP of 15W versus the Core i3-3217U's TDP of 17W, we were expecting it to have slightly better power consumption.

Not a Game Changer

Brazos might be AMD’s most successful notebook platform ever, but the overwhelming majority of notebooks are still powered by Intel. In fact, our last review of a Brazos-powered unit was a good two years ago, when netbooks were in their last stages. The fact that we had difficulties in getting a Brazos unit in for testing to act as a suitable point of reference should tell you just how lopsided Intel’s market share of the notebook computing market is.

It is difficult to draw concrete conclusions of the Kabini lineup considering all we had to work with is a single reference notebook which has the A4-5000 APU under its hood. This particular APU is neither the most powerful nor the weakest in the lineup so we have no boundaries as to what Kabini is capable of. However, judging from the A4-5000 APU specifications and its performance in our testing, we can extrapolate some findings.

With Kabini, AMD is once again banking on its strengths in graphics processing. Looking at the scores in the graphics benchmarks, it is clear that even the basic A4-5000 APU is capable of going up against more powerful Core i3 processors from Intel. While that is certainly reason to be content, the fact remains that the integrated Radeon HD 8330G APU is still not quite capable enough even to play older games such as Far Cry 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 at even modest settings. Also, even if not directly comparable, we were hoping for slightly more competitive graphics performance against the two other Trinity APUs - the A10-4600M in the AMD Trinity reference notebook and the A8-4555M in the Sapphire Edge VS8. While understandable Trinity is a higher APU grade than Kabini, it's still not a shining example of what AMD can deliver when it's not better than an Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics core.

In terms of raw processing power, Intel processors are still tops, as evidenced by the entry-level Core i3-3217U processors. In CPU-intensive benchmarks like Cinebench and Handbrake, it took AMD’s A10-4600M APU to see them off, and in case you have forgotten, the A10-4600M is a quad-core APU with a rated TDP of 35W. The Core i3-3217U is only a dual-core CPU (albeit with HyperThreading) and has a TDP that’s half that at 17W. If raw CPU power is what you need, Intel still has the advantage here.

Benchmarks aside, In our practical use of the Kabini reference notebook, we found that the system works rather fluidly and snappily. To be sure, opening applications took some time (much of this can be attributed to the mechanical hard disk too), but if you can look past that, everyday tasks such as web browsing, word processing and emails are handled admirably. Battery life was also decent considering its sizable 15-inch display.

All in all, it seems that the status quo between AMD and Intel has not changed that much, and Kabini is far from being a game changer. However, with the top-end A6-5200 APU still yet to tested and Intel preparing to launch its next generation of Core processors, things could get interesting yet (or maybe not). Meanwhile, we hope AMD and its notebook vendors would provide us actual retail notebooks to test (and final price points to keep in consideration) for us to draw more accurate comparisons in the future.

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