AMD Sempron (Kabini) Quad Core AM1 @ $37

[shady28]

So anyone seen any actual reviews of these things yet?

I just noticed my local MicroCenter has them in stock - AM1 1.3Ghz 25W "Sempron" quad core Kabini chips for $37.

No AM1 motherboards yet from a source I call reliable, the ones out there on Google shopping seem to be running $35-55 though.

I only found one comparison, to Cedar Trail Atom - Kabini was about twice as fast on single threads on one benchmark.

 

[frozentundra123456]

25 watts for 1.3 ghz seems like really high power consumption. Does it have turbo?

 

[shady28]

25 watts for 1.3 ghz seems like really high power consumption. Does it have turbo?

Yep looks like it will turbo by 450Mhz.

There is also a 2Ghz 25W part, but they sell for $59.

I am just thinking this thing might be the perfect replacement for my D510 Atom rig.

 

[Enigmoid]

The biggest competition to these kabini chips is baytrail.

Baytrail is soldered onto the mobo but that allows for lower costs.

But honestly the pricing looks like pricing to fail. The price of cheap Celerons + Mobo are maybe $70. Sure the TDP is higher but the power usage is going to be very similar. How much power does two 1.8 ghz non HT IVB cores use?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813135350

$37 leaves $32 for a mobo. Possible but unlikely. When you get to the more expensive kabini parts it looks even more unattractive. $60 for top end Kabini is ludicrous.

Really think AMD should have gone embedded with kabini. On a system this cheap, low powered, and low performance few people are going to upgrade. I think AMD went this way so that they can get a bigger cut by selling individually.

 

[TeknoBug]

Yeah 25W is a bit much considering my laptop's A4 5000 (quad core) is 15W at 1.5GHz

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah 25W is a bit much considering my laptop's A4 5000 (quad core) is 15W at 1.5GHz

Maybe not, when you figure the AM1 Kabini chips are fabbed at GF, and the embedded ones were / are fabbed at TSMC.

 

[ShintaiDK]

It makes no sense when you can get Celerons thats 3x faster for 42.

 

[inf64]

It makes no sense when you can get Celerons thats 3x faster for 42.

What Celeron and 3x faster in what workload?

 

[NTMBK]

Yay, you can get a socketed Kabini that lets you upgrade all the way to, erm, another socketed Kabini! Or alternatively buy a Celeron that lets you upgrade to anything up to a Core i7...

 

[jaydee]

I think the advantage is, these Kabini's are better HTPC chips then the Celeron's because of the GPU, someone correct me if I'm wrong. But ya, the price is similar enough to the Athlon 5150/5350 for higher clocks on the CPU and GPU within the same TDP, makes it a tough sell...

 

[Phynaz]

$37 APU's isn't the way for AMD to stay in business.

This could actually be better for Intel than AMD. It keeps x86 visible in the low end, but leaves all the money to Intel.

 

[AtenRa]

$37 APU's isn't the way for AMD to stay in business.

You are talking like those 25W TDP SKUs are the only products of the company

Those 25W TDP are perfect for AIO, SFF etc entry level desktops. They have both good CPU and iGPU performance, especially that 2GHz Quad Athlon 5350. AMD could easily sell millions of those and make a nice profit. Also, people could choose the entry level dual cores and upgrade to Quad when they will feel like it.

 

[monstercameron]

You are talking like those 25W TDP SKUs are the only products of the company

Those 25W TDP are perfect for AIO, SFF etc entry level desktops. They have both good CPU and iGPU performance, especially that 2GHz Quad Athlon 5350. AMD could easily sell millions of those and make a nice profit. Also, people could choose the entry level dual cores and upgrade to Quad when they will feel like it.

the problem is that many of the people this is aimed at dont upgrade their hardware, they use it or they buy new stuff.

 

[AtenRa]

the problem is that many of the people this is aimed at dont upgrade their hardware, they use it or they buy new stuff.

Instead of buying a new BGA APU/Mobo you now have the luxury to only upgrade your APU. I never said anyone will do it, but at least people now have the option.
Also, this is more useful for OEMs, Integrator etc. In the past you had to guess what the market wanted and accordingly purchase/manufacture boards with BGA Dual Cores OR Quad cores. Now you only produce a single board that can be fitted with all the available APUs of the same socket. Just like an ordinary Desktop

So at the end, both the manufacturer and the Consumer benefited from it.

 

[Yuriman]

You are talking like those 25W TDP SKUs are the only products of the company

Those 25W TDP are perfect for AIO, SFF etc entry level desktops. They have both good CPU and iGPU performance, especially that 2GHz Quad Athlon 5350. AMD could easily sell millions of those and make a nice profit. Also, people could choose the entry level dual cores and upgrade to Quad when they will feel like it.

What exactly is "good" iGPU performance? So far as I can tell, it's somewhere between Intel's HD3000 and HD4000, which suggests that the integrated graphics with a Haswell Pentium shouldn't be much, if any slower.

Honest question. There are so few reviews of low end parts.

 

[monstercameron]

What exactly is "good" iGPU performance? So far as I can tell, it's somewhere between Intel's HD3000 and HD4000, which suggests that the integrated graphics with a Haswell Pentium shouldn't be much, if any slower.

Honest question. There are so few reviews of low end parts.

haswell pentium is faster...

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-Haswell.93341.0.html

the g3220 seems to be scoring upto 48k in 3dmark icestorm vs the 5350 scoring upto 32k in the graphics subtest. the cpu does also help the 3d performance.

 

[AtenRa]

What exactly is "good" iGPU performance? So far as I can tell, it's somewhere between Intel's HD3000 and HD4000, which suggests that the integrated graphics with a Haswell Pentium shouldn't be much, if any slower.

Honest question. There are so few reviews of low end parts.

Ahh yea sorry, i mean good enough for everyday usage like browsing, video playback etc.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

What exactly is "good" iGPU performance? So far as I can tell, it's somewhere between Intel's HD3000 and HD4000, which suggests that the integrated graphics with a Haswell Pentium shouldn't be much, if any slower.

Honest question. There are so few reviews of low end parts.

For this segment, so long as video decoding works, everything HD3000+ is properly "good enough". You're not going to get enough performance out of either to play anything modern anyway.

I do however have a slight quip about Intel's drivers and older titles, there I much prefer AMD.

 

[TeknoBug]

My laptop is A4 5000 with 8330D GPU, my wife's laptop is Pentium 2020M with I think Intel HD 2500. When opening programs, copying files and handling flash based stuff on the web the Pentium pulls ahead (obviously because of the higher GHz clock) but when it comes to watching Youtube, Google Play movies, Netflix and DVD's the A4 wins. The GPU makes all the difference if you're aiming at using it as an HTPC type role.

But there is of course newer Pentium, Celeron and i3's than the 2020M now anyways.

 

[johnny_boy]

What I hate about APUs is that they leave you with no upgrade path: this includes the low powered Kabinis. If you bought one of the top end chips for a particular APU socket starting all the way back from FM1, AMD gave you no compelling upgrade path on that socket. Besides giving us some more MB + CPU pairing options, I would rather save some money and have only the cheaper option of APUs soldered right onto the board.

For almost the price of an Athlon 5350 and AM1 mobo, you can grab a Haswell Pentium and cheap 1150 mobo, and have a serious upgrade path up to a 4770K currently. By the time you'll want to upgrade your little Pentium HTPC, you'll be able to pick up an i7 on that socket for dirt cheap! Yeah, the TDP is about double on Intel, but it's still low enough that it won't matter for most people.

Basically, these APUs don't seem compelling at all unless you want decent graphics performance in the smallest possible space. (I'm typing this from my Trinity rig I built when they first came out! Slight regret...)

 

[Phynaz]

You are talking like those 25W TDP SKUs are the only products of the company

Really. Where did I say that?

 

[cbn]

But honestly the pricing looks like pricing to fail. The price of cheap Celerons + Mobo are maybe $70. Sure the TDP is higher but the power usage is going to be very similar. How much power does two 1.8 ghz non HT IVB cores use?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813135350

$37 leaves $32 for a mobo. Possible but unlikely. When you get to the more expensive kabini parts it looks even more unattractive. $60 for top end Kabini is ludicrous.

The pricing seems expensive to me also, but maybe some partners will enable ECC RAM on their AM1 boards?

 

[coercitiv]

By the time you'll want to upgrade your little Pentium HTPC, you'll be able to pick up an i7 on that socket for dirt cheap!

By the time you'll want to upgrade a way better generation/core/socket will be available and you won't buy that i7 anyway.

I just noticed my local MicroCenter has them in stock - AM1 1.3Ghz 25W "Sempron" quad core Kabini chips for $37.

No AM1 motherboards yet from a source I call reliable, the ones out there on Google shopping seem to be running $35-55 though.

The biggest competition to these kabini chips is baytrail.

Baytrail is soldered onto the mobo but that allows for lower costs.

But honestly the pricing looks like pricing to fail. The price of cheap Celerons + Mobo are maybe $70. Sure the TDP is higher but the power usage is going to be very similar.

$37 leaves $32 for a mobo. Possible but unlikely. When you get to the more expensive kabini parts it looks even more unattractive. $60 for top end Kabini is ludicrous.

Really think AMD should have gone embedded with kabini. On a system this cheap, low powered, and low performance few people are going to upgrade. I think AMD went this way so that they can get a bigger cut by selling individually.

Cheapest MB is around $42 here in Europe, so $32 in U.S. is quite likely. The $77 model comes with 4 SATA ports and every video output one can think of (VGA, DVI, DP, HDMI): it's pricey for an AM1 board but would make a good HTPC buy.

Baytrail should have been main competition, but in my case it failed from the spec sheet: with prices of $96 and $125, the two Gigabyte - Bay Trail embedded MBs offer only 2 SATA ports and no PCIe slots. Maybe that will change with other models, but for now this lack of features and flexibility is a no go for me. At $125 the quad core Bay Trail ain't cheap either.

The embedded IVB Celerons are indeed nice competition for the Kabini: nice CPU, enough SATA ports, PCIe x16 slot (some of them at least), likely cheaper overall. They lack USB 3.0 though. Because.... differentiation.

 

[tential]

$37 APU's isn't the way for AMD to stay in business.

This could actually be better for Intel than AMD. It keeps x86 visible in the low end, but leaves all the money to Intel.

Actually there are multiple projects in the works from people to use these APUs to bring lower power devices like dedicated XBMC boxes. So it is helping AMD.

Also there was an article about this already on anandtech and AMD does have mobo/cpu combos just like Baytrail as well, only difference is it's not soldered so you can upgrade.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7824/amd-am1-platform-announced-socketed-kabini

 

[Phynaz]

You completely missed my point.