

AMD Launches Mobile Kaveri APUs - zerny
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8119/amd-launches-mobile-kaveri-apus

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sspiff
All in all, I'm surprised with the very respectable performance AMD managed to
reach. Price, power and thermals will probably play a big part in how
successful these parts will become.

I've heard many people comparing the TDP of the Intel solution tested in the
article (i7-4500U & Nvidia Geforce 750M) to the new APU tested.

The 15W reported by Intel is __not __directly comparable to the 35W claimed by
AMD. The APU includes, among others, the more powerful GPU on the CPU die,
which is handled on the Intel system in the benchmarks by the Nvidia card. The
power budget of the Nvidia is not included in the 15W figure.

The methodology used to derive these TDP specs is also not known and likely
differs between the manufacturers.

The only proper way to compare the power consumption would be to do a full
system power measurement of two comparable devices.

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tkinom
Intel Haswell has integrated GPU. I have been using one for ~ 1 year. It
supports VGA, DVI, HDMI output all at the same time. Works well. Power is
better than the I7 I used before.

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rdudek
It is also disabled when external gpu is present. At least it should be.

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pranith
There were plans not to disable the on-chip GPU and use it as a power saving
feature. When the gpu work load can be handled by the on-chip GPU, disabling
the external GPU saves you quite a lot of energy.

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ciupicri
> First, you're sure to notice the use of the FX branding. Make no mistake:
> this is the same APU as the other Kaveri parts and it has no relation to the
> desktop FX processors; AMD marketing simply feels the FX brand has a good
> reputation among enthusiasts and consumers and they wanted to carry that
> over into the mobile world.

I don't think customers are going to appreciate the confusion.

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pucinators
There's already insane confusion about laptop CPUs. Every time someone asks me
my opinion about some laptop - I have to lookup some CPUMark score, because
you can't tell anything from name, generation or GHz anymore.

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higherpurpose
My "favorite" latest (intentional) confusion is from Intel who decided to name
chips "Celeron" that are both Haswell-based and Atom-based. Why intentional
you may ask? Because they can begin offering Haswell-based ones at first, get
high praises for the performance of budget laptops, and then in new
generations switch to the Atom-based Celerons, which can be anywhere from 2x
as weaker to slightly less weaker, but costs Intel half the price to make
them, and they could be offering them for the same price to OEMs, since it's
"Celeron" after all.

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programminggeek
I'm going to go ahead and say that even if these chips are good, they will be
saddled with terrible displays, cheap hard drives, and horrible touch pads in
oversized cases for $500 crappy laptops.

AMD needs to basically own the $500-800 space with a good APU, SSD, and
outstanding form factor. Basically if they could make a 13" Macbook Air with
one of these CPU's for around $500-750 they would have a winner on their
hands.

I fully expect that to not happen.

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commandar
It really is a ripe market.

The MBA is nice and all, but has an absolutely godawful screen compared to
everything else in its price segment, especially if you bump up above base
specs.

PC laptops with decent displays don't seem to exist below around the $900-1000
mark currently. I don't _need_ an i7 in a notebook, but shopping around, it's
been the only way for me to get something with the SSD and 8GB of RAM that I
do need.

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programminggeek
Yeah, what's amazing is Chromebooks are WAY nicer machines at the $200-300
price range than the comparable Windows PC. It's just so bizarre the choices
Windows PC makers make that are just junk.

It seems that to get a SSD in a Windows laptop, I need to either spend $1,000
or buy a decently spec'ed $500-700 laptop, and drop in my own SSD for $100.

