AMD Kaveri, Kabini and Temash APUs explained

AMD has a bunch of new processors in the works this year for the mobile and desktop segment. Kaveri, Kabini and Temash all address different segments of the mobile market, covering notebooks, netbooks, hybrid notebooks with touch screens, tablets and kiosks. Lets take a quick look at what’s in store for consumers this year.

AMD 2013 APU roadmap

This year AMD has already released two new APUs for the desktop market utilising socket FM2. Trinity and Richland, two second-generation APUs, use AMD’s Piledriver architecture, based on Bulldozer and shared with the current range of FX CPUs that the company offers. Richland is based on the same architecture and silicon as Trinity, but comes overclocked from the factory and is AMD’s chosen method of clearing out older stock while they prepare for the new designs.

Servicing the desktop, Kaveri is designed to replace the Richland APUs. It is based on the upcoming Steamroller architecture, an improvement to Piledriver. It will feature up to four cores, integrates a new GPU based on AMD’s GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture and features HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture), where the CU and GPU work in tandem on complex tasks to finish them quicker.

Kabini will be available in select low-power notebooks. Kabini is a complete SOC (system-on-chip) that integrates features usually found in other chips on the motherboard, like a memory controller, the chipset that governs connected components like SSDs and other chip logic that can fit in there. Its designed to disrupt low-power notebooks using Intel’s processors and will reportedly feature superior graphics capability.

Temash will be destined for the tablet market. It is a complete SOC and is designed to disrupt sales of Intel’s Atom processor as well as competing designs from other companies using ARM cores (for example, Microsoft’s Surface, which is powered by ARM processors but is not an x86 chip). Temash’s advantage will be strong graphics capability, with a GCN-based graphics processor next to the processor driving games and other GPU-accelerated applications.

Both Kabini and Temash will be revealed and launched in Q2 2013 and this correlates with the Computex Taipei expo, due to start on the 4th of June 2013 and running to the 8th. Its expected that Intel will have products based on their new Haswell family there at the same time.