While Kaveri-based APUs have been quite interesting for the mainstream desktop market, the higher 45W TDP did not make it exactly suitable for SFF and HTPCs systems, or even entry-level market, looking for as cheapest possible platform, so AMD has now announced the Kabini, a low-power APU platform which should fit well in those market segments.


While these entry-level, low power CPUs were generally embedded on the motherboard, AMD decided to spice things up a bit by making the new Kabini APUs user-replacable with the new FS1b socket, or AMD AM1 platform, as AMD decided to call it. Although AMD has decided to only reveal details regarding the platform and not shed any details regarding the AM1 APUs, we do know that these will feature up to four Jaguar based CPU cores and GCN-based graphics.

There are plenty of socket FS1b motherboards already revealed by various manufacturers, including ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, ECS, Gigabyte, MSI and others, in both mini-ITX and micro-ATX form factors.

As far as the general AM1 platform specs are concerned, we will see support for single-channel DDR3-1600 memory, SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 ports as well as wide variety of display outputs.

The AM1 platform APUs will be hitting market as Athlon and Sempron APUs and should be enough for your average entry-level office PC but the most success will be in SFFs and HTPCs where it could certainly take on Intel's NUCs. While they may be lacking in the CPU departement compared to Intel's Bay Trail, it will certainly make things up in the GPU department.

AMD expects AM1 platform Sempron APUs to start at around US $39 while Athlon APUs should start at around US $60. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for AMD's official details as well as the precise availability date.









Source: AMD.com.