AMD has now officially announced its newest AMD AM1 platform which consists of Athlon and Sempron Kabini based APUs and motherboards with FS1b "upgradeable" socket. Based on dual and quad-core Kabini APUs, the new Socket AM1 platform from AMD will target Intel Bay Trail-D entry-level desktop platform. The new APUs are actually AMD's first "System in a Socket" solution as most of the stuff is included in the APU and motherboard can be considered as a simple shell of interfaces.


For starters, AMD will launch a total of four SKUs, including two quad-core Athlon APUs, single quad-core Sempron and single dual-core Sempron APU. The entire lineup feature AMD Radeon R3 graphic with 128 GCN Radeon cores.

The top of the line are quad-core AMD Athlon 5350 and the AMD Athlon 5150 APUs. Both coming with Radeon R3 graphics clocked at 600MHz and featuring 128 Stream Processors, single-channel memory support for up to 1600MHz, 2MB of cache and two USB 3.0, eight USB 2.0, two SATA 6Gbps ports and 25W TDP. The CPU part of the Athlon 5350 is clocked slightly higher at 2.05GHz while the Athlon 5150 sticks to lower 1.6GHz clock.

The AM1 platform Sempron APU lineup starts off with quad-core Sempron 3850 APU. The quad-core CPU part on this one is clocked at 1.3GHz and it also feature Radeon R3 graphics part with 128 Stream Processors but clocked at slightly lower 450MHz. It also has support for single-channel DDR3 1600MHz memory, 2MB of cache, same I/O as the entire lineup and same 25W TDP. At the bottom of the lineup is the AMD Sempron 2650 APU which is the only dual-core part clocked at 1.45GHz. It has even lower clocked, at 400MHz, Radeon R3 series GPU with 128 Stream Processors, support for 1333MHz single-channel memory and 1MB of cache.

Although the AM1 platform APUs have been already selling in some parts of the world, today we have the official prices from AMD which are set at US $31 for the cheapest AMD Sempron 2650 dual-core part, US $36 for the quad-core Sempron 3850 SKU while Athlon 5350 and the Athlon 5150 will be priced at US $55 and US $45, respectively.

According to AMD's slides and what we had a chance to see during AMD's AM1 press launch earlier last month, the AMD AM1 platform is not only "upgradeable" but it also runs circles around Intel's entry-level Bay Trail-D platform. While Intel may brag with lower TDP, 10W over 25W, it does not pack enough punch to be even a decent HTPC platform, let alone anything else. While AM1 platform will not give you enough power to play any serious games, it can run some casual "indie" games as we had a chance to see during presentation.

As noted, the AMD AM1 platform can run circles around Intel's Bay Trail-D platform and ends up significantly cheaper also and all we need now is some players to come up with a custom passive cooler for the AM1 platform as one of those would make a perfect HTPC system, as long as it stays nice and silent.









Source: AMD.com.