The AMD Developer Summit in San Jose Convention Center, called APU13, has closed with the revealing of its 2014 mobile Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) product roadmap. The main news contained within concerns two new APUs codenamed ‘Mullins’ and ‘Beema’ which the chipmaker says will be utilised by systems makers to raise “the performance bar across fanless tablets, 2-in-1s and ultrathin notebooks”. AMD claims that these two new mobile APUs will “deliver more than 2x the performance-per-watt of the previous generation”.*
Both ‘Mullins’ and ‘Beema’ APU designs can offer between two and four ‘Puma’ CPU cores paired with Radeon graphics on a SoC fabricated at 28nm. Interestingly, this duo of APUs will be AMD’s first to integrate an ARM Cortex based TrustZone platform security processor. AMD also informs us that they support Microsoft InstantGo (the renamed and updated Connected Standby capability) for faster wake times and actively refreshed communications events while in standby.
“AMD is establishing excellent momentum this year in the low-power, mobile computing market and with ‘Mullins’ and ‘Beema’ coming in 2014 we are not standing still,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD’s chief technology officer and senior vice president, during his closing keynote at APU13. “AMD aims to deliver a set of platforms in the first half of next year that will outperform the competition in graphics and total compute performance in fanless tablets, 2-in-1s and ultrathin notebooks.”
AMD’s new mobile APUs will be on demonstration at CES2014, Las Vegas, in January with devices expected to ship within H1 2014.
* The new 2014 AMD A-Series low power APU platform, codenamed “Mullins,” is expected to deliver up to 139 percent better productivity performance per watt when compared to the previous generation “Temash” platform.
*The new 2014 AMD A-Series mainstream APU platform, codenamed “Beema,” is expected to deliver up to 104 percent better productivity performance per watt when compared to the previous generation “Kabini” platform.
