AMD Temash gives glimpse of gaming future in Acer Aspire V5 sub-notebook

AMD’s Temash is part of the firm’s renewed foray into low-power APUs and brings us the first glimpse of Jaguar, the company’s next-generation architecture. Jaguar is an evolution of AMD’s previous Bobcat design and finds a home in two families – Temash and Kabini.

Jaguar is also at the heart of the PlayStation 4, and so the performance of this Jaguar-based sub-notebook gives a tantalising taste of the real-world performance of the architecture.

The version of Temash that appears in the Aspire V5 is the A6-1450. It sports four cores running at 1GHz each, boosting up to 1.4GHz and includes AMD’s Radeon HD8280G. Its about 50% faster than AMD’s E-450 and, in some cases, is on par or faster than the AMD A6-4455M, which is a much higher-clocked Trinity chip with two cores at 2.1GHz boosting up to 2.6GHz and Radeon HD7500G graphics.

Acer Aspire V5-122P open

Acer Aspire V5-122P left side

Acer Aspire V5-122P lid

Acer Aspire V5-122P specs

Acer Aspire V5-122P inside

The new Aspire V5-122P features a 11.6-inch LED-backlit IPS screen with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. It has a backlit keyboard, comes with a 500GB hard drive, and options for attaching a secondary battery, as well as a break-out connector (sold separately) that gives you VGA, LAN, and other ports not already included on the notebook.

In the few reviews online, the reviewers agree that the V5 is a good notebook and in some performance benchmarks it can walk all over the Ivy Bridge i3 and i5 chips, especially where encryption performance is concerned. Notebookcheck’s review showed it coming very close to the Core i3-3217U with HD4000 graphics and dominating Intel’s current Atom CPU family.

However, in games it doesn’t seem to get up to the same level as an Intel Core processor with HD4000 graphics and I think there’s a very good reason for that. The A6-1450 is the very lowest of the Temash lineup and its not meant to be the ultimate low-end gaming solution. However, it is much faster in the types of games it is suited to play, which is all the games on the Windows store that the Atom can’t hope to run. In that respect, its a very good showing indeed.

Given the benchmark scores in Notebookcheck’s review there are two things clear to me – one, bumping up the clock speed to 2.0GHz on all cores will bring this $44 processor in line with the performance of a low-voltage, Ultrabook-bound Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor. That’s easily within reach here.

Two, if this is what four Jaguar cores at 1GHz can do…what kind of performance will the other upcoming variants offer? That’s something we’ll only be able to answer once Computex gets underway. Remember, the PS4 runs on eight high-clocked Jaguar cores and the world is slowly changing to prioritising multi-threaded performance. That’s AMD’s home turf and that’s where their chips best excel.