AMD has played Pied Piper of the APU movement for some time. Now, the silicon slinger is tooting that horn yet again, only this time for the mainstream market and not solely the enthusiast crowd.
The company is introducing its AM1 platform anchored around its socketed "Kabini" APU architecture. AM1 comes to life in the form of the quad-core Athlon and Sempron APUs.
AMD is targeting the low-cost, PC-like device sector in regions like Latin America, South East Asia and EMEA, at least to start. The tagline here is "everyday PC use at extremely low costs," and in an upgradable platform to boot.
What exactly those low costs are AMD isn't ready to reveal, but the APUs will start as low as $60 (about £36/AU$67). AMD is targeting April 9 for release.
Pass me some AM1 sauce
It may be helpful to think of the new platform as an equation; a socketed Kabini APU plus an FS1b upgradable socket equals AM1.
The system is Windows 8.1 optimized yet continues support for Windows XP and Windows 7 in 32- and 64-bit configurations. DirectX 11.2 and Graphics Core Next also find Kabini in their corners.
Maximum memory support in Windows is 16GB, and users will find USB 3.0 support along with SATA 6GB/s. Kabini supports up to DDR3-1600 memory and up to four "Jaguar" x86 cores. It's also cozy with USB 2.0, DP, HDMI and VGA on the port end, so look for these specs when Athlon and Sempron become available.
Consumers will find Kabini-carrying motherboards from the likes of ASRock, Asus, Biostar, ECS, GBT and MSI. Both microATX and minilTX boards are slated to release.
