AMD has been struggling to compete against Intel in the traditional PC market and rivals such as ARM in the mobile device space.
However, that hasn’t stopped the industry heavyweight from launching and evolving its new lineup of APU (Accelerated Processing Units) SoCs for laptops and other mobile devices.
Recently, AMD exec John Taylor was spotted showcasing a new APU reference device powered by AMD’s Temash processor.
AMD is billing the Temash chip as the first quad-core x86-based SOC on the market, although the chip is also available in a dual-core version. Temesh is equipped with a built-in Radeon HD 8000 series GPU and features AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture. All in all, Temash is supposed to provide PC-quality gaming on mobile devices like tablets.
Indeed, AMD maintains that Temash offers 50% more performance than the company’s Hondo processor, which can be found in some Windows 8 tablets such as the offering from Vizio. AMD says that its new SOC should be able to compete directly against Intel’s Clover Trail chips in tablets as well as some Intel Core i3 units found in laptops.
AMD expects to ship Temash in the first half of 2013. The chipmaker has also promised more details about the Temash platform at Mobile World Congress in late February. At this point, we’re going to take all of AMD’s claims with a grain of salt, as we’re waiting to see benchmarks comparing AMD’s Temesh to Intel and other rivals.
As you can see in the video above, the device showcased at CES was a prototype device with an 11.6-inch full HD resolution display. AMD claims that the max power draw for the machine is 8 W.
AMD demoed the tablet playing DiRT Showdown, with Engadget confirming the game ran smoothly at full HD resolution and despite a slight slowdown, the game was quite playable and said to be a significant improvement over the performance of current-gen Ultrabooks.
