AMD 2013 A & E-Series Kabini and Temash APUs

Name: AMD 2013 A & E-Series Kabini and Temash APUs
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 23, 2013, 12:01 AM EDT

AMD has been pretty open about discussing certain products in the roadmap. In fact, we’ve disclosed a number of details regarding the main products we’ll be talking about in this article--Kabini, Temash, and Richland--over the last few months.

It was all the way back at CES that we first showed you Kabini, Temash, and Richland-based products in action in a number of prototype notebooks and tablets from Vizio, HP, Asus and others. And AMD actually talked about the foundation of two of these products (Kabini and Temash)—its Jaguar CPU core microarchitecture—at Hot Chips in April of last year. If you’re unfamiliar with Kabini and Temash, they are the codenames given to AMD’s next-gen, low-power APUs targeted at mobile and ultra-mobile form factors. Kabini and Temash are not simple updates to existing products, however. As we’ve mentioned, they feature newly-designed CPU cores fused to a Graphics Core Next-based GPU, and they're designed to considerably improve performance while also operating at lower power. Richland is based on last year’s Trinity microarchitecture, but it's updated with a number of power- and performance-related enhancements.

AMD Kabini SoC Die Shot

Above is a shot of a quad-core Kabini die. Kabini is the follow-up product to AMD’s very successful Brazos line of products. How successful was Brazos, you ask? According to the most recent information provided by AMD, the company sold upwards of 48 million units, and if you ask them, they’re expecting greater success from Kabini.

AMD Is Targeting Mobile Form Factors With Kabini, Temash, and Richland ULV

We’ll dive a little deeper on the pages ahead, but to give you some high-level guidance, Kabini is an x86 quad-core SoC (system on a chip) targeted at entry-level and small form factor touch notebooks. Officially, AMD will be referring to Kabini as their “2013 AMD Mainstream APU”, and it is one of these products that we’ve been able to test drive for the last couple of weeks.

A Kabini Based AMD A6-Series APU

Also arriving alongside Kabini is Temash. Temash and Kabini are based on the same microarchitecture and share essentially the same feature set, but Temash targets small form factor notebooks, tablets, and hybrids 13-inches and smaller. AMD puts Temash-based products under the “2013 AMD Elite Mobility APU” umbrella, and the SoCs will come in dual (A4) and quad-core (A6) configurations.

Finally, AMD is revealing yet another group of products, the 2013 AMD Elite Performance APUs (formerly codenamed “Richland”), which consist of higher-performing A8 and A10 branded products targeting premium ultrathin notebooks.

Tags: AMD, GPU, CPU, processor, Fusion, APU, A-Series, Kabini, Temash

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com