AMD takes fight to Intel with Richland, Temash and Kabini

 

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By Nicole Kobie in Las Vegas

Posted on 8 Jan 2013 at 09:35

AMD has unveiled a host of new processor platforms at CES 2013: its new top-end A-Series, "Richland", plus "Temash" for tablets and "Kabini" for ultrathin devices.

The top-of-the-line Richland APUs will be branded as A8 and A10, o and will be targeted at high-end laptops and desktops.

Richland is already shipping to OEMs, and offers a performance boost of up to 40% over existing AMD A-Series APUs, claimed Lisa Su, vice president of AMD global business.

Like Intel, AMD is adding additional input capabilities, including gesture and facial-recognition software to unlock devices - a feature shown off by its larger rival earlier in the day at CES.

AMD also revealed that the successor to 32nm Richland will be a 28nm APU named Kaveri, which will ship in the second half of this year with features from AMD's heterogeneous system architecture.

Temash is designed to run Windows 8 on "true performance" tablets and hybrids, and will be branded A4 or A6. The company said Temash doubled graphics processing performance over its predecessor, Hondo. AMD showed off a tablet running Temash, highlighting how smoothly it was able to run HD content verus Hondo and Intel's Clover Trail.

AMD stressed Temash was built from the ground up for tablets, and wasn't a "repurposed notebook processor" - a reference to Intel's chips, which the company admitted had been "retrofitted" to work for tablets. However, Intel's new breed of Haswell processors, due out later this year, have also been built specifically for tablets and Ultrabooks.

Kabini, meanwhile, is targeted at ultrathin notebooks and boosts performance by 50% over its predecessor Brazos 2, with Su claiming it was the industry’s first quad-core x86 SoC. It will also be branded as A4 or A6. Both Temash and Kabini are expected to ship in the first half of the year, and mark a reduction from the 40nm process to 28nm.

AMD also announced updates to its discrete mobile graphics line, as well as a partnership with Vizio to supply processors for its new all-in-ones, tablets and thin laptops.