AMD Kaveri Mobile APU, FX-7600P Preview

Initial Performance Summary:  The quick-take on Kaveri mobile performance we grabbed for your here should serve as an early indicator of what to expect from retail notebooks that will be hitting the market in the next few months.  In short, AMD's Kaveri mobile architecture shows more competitive CPU and general compute performance and class-leading graphics performance in the notebook product segment.  How well lower-powered Kaveri iterations for hybrids and ultra-portables will fair remains to be seen. However, with what we've seen thus far, for full-sized notebooks and thin and light devices, the AMD Kaveri FX mobile chip we tested can hang with the best Intel has to offer on the CPU side with graphics performance that Intel's ULV processors can't currently match.


With this preview look at AMD's new Kaveri line-up coming to a close, you won't see us passing final judgement or giving an official rating to the specific part we tested.  Since our test vehicle was a prototype machine and not something you can actually purchase on the market currently, we'll have to reserve our final assessments for when we get retail product in hand.  There were just too many variables in our limited time with the machine for us to feel completely comfortable with a final assessment of performance with this new notebook architecture.

That said, what we've seen of Kaveri mobile thus far is very promising.  In our limited time testing the chip, it impressed us almost at every turn, from standard CPU throughput to graphics and gaming benchmarks. It will be interesting to see what some of the mid-range and lower-end Kaveri mobile chips can do and what power consumption looks like with them as well.  Our initial thought is that AMD will likely drive the 19 watt variants for key design wins with some of the majors OEMs we mention earlier (Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba etc.). 

In fact, AMD officials were quick to point out that we'll see Kaveri take residence in competitively priced machines, rather than top-shelf premium notebooks that retail on the upper end of the price curve.  What AMD is going for here is volume and in fact the company may well have a compelling and very capable offering here versus Intel.  It all comes down to final price points and real-world system performance.  We look forward to bringing you a view of that very soon as we get our hands on full retail AMD Kaveri-powered notebooks in the months ahead.