I follow AMD investor news and this popped up yesterday. Extremely interesting read. AMD appears to be on track as Rory Read stated a couple of months ago when he turned down a sale of the company.
Here's a small snippet of the news post by author Tom Luongo:
Earlier in the month I tentatively made the call that AMD's (NYSE:AMD) Jaguar core-based Kabini/Temash APU's were good enough to give AMD hope. Now that we've seen Temash for real in reference devices as were shown off yesterday at Mobile World Congress I have to say that AMD has a lot more than hope. AMD showed off three very impressive tablet designs from each of the major Taiwanese ODMs, Compal (CMPCY.OB), Quanta (QUCCF.PK) and Wistron. The A6-1450 will give tablet/hybrid manufacturers a lot of options they do not currently have.
The key here is AMD's TurboDock technology that will allow the chip to scale up and down in Thermal Design Power (TDP) depending on what the user wants. So, take the tablet on the road and it runs at 5.9W TDP -- which will dial back even further to 1W for normal usage like browsing, etc. - dock it to the base station and it can scale up to a 15W TDP with fan-based cooling . Check out the video of a 13 tablet running the Fishbowl app from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) dialing up and down Temash in-situ versus a Z-2760 Clover Trail from Intel (NASDAQ:INTC).
The latest benchmarks that we've seen have the A6-1450 pushing Cinebench R11.5 tests slightly better than a 17W Core i3 Sandy Bridge, a test that Intel's chips do very well in. If this is 5.9W performance it's a ridiculous jump. But, even if this is 15W performance let's think this through. Temash has the south bridge on die so a 15W TDP is really 15W, versus the 19-20W the i3-3217 plus chip set is pushing. It's producing nearly 4% better results from 21% less power and 70% of the die size. All of these things together point to real design advantages. Add in OEM fatigue over Intel's lack of competence at the low end of the mobile market and I'm seeing a number of defections in the near future.