AMD releases Hondo Z-60 specs

I buy more Intel products personally but the AMD APU designs are always fairly priced. Especially with the A10 system that I was thinking of building for fun.

That being said, if the AMD Hondo Z-60 offerings(tablets of course) turn out to be a great value like the A10 then I will most likely buy one. I like the direction the AMD APUs are headed. :)
 
I'm excited to see AMD put the same chip in my netbook (the E-350) into tablet form but I have mixed feelings about this. Two cores at 1 GHz. I don't know how that's going to play out. My gut feeling is that it seems a little bit underpowered. Intel has also released a new Atom series for tablets which is going to run at 1.8 GHz on two cores with Hyper-Threading. Either Intel's design is overkill or AMD's is cruel and unusual punishment.

OTOH the graphics should be pretty good, no complaints there.

^^^ But to be clear the above is all speculation, we'll know when it lands. I look forward to it. :)
 
XacTactX said:
I'm excited to see AMD put the same chip in my netbook (the E-350) into tablet form but I have mixed feelings about this. Two cores at 1 GHz. I don't know how that's going to play out. My gut feeling is that it seems a little bit underpowered. Intel has also released a new Atom series for tablets which is going to run at 1.8 GHz on two cores with Hyper-Threading. Either Intel's design is overkill or AMD's is cruel and unusual punishment.

OTOH the graphics should be pretty good, no complaints there.

^^^ But to be clear the above is all speculation, we'll know when it lands. I look forward to it. :)
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1ghz dual core is probably plenty for a tablet. I was quite impressed with the E-350
 
XacTactX said:
I'm excited to see AMD put the same chip in my netbook (the E-350) into tablet form but I have mixed feelings about this. Two cores at 1 GHz. I don't know how that's going to play out. My gut feeling is that it seems a little bit underpowered. Intel has also released a new Atom series for tablets which is going to run at 1.8 GHz on two cores with Hyper-Threading. Either Intel's design is overkill or AMD's is cruel and unusual punishment.

OTOH the graphics should be pretty good, no complaints there.

^^^ But to be clear the above is all speculation, we'll know when it lands. I look forward to it. :)
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Well in the tablet space, we'll see how x86s chips do in terms of performance, however the bigger comparison will be in power use and battery life.
If they can really squeeze 10 hours out of this thing, it is pretty impressive for an x86 platform.
 
The Z-60's direct competitor in x86 space is the Intel Clover Trail Atom CPU, which is still an in-order CPU. Being an out-of-order CPU, the Z-60 will have a decent advantage. Overall, the new Atom may have a small performance edge in CPU-hungry tasks, but it will definitely be offset by the graphics performance that the Z-60 can provide. Though, I am still a little worried about performance of Win8 tablets with chips like these. I'd really like to see a 1.4GhZ version of this chip with 120 stream processors and a native 1920x1080 resolution from a 10" tablet.
 
The clover trail chip is in-order? Wow. If that's the case, AMD might actually have something with this. The PowerVR graphics are going to be heavily outmatched by AMD's cores and that 1ghz might not do all that poorly against the Clover Trail atoms.
 
Correct. It'll be kind of like pitting 4 really fast pentium 3s against 2 slightly slower pentium 4s as far as CPU goes. On the GPU side its more clear-cut.
 
That's pretty funny, actually. While the newer ARM SoCs are using out-of-order execution, Intel's x86 Atom is using in-order :p Talk about a role reversal...

The battery life isn't going to be in AMD's favor with Hondo, though. It's not an SoC and the chipset/controller hub and other accessories are going to be chewing up a significant amount of wattage.
 
pelo said:
That's pretty funny, actually. While the newer ARM SoCs are using out-of-order execution, Intel's x86 Atom is using in-order :p Talk about a role reversal...

The battery life isn't going to be in AMD's favor with Hondo, though. It's not an SoC and the chipset/controller hub and other accessories are going to be chewing up a significant amount of wattage.
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The AMD Bobcat architecture is not aggressively out-of-order, much like the ARM Coretex-A9, so the overall IPC is not much higher than 1. Atom avoids the problems keeping the pipes filled by adding Hyperthreading, which means that if your load is multithreaded it will approach 1 IPC (it's much less in pure single-threaded tasks).

You can see here that Atom at 1.8 GHz performs similarly to the AMD E-350 Bobcat core at 1.6 GHz in multithreaded tests, and then loses by about 30% in single-threaded tests like the AAC encode. The problem with the Z-60 is that AMD will seriously hurt their single-threaded performance by dropping the clock speed from 1.6 to 1.0 GHz, to the point that the Atom at 1.8 GHz will be FASTER in single-threaded tests, and will SMOKE AMD in anything multithreaded.

Note from the above linked article that the AMD Bobcat is supremely outperformed by modern Intel out-of-order processors. If you scale-up the numbers to match the 2.8 GHz speed of the Pentium G6950, you see the IPC jump 60%.
 
Kind of ironic coming from the company that has gone the way of multithreading to the point of hurting their desktop and server performance, no? I think we'll see a decent balance due to better hardware graphics acceleration, though. We're not talking about Android tablets here, we're talking about Windows. I think gaming, movie playback, and web browsing will probably end up better on the Z-60 tablets.
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
Kind of ironic coming from the company that has gone the way of multithreading to the point of hurting their desktop and server performance, no? I think we'll see a decent balance due to better hardware graphics acceleration, though. We're not talking about Android tablets here, we're talking about Windows. I think gaming, movie playback, and web browsing will probably end up better on the Z-60 tablets.
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I disagree about the gaming.

You have to have a minimum amount of CPU to play Windows games (the GPU doesn't do it all). Flash games will also hurt by the reduction in CPU power. Show me the last AAA game that had a minimum system requirement of 1.0 GHz core clock!

The reason the E-350 could get away with the "extremely low-end gaming" label was because the 1.6 GHz clock speed allowed for "barely playable" framerates - you take that away, and it's just a fully-accelerated media playback device.
 
defaultluser said:
I disagree about the gaming.

You have to have a minimum amount of CPU to play Windows games (the GPU doesn't do it all). Flash games will also hurt by the reduction in CPU power.

Show me the last AAA game that had a minimum system requirement of 1.0 GHz core clock. The reason the E-350 could get away with the "extremely low-end gaming" label was because of the 1.6 GHz clock speed - you take that away, and it's just a fully-accelerated media playback device.
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That's more of an issue with windows and its legacy environment. In Metro the 1ghz chip should do well, or at least mediocre, but as soon as you stray from that environment you're dealing with programs meant for desktop and laptop chips rather than measly 1ghz neutered netbook chips. So, you're definitely right. It's going to have a rough time of it, but then again, so are most of the atoms.

Frankly, I think that's more of a Microsoft/OS issue than it is an Intel/AMD one, but that's what they get for playing the x86 game for so long.
 
Flash can be hardware accelerated with any ATI/AMD GPU from the past 4-5 years, and they've already said you could play MW2 at 1024x768 with it (maintaining roughly 30fps). I highly doubt Clover Trail will be able to do that. Not to mention Firefox 3+ and IE9+ also take advantage of hardware acceleration from GPUs. The only thing one really needs to be worried about is the drivers, we all know AMD has been slacking a bit in that dept. lately.
 
pelo said:
That's more of an issue with windows and its legacy environment. In Metro the 1ghz chip should do well, or at least mediocre, but as soon as you stray from that environment you're dealing with programs meant for desktop and laptop chips rather than measly 1ghz neutered netbook chips. So, you're definitely right. It's going to have a rough time of it, but then again, so are most of the atoms.

Frankly, I think that's more of a Microsoft/OS issue than it is an Intel/AMD one, but that's what they get for playing the x86 game for so long.
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But it's not just the CPU performance that takes a hit:

GPU clock speed of AMD E-350 I just linked: 500 MHz

GPU clock speed of AMD Z-60: 276 MHz.

So graphics performance also drops by over 40%. Gonna be a hard sell that Z-60 has any advantages over Atom at this point.
 
For general usage (web/email/IM etc.) I reckon a 1GHz dual core (especially with a decent graphics bolt on) would be fine. The main crux is to make sure it has a decent SSD in it. Thats where folks realy notice the difference.

My main laptop is a Dell Inspiron 13z that I bought in 2009. It has a dual core Intel CULV 1.3Ghz CPU. It also has a Nvidia 105M GPU and a 120GB Sandisk SSD. I can hardly tell the difference between it and the stock i3/i5 laptops I get in for customers. There really isn't much in it. In fact I prefer the performance of mine due to the SSD.

As long as its dual core with a decent data storage solution its fine.
 
defaultluser said:
But it's not just the CPU performance that takes a hit:

GPU clock speed of AMD E-350 I just linked: 500 MHz

GPU clock speed of AMD Z-60: 276 MHz.

So graphics performance also drops by over 40%. Gonna be a hard sell that Z-60 has any advantages over Atom at this point.
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Doing math just over clock speed when there have been further architecture improvements on both CPU+GPU doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
Doing math just over clock speed when there have been further architecture improvements on both CPU+GPU doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
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There have been no major improvements.

This is a cut-down Zactate platform, right down to the 80 sp GPU utilizing the (now ancient) VLIW5 architecture. It's still produced on a 40nm process, and still uses the same old bobcat cores.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/05/amd-to-launch-something-mutated-on-october-9/

http://seekingalpha.com/article/914181-amd-s-z-60-apu-earns-it-a-place-in-the-tablet-wars

In fact, it's just AMD doing a crash-course diet on the platform hub of the existing C-50 part to reduce idle draw. It too has 2 Bobcat cores at 1GHz and the same GPU clocked at 280 MHz in order to fit the part in a 9w TDP. It's not hard to see AMD getting that down to 4.5w if they cut the I/O and tweaked the power saving features to be more aggressive.

AMD will eventually release their new Jaguar revision of the Bobcat core, but this product does not feature it.
 
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LAiN_OfTheWired said:
Ouch, nvm then. Maybe we should just wait for some reviews then lol
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I agree, I still want to see how it performs, but I'm not holding out hope for a major AMD coup here.

And we'll have to see what AMD's pricing strategy is, since they've been consistently charging more for the (more powerful) 18w Zactate platform.
 
this is a windows 8 tablet processor and it wipes the floor with the atom
 
defaultluser said:
I agree, I still want to see how it performs, but I'm not holding out hope for a major AMD coup here.

And we'll have to see what AMD's pricing strategy is, since they've been consistently charging more for the (more powerful) 18w Zactate platform.
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It's cheap, but when we're talking about tablets/smartphones all of the processors are cheap. Unlike laptops and desktops where the price can differ by $50-to-hundreds of dollars, in a tablet it's in the single digits. So if AMD's product is cheaper than an Intel or ARM tablet, it's cheaper because the components are cheaper. That's not a good thing.
 
Not always true, but generally the case. You are talking about a company that is willing to take smaller margins just to rebuild its name, though.
 
LAiN_OfTheWired said:
Not always true, but generally the case. You are talking about a company that is willing to take smaller margins just to rebuild its name, though.
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While that means a substantial amount in server and desktop, it means very little in tablets and smartphones. Intel and AMD can charge a small fortune for their x86 chips, but now those x86 chips must compete with already cutthroat competition within ARM. The products sell in high volume and the SoC/CPU is only a small percentage of the overall cost of the entire device. Unless you're already operating on slim margins, there's no way in hell OEMs will pick you.
 
pelo said:
It's cheap, but when we're talking about tablets/smartphones all of the processors are cheap. Unlike laptops and desktops where the price can differ by $50-to-hundreds of dollars, in a tablet it's in the single digits. So if AMD's product is cheaper than an Intel or ARM tablet, it's cheaper because the components are cheaper. That's not a good thing.
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This is laughably inaccurate, to even make the statement "it's cheaper because the components are cheaper" really shows how little you know, thanks for showing your ignorance though!
 
darkstarcow said:
This is laughably inaccurate, to even make the statement "it's cheaper because the components are cheaper" really shows how little you know, thanks for showing your ignorance though!
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an ARM SoC, like the Tegra 3, costs 15-25 bucks.

How much do you think you pay for the chip in your laptop and desktop?

Remember, tray prices are online. I'll wait for you to google the answer. It really shouldn't take you longer than 5 seconds.

AMD decreasing the price from $20 to $15 means pretty much nothing for an OEM. A few extra bucks to spend elsewhere or pocket. It makes almost zero impact on the overall price of the entire device.
 
darkstarcow said:
This is laughably inaccurate, to even make the statement "it's cheaper because the components are cheaper" really shows how little you know, thanks for showing your ignorance though!
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pelo said:
an ARM SoC, like the Tegra 3, costs 15-25 bucks.

How much do you think you pay for the chip in your laptop and desktop?

Remember, tray prices are online. I'll wait for you to google the answer. It really shouldn't take you longer than 5 seconds.

AMD decreasing the price from $20 to $15 means pretty much nothing for an OEM. A few extra bucks to spend elsewhere or pocket. It makes almost zero impact on the overall price of the entire device.
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I think he is referring to market force, EG: apple can charge $500 for a tablet that costs $200 to manufacture.
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
I think he is referring to market force, EG: apple can charge $500 for a tablet that costs $200 to manufacture.
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Then I suppose that backfired on him quite quickly then?

For those that are wondering, the Surface RT tablets are starting at a price of $$399-$499 without keyboard.
 
pelo said:
Then I suppose that backfired on him quite quickly then?

For those that are wondering, the Surface RT tablets are starting at a price of $$399-$499 without keyboard.
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Are there specs published yet? EG: Krait dual core 1.5ghz adreno 225s?
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
Are there specs published yet? EG: Krait dual core 1.5ghz adreno 225s?
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Microsoft's Surface RT is likely a Tegra 3, or at least that's what the rumors say. The price is a lot higher than that $199 we heard a while ago, though. Granted, that makes sense given the price of the RT license -- ~$80 or so.
 
pelo said:
Microsoft's Surface RT is likely a Tegra 3, or at least that's what the rumors say. The price is a lot higher than that $199 we heard a while ago, though. Granted, that makes sense given the price of the RT license -- ~$80 or so.
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You would think that Microsoft might have a pricing advantage on Microsoft RT licenses.
 
I don't think they're going to purposely screw their OEMs. Granted, they're screwing them anyway, but they were careful not to double screw them.
 
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