AMD is launching three new families of processors, which the company thinks fill a gap in the market. The new Temash, Kabini, and Richland chips are largely aimed at tablets, hybrids, and ultrathin notebooks and performance notebooks respectively.
It's not like market leader Intel doesn't already have those areas covered, but AMD thinks its new processors will offer better performance at a lower price than Intel chips.
Like Intel, AMD has been working to reduce power consumption while improving performance and stepping up graphics performance in all of its latest processors. The lowest power Temash chips have a TDP of just 3.9 watts and AMD says it could power tablets that get up to 10 or 11 hours of battery life.
AMD says we should see dozens of tablets and notebooks with its latest chips in the coming months, including models from most major PC makers.
Temash
We've already seen Temash chips start to hit the market in devices like the Acer Aspire V5-122 notebook. But AMD actually has 3 different Temash chips designed for tablets and small-screen notebooks with touchscreen displays.
The company is positioning these chips as low-cost competitors to Intel's Celeron or Pentium chips which fill the space between Intel Atom and Intel Core i3.
The AMD A4-1200 is a 1 GHz dual-core processor with AMD Radeon HD 8180 graphics clocked at 225 MHz.
It has a TDP of 3.9 watts, and in that space, you shouldn't expect any miracles from an x86 processor. This chip is primarily aimed at what Intel calls "performance tablets," and probably won't offer a stellar experience with more demanding Windows apps.
The A4-1200 is basically AMD's answer to an Intel Atom chip, and while it should offer significantly better graphics than a Clover Trail processor, it's too early to say how it will stack up against Intel's Bay Trail chips due out later this year in terms of CPU and graphics performance.
AMD also offers the A4-1250, which is an 8W version with Radeon HD 8210 graphics at 300 MHz. This chip is aimed at notebooks with screens smaller than 13 inches, which qualify for low-cost Windows 8 licenses.
In other words, the low-cost mini-notebooks that AMD and Microsoft don't want to call netbooks, but which basically fill the same niche.
The AMD A6-1450 should offer a bit more performance. It's the chip used in the Acer Aspire V5-122, and it's a 1 GHz quad-core processor with an 8W TDP, support for burst speeds up to 1.4 GHz, and 300 MHz Radeon HD 8250 graphics which can overclock to 400 MHz.
AMD's Temash chips feature new "Jaguar" cores which the company says offer up to twice the computing performance of the "Bobcat" cores used in the last-generation chips, code-named "Hondo" and "Brazos."
At the same time, AMD says the new chips offer a 20 to 25 percent improvement in battery life. That's partially because the Southbridge Controller has been integrated into the chip, making Temash processors true SoC (System on a Chip) components.
While AMD is promising better graphics performance than you'll see in comparable Ivy Bridge or Haswell chips from Intel, AMD is also banking on price. The company thinks that we'll tablets with Temash chips for well under $500, and notebooks that are a bit less expensive than their Intel-powered counterparts.
AMD Temash
But I think that might be a bit optimistic: You can already pick up an ASUS VivoBook X202E
Kabini
If Temash chips are designed to compete with Intel's budget processors, Kabini is designed to go head-to-head with Intel's mid-range chips all the way up to Core i3.
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