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The AMD Kabini Review: A4-5000 APU Testedby Jarred Walton on 5/23/2013 12:00 AM EST
130 Comments
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Musafir_86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link-Finally!
-BTW, some pictures still missing/not loading...
-Thanks for the article, but when Anand's architectural deep-dive will come out?
Regards. Reply
Musafir_86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link-Sorry, I missed the link on the main page, and all pictures load correctly now.
Thanks. Reply
codedivine - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkKabini looks interesting. Somewhat surprised that the max bandwidth (10.5 GB/s) supported is less than even Exynos 5 Dual (12.8GB/s).
Wondering whether the GPU supports fp64 and at what rate? Reply
codedivine - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI guess Anand answered the fp64 question in the other article already :) Reply
axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Wow...the AMD Jaguar Temash and Kabinis cost about the same as Atoms (~$30-$50) and perform many times faster than Atoms.
I wonder why Anandtech did not compare the Kabinis against Atoms/Celerons instead of i3 and i5 that cost around $200 to $225+ ? Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkSadly (not really -- Atoms are trash), we don't have any recent Atom/Celeron/Pentium laptops around. No one has ever sent us a Celeron or Pentium laptop for review, and the last Atom netbook we tested was probably almost two years back. Anand does have Clover Trail covered, but there's no real point in running our heavy laptop suite on that. Reply
JDG1980 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIn the mini-ITX DIY segment, Kabini may compete against the Celeron 847 boards (which currently run about $75). I'd be interested to see how it stacks up there. The AMD solution would have a clock speed advantage (847 only runs at 1.1 GHz) but the Sandy Bridge-based 847 almost certainly has better IPC. Reply
MrMilli - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkHere you go: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/201... Reply
BushLin - Friday, June 21, 2013 - linkThanks for that, my German isn't great but from what I can tell this chip is a great choice compared to Intel's actual competing products. Such a shame Anand's review is with a Pentium consuming over twice the power and i5/i7 products costing many times more.
My interest is in the low power desktop boards and hope to see a useful comparison on here at some point. I'm sure Zotac or some other manufacturer with such a leaning would be happy to supply comparable boards to cover Kabini and the lower power Pentium and Celerons. Reply
jagd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkDual channel may not help to CPu but you are forgetting GPu , this is a shame for anandtech . Reply
MrSpadge - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt's a shame for Anandtech that AMD didn't include a dual channel controller on the die? Weird. Reply
HalloweenJack - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkrubbish Kabini includes dual channel on die - the `prototype` doesn't use it. which is ofc a shame , and if anandtech wasn't being paid by intel or employed intel staff on its website , they would likely have added another stick to show the improvement gained. Reply
t.s - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link"Just to call out a couple noteworthy items, first is the single-channel memory configuration. In theory that could be hampering performance somewhat, but we have no real way of knowing. While the laptop does support two SO-DIMMs, Kabini only supports a single-channel interface, so adding a second SO-DIMM wouldn't help." --Page 2
So, Whose right? If Kabini indeed support dual channel on die, then yes, it's a shame. Knowing it will raise the bar for AMD and intentionally didn't include it with testbed in the review. Reply
GuMeshow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkKabini does not "include dual channel on die". All the websites i've seen say "Kabini features a single 64-bit DDR3 memory controller", two SO-DIMM sockets does not mean two channels ... Unless i'm mistaken and if that is the case i would ask for your source on that. Reply
lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkNo, you're right. HalloweenJack is spreading FUD instead of candy. Reply
Spunjji - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkTool. Reply
johnny_boy - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - linkI wondered the same thing, but I thought "shame on AMD". Why would they be that retarded though? I don't get it. Reply
johnny_boy - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - linkI get it now, after having read the comments. I should also read the article. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI believe that kabini is typically $42-72, though I can't find the link Reply
polyzp - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkAMD back in the High End with Steamroller! Check out the benchmarks
http://amdfx.blogspot.ca/2013/05/amd-steamroller-f... Reply
Kevin G - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThose aren't real benchmarks, just estimates that are based upon improvements from an anonymous source. Reply
TerdFerguson - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt should be criminal to market any of these chips as "Elite Performance" platforms. The words elite and performance have pretty well understood meanings, which nothing AMD is offering stand up to. If I'm shopping for a new computer and it is advertised as an elite performance platform, I'm going to expect it to run AAA games at elite settings.
AMD is distancing themselves from my wallet a little more every day, thanks to weak products, weak initiatives, hype and terribly dishonest marketing. Reply
Finally - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI want a Kabini in my Office PC, I want one in my 13' laptop and I surely will be recommending them to all my friends. Reply
lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkDon't know about in your office PC unless you're an Office-only type of worker. I guess that applies to a lot, but I wouldn't know. I could see it in an AIO for office type of deal, or nice, SFF setups. I feel like multi-seat and/or thin-client setups would be cheaper though. May as well buy that i3 if you're getting an independent machine. Reply
wumpus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkConsidering just how many office machines are running XP (the pentium4s only get replaced when they burn up, the core-based products are likely to stay until the IT department adopts some faddish idiocy*).
* not saying that core+windows is irreplaceable, just that stupid business fads are much more likely than real reasons to replace them, the money being available, and enough pointy haired bosses on board at the same time. Reply
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkUh huh, I'm sure you were totally predisposed toward getting an AMD product until you saw that marketing-speak.
Dude, it's marketing. Intel is just as (if not more guilty) of the same. Feel free to hate marketing-speak -- I certainly do. But let's not pretend it's something unique to AMD, m'kay?
And uh, there's nothing weak about Jaguar, from what I can see. It looks like the best low-power x86 SoC bar by a large measure. Reply
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt looks like the best low-power x86 SoC by a large measure.** Reply
yannigr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkYou are free to buy an Intel product, you know Intel, that beautiful company that in the past was threatening anyone thinking that he could sell PC's with Athlon's. That behavior off course has nothing to do with words like "criminal" or "dishonest marketing". So go and buy an Intel system, the "dishonest marketing" free and "criminal" hardware. Reply
yannigr - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI meant "criminal" free hardware off course.
Intel, because we hate monopoly. Reply
lmcd - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkYa know, it happened, but an i3 ULV with 4k graphics knocks this chip silly, to ignore GT3e coming around the corner. Sorry but it's to the point where Intel will never need such moves again. Reply
Spunjji - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkAh, so that justified them doing it while they did do that, right? ;) Reply
Coolmike899 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI know it's not on topic, but did anyone else see the add for the GTX 780 on anand's home page? Reply
coburn_c - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkOnly one test comparing it against an a15? There is trickery afoot. Reply
wumpus - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkOr likely a lack of A15 based systems in Anand's test lab. HEY YOU! You with the A15 tablet samples. Send some to Anand. Reply
beginner99 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linklooks ok now...but this will change in about 1 month and then even more so when baytrail-T arrives. Reply
devashishpurandareva - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThe article describes a 14 inch display, but the specs embedded in the article mention 15.6 inch screen... Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkFixed. Reply
coburn_c - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkA4-5000: half the performance of Haswell with all the TDP Reply
takeship - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt's even worse than that. Kabini can't compete in either CPU, or GPU perf with ULV Ivy-bridge, let alone Haswell. Less performance, slightly better battery life?, and likely cheapy cheap laptops sound the DO NOT WANT trumpet pretty loudly. Maybe if we could get this kind of performance at 7W instead. Reply
NotTarts - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkKabini will be priced under $60. What's Haswell going to be priced at again? $200? $300? Reply
takeship - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkTrue, price will keep most budget buyers out of Haswell powered ultrabooks. Not so for the now-on-clearance-sale Ivy Bridge Dell & HPs though. And in that market Kabini loses most of it's price advantage, while still giving worse performance & marginal battery life improvements. There it's the new $500 plastic Kabini laptop, vs. the $600 aluminum IVB Lenovo. I just don't see that being a win. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThe HP Pavilion 11 Touchsmart costs 400$. It has a 10-point touchscreen. So, the 400$ touch enabled Kabini seems mighty atractive compared to the 600$ Lenovo now. Reply
axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Touche! Thanks to AMD for providing alternatives to Intel's Atoms and higher priced CPUs. Reply
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkBesides the price issue, you seem to be quite missing the point of a low-power architecture like Jaguar. Let me know when ULV Ivy Bridge can scale down to 3.9W.
Also, a lot of people seem to have trouble comprehending the fact that TDP doesn't really have much in common with the actual power draw of the chip (or the heat output). We've already seen what happens when you try to cram even the lowest wattage Ivy Bridge into a modern tablet form factor: high temperatures w/ fans, low battery life, high price. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt competes with an Sandy Bridge ULV i3 and it gets quite close to a i3 Ivy, while offering better battery life.
Seems like a clear proposition to me: if Pentium like performance is what you need this offers you that and better GPU performance. Perfect for the low-end of the ultrathin/ultrabook market. Reply
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkyeah, pretty much how I read it as well. Assuming you can afford to pay an extra $200 dollars there's not much reason (other than possibly graphics drivers) to not get haswell instead. Reply
aryonoco - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkVery interesting article. Just a few notes:
I'm not sure that Exynos 5250 is the best representative of Cortex A15. For one, it's dual core without any HT so at a massive disadvantage in a test like Kraken. Secondly, it came out in actual device in the market about 7 months ago. By the time Kabini shows in products, it will probably be over 8 months later. We'll have other Cortex A15 parts by then, and if the Tegra 4 Kraken scores that I'm hearing (~6000) is right, and if something Tegra 4 is using about half as much power as this 15W Kabini, then Kabini suddenly doesn't look that competitive.
Of course as you say, the success of Kabini will depend on what OEMs do with it, but traditionally these cheap AMD parts find themselves in devices that are compromised in everyway. Even if we get a 1080p screen this time around (which I'm hopeful), we'll still have to deal with sub-optimal keyboards, trackpads that work only half the time, and other cost-cutting measures we are familiar with. For this to succeed, someone needs to put it in a Ultrabook-style laptop, with good display, good keyboard and no software glitches, and price it under $500. That's a tall task.
HP just announced a very interesting Slatebook X2 running Android (not skinned) on Tegra 4 with 1080p IPS screen and a Transformer-style detachable dock for $479, including the dock (sidenote, I was disappointed there was no coverage of this on AT). If the performance claims for Tegra 4 (and other future more optimized Cortex A15 parts) are accurate, with such devices on the horizon, will there even be a cheap Ultrabook-style market left for Kabini to compete in? Can Kabini find its way into similar designs by major OEMs? I hope, for everyone's sake that AMD can succeed, but I am doubtful. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI certainly think Kabini can go into the same designs that we're seeing Tegra 4 target. Which will end up being faster? That's a different question, and I'm not sure we have enough information to come to a conclusion right now. If Kabini/Temash can get into tablets sooner rather than later, they've got a chance. If it takes 6-8 months, you're right: it may not matter at that point. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkHP just announced their back to school products and there is a successor to the HP dm1 that will cary A4's and A6's. Reply
Exophase - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkNo Cortex-A15 has HT, and Kraken is single threaded anyway. I think Kraken just isn't a great benchmark. Although its makers say it's a lot better than Sunspider it shares a lot of the same sorts of problems:
1) It's Javascript which has its own unique (pretty severe) overheads which can dominate run-time to the extent that it drowns out a lot of the variation from the type of JS code you're running. JS is used and it's important, but even today on good JITs most JS code is several times (think 5 times) slower than an equivalent written in something like C++ or even Java, making it a bad representation of performance of more efficient software.
2) Much of what it does - path finding, signal processing, and crypto - is not the kind of stuff Javascript is usually used for.
3) Its test durations are really short, which is bad for benchmarks in general but can be especially bad for JITs where it
Cross-architecture comparisons are hard and I don't blame people for using JS when there's not a lot else available (although at least some other inclusions would be nice).. but you shouldn't draw a very broad conclusion from a Kraken comparison alone. And if you did that it'd also make the Kabini vs i5 comparison look a lot worse than a lot of other tests show. Reply
georgec84 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThese chis look great! I hope it can provide AMD with a small spark. They certainly seem to be looking up compared to 2 years ago. Reply
Nintendo Maniac 64 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI think it would have been interesting if Anand tested the CPU against some older mid-range to high-end CPUs. From my own assessments it looks like Jaguar has slightly better IPC than K8 and is overall comparable to the original Phenom (though obviously without the huge power consumption). Reply
JDG1980 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI really want to see a comprehensive rundown of single-threaded tests with constant clock rate. We have a rough idea of which architectures have better IPC, but I'd like to see some hard numbers. Reply
Streetwind - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThis is the first real step forard for AMD I've seen in nearly a decade... everything else were minor clock speed bumps, experimental architectures that ended up being slower clock-for-clock than the old ones, big iGPUs and shuffling around its product stack to target a changing market with the same technology.
The performance advantage Intel has accumulated over the years means that AMD can still only really compete via price, but Kabini is finally the kind of product that attempts to narrow the gap with the competition again. Please AMD, more of this! Maybe in one or two years we the consumers will have a real choice in the x86 market again if you keep it up. Reply
KaarlisK - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkRegarding memory performance: as I understand it, Kabini supports two DIMMs, but only single-channel. Reply
darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkWhy are you always comparing that dual core ARM chip?
Why not Octa chip?(like, the best currently available ARM chip)
And why always avoid using Geekbench, but instead use a heavily software dependant tests?
This always seems to be case when dealing with ARM on this site.
Really, it looks like a deliberate undermining of the architecture, in my mind. Reply
kyuu - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkOne: the "octa chip" is really quad-core.
Two: Geekbench is not a great benchmark utility, especially when comparing cross-platform.
Three: Attributing an anti-ARM agenda to this website is pretty freakin' silly. Reply
darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkOne: the chip has 4+4 independently operated core clusters.
Operating at low power cores makes for a very advanced solution, compared to big cores revving down for a certain task.
Besides, what does your remark have to do with what I said?
My point is, Octa is a FAR more capable ARM chip than the one used in this comparison.. yet it doesn't cost more, and consumes up to 70% less power.
Two: as opposed to what? Comparing Chrome for Android with Chrome for Windows?
Geekbench is not perfect, but it is the best you can try when comparing across platforms.
It is the ONLY credible comparison of pure processing abilities in this case.
Three: answer the first two then. What am I missing here? Reply
darkich - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkCorrection..I meant two modules (core clusters), with 4 cores each, of course Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkAnd those 2x4 cores can run simulataneously with the right software, hence the name Octa.
This means Jaguar will get very close to A15 - until Cortex-A57 is released of course. Reply
darkich - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkThere you go.
AnandTech, speak up!
I'll take silence as a confirmation that I was right Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkMost of the smartphone/tablet testing is done elsewhere (Brian for Smartphones, Anand for tablets). Given we're looking at tablets and laptops here, comparing performance to a Smartphone would be silly, so then we need to find a tablet with the Octa...which doesn't exist except in prototype form.
As for the "octa" having eight cores, that's true, but it typically only runs four at a time -- either the four A7 or the four A15. With the right software (basically only a benchmark designed to do something the Galaxy S4 won't ever do on its own), you can get the theoretical performance, but in practice you won't ever get this (at least not on the only currently shipping Exynos 5 device).
Finally, as pointed about by Kyuu, Geekbench is not a great benchmark. Sure, it can tell you some theoretical performance numbers, but many of the tests have very little to do with real workloads. I don't think we've ever used Geekbench outside of some smartphone testing, just like we don't generally report things like SuperPi or Sandra performance. Then again, I don't necessarily like Cinebench or x264 HD much either. If you want the Geekbench results, here's the 32-bit numbers for the A4-5000: 2987
browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/1983485 Reply
Exophase - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkIf you're doing an SoC comparison I don't see why it matters if that SoC runs on a phone instead of a tablet. And I understand that this review may not be an SoC review, but that's what a lot of people are looking for right now.
Geekbench's integer tests aren't that bad. Crypto, bz2 and jpeg compression/decompression done in native code are actually relatively common tasks on a variety of hardware. The code being ran on the lua test (prime testing) is junk, but since lua is interpreted most of the measurement is with how well it does with interpreters and running junk code doesn't make much difference.
IMO your criticism applies more to Kraken which you conspicuously left out of your list of not so great (but we use them anyway) benchmarks. I gave a bunch of reasons why I don't like it in an earlier post, but I'd like to add a little bit to that - it's not just that it does a lot of DSP (audio and image processing) and crypto stuff but that these tests take up proportionately a lot more of the runtime, drowning out the little path finding and string parsing scores.
These tasks (DSP and crypto) are useful on a variety of platforms like Geekbench's, but the problem is that they're greatly distorted by being executed in Javascript - which is not where it'll usually be ran. It's going to have a hard time optimizing beyond double precision - assuming the code wasn't intended to be double precision in the first place, which would make it even less relevant. It'll have a lot of memory overhead issues and vectorization is pretty much out of the question, despite these being vector-friendly operations. This all makes it a bad proxy for how native code would perform at these tasks, especially if we're comparing with hand optimized SSE and NEON. Reply
Wilco1 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkNo, the right software is a Linux kernel patch which allows all 8 cores to be used, and S4 will be upgraded to use it. Although it will improve performance, the actual goal is lower power consumption because you can now mix and match cores. Today a single high performance task forces all processes to use A15 even when they don't need it, and when the task finishes all processes have to be migrated back again. In the new world you enable 1 A15 as needed and keep 1 or 2 A7's running the background processes.
Like most benchmarks, Geekbench is not perfect. But I agree with Exophase it is most definitely a lot better than JavaScript benchmarks. Geekbench does test real workloads (many of the tests is actual code people use), quite unlike JS benchmarks, which have nothing to do with browsing performance, let alone CPU performance.
The state of smartphone/tablet benchmarking is a shambles - and this is an opportunity for AnandTech to make a difference. You could take a set of Linux benchmarks (eg. freely available versions of SPEC subsets, Phoronix and other common benchmarks like the ones used in Geekbench) and create an app for Android and iOS.
Thanks for the Geekbench link, integer performance of Jaguar is slightly better than I expected vs Exynos Octa (http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/... This may be partly due comparing a phone SoC with a laptop SoC (Jaguar has a major advantage on the memory/stream part), but this kind of detailed comparison is far more interesting and revealing relative strengths and weaknesses in the microarchitectures than looking at JS performance. Reply
darkich - Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - linkWow.. can you give a source about that kernel update?
I can imagine all eight cores mixing would be beneficial on all areas.
While four A15 cores can work asynchronously between each other(independently change frequency, idle/sleep state), their voltage is inherently higher that that of A7 cores.
If the A57 soc will be able to mix cores too, then that will be an overall amazing prospect.
And I completely agree about Geekbench.. no matter how realistic workloads it represents, it beyond any doubt DOES give an idea of raw processing power.
It's ridiculous to neglect that. Reply
Wilco1 - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - linkNote there are actually 3 different variants of big.Little software, ARM's hypervisor code which is OS unaware, the Linaro In-Kernel-Switcher and MP switcher (the latter supports 8 cores).
This is the team developing the big.Little MP software: https://wiki.linaro.org/projects/big.LITTLE.MP. Here is a presentation: http://www.linaro.org/documents/download/6d58a63e4...
Yes A57 supports big.Little with A53. Reply
darkich - Saturday, June 01, 2013 - linkThank you.
This makes me wonder about the Snapdragon 800 for the Note 3 rumours..an upclocked Octa on that kernel should really be more than good enough.
Only advantage I can see in snapdragon is the GPU..adreno 330 looks like a whole step above from anything on the market right now. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThis was a really underwhelming review... Comparing Kabini to a Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge. Really?
Why don't you make the charts with relevant comparisons instead of forcing people to dig through benchmarks to find comparable CPUs?
And you just got to wonder what's the point of this sentence:
"After all the bad news in terms of performance (not that it's really bad, but it can certainly look that way at times), the good news is that not only is Kabini noticeably faster than Brazos, but it's also mighty frugal when it comes to power use. "
Bad news in terms of performance??? Why, because it doesn't compete with an i5 Ivy Bridge??
If anyone wants to read a decent review to Kabini, with more comparisons to relevant notebooks head on over to Notebookcheck.net.
Here's the link: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl...
To sum up: The Kabini A4-5000 is competitive with a Sandy Bridge i3 in terms of CPU and GPU performance (number of cores compensating for lower single thread performance) and it sometimes shadows an Ivy Bridge i3. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThat's being awfully generous on "competitive". Single-threaded, i3-3217U is about twice as fast as A4-5000; multi-threaded it's only about 20% faster. In their graphics testing, the HD 4000 in an i3-3217U is consistently leading by 20-40%. That's a Core i3 laptop with Ivy Bridge that you can get for under $500, right now, and it's ahead by 20% or more in every test I looked at...and Core i3 with HD 4000 isn't exactly known for being a performance monster.
I'd say that AMD is over-reaching with their targets; A6 is more like a match for Pentium, A4 for Celeron, and anything below that isn't really worth discussing (i.e. Atom). When we see the Haswell update next month, the margin in favor of Intel will only increase, but at least I don't think AMD will have to worry about ULV i3 Haswell for a few more months. Based on currently available laptops, Kabini needs to be well under $500 to compete -- or I'd say $500 is acceptable if you get a decent LCD. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkConsidering that Notebookcheck said this:
"Even though the A4-5000 on paper only slightly higher clocked than the recently tested A6-1450 , the performance differences in practice are quite large. The reason for this is the higher TDP Classification: Not to exceed its maximum consumption of 8 watts (without "turbo Dock"), the A6-1450 can achieve the full turbo of 1.4 GHz only with utilization of a single core; under full load decreases the frequency contrast decreases to just over 1.0 GHz. Thanks to constant fitting the A4-5000 1.5 GHz can settle in some benchmarks by almost 50 percent, and so makes a clear leap forward.
, When all four cores, the APU beats even just the Core i3-2367M and comes in part the newer Core i3-3217U close. However, the gap in the per-thread performance remains impressive: Even a Pentium 987 per core expects at least 50 percent faster. Although the parallelization of modern applications has been greatly improved, you should not completely exclude this point.
In everyday life, the tester provided by AMD still feels quite fast and responsive. The more power than the A6-1450 or the previous E2-1800 is quite noticeable, could additionally by a turbo mode but even higher - a pity that the A4-5000 have to do without this feature. For office and multimedia applications including full HD video, the rich, however, reserves the APU from perfect. "
I'll go by their words since they have a more thorough review than the poor job you guys did here. The A4-5000 beats the Pentium in their benchmarks - except in single threaded performance - in every aspect. The Kabini GPU is comparable with the HD3000 in many of the graphical benchmarks and can run some non-demanding or old games. Hands-down the A4 eats the Pentium brand, so no AMD isn't over-reaching with their targets - have you tested the A6 yet and compared it with an i3 IB?
And why are you talking about Haswell, when Kabini sits below the Intel Core brand? AMD defeats Intel below the Cores and this just confirms that.
Now if you want to talk about Richland versus Ivy Bridge and Haswell I'll concede that AMD is really behind and Steamroller can't come soon enough. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkBecause no one cares about Sandy Bridge ULV considering its now end of life. They also tested a lot of highly synthetic benchmarks. i3 ULV ivy notebooks can be had for $400 on newegg, i5 ULV notebooks cost $500 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... sale yes but sales happen all the time). Also for the greater part of its lifetime, kabini will compete with haswell. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkNo, Kabini will compete with Pentiums. You guys keep forgeting that.
And Ivy notebooks will be replaced and Kabini notebooks won't compete with them for most of it's shelf life. As for sales, do you think you won't see sales of Kabini notebooks?
Just because there's a small overlap of vendors clearing up inventory of Ivy notebooks doesn't invalidate that Kabini is a new chip and won't compete with Ivy Bridge for most of its life. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkNo, if an i5 ULV notebook costs $500, an i3 ULV notebook costs $400 and a kabini notebook costs $450 then the kabini is competing with i3/i5 and NOT pentium. Pricewise it competes with i3 and possibly i5. Haswell ULV will launch in a few months. Bobcat launched what? two years ago. With a similar lifetime (hope its shorter) jaguar will be competing with haswell for the vast majority of its lifetime. Reply
t.s - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkYep. The barrier IMO, is OEM. OEM tend to hiking the price. When bobcat E350 first out, the average price is ~$360. What the hell. With $460, i can get 2x performance with sandy bridge i3.
If only AMD want to build their own machine (laptop and desktop). Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkA Kabini notebook costs 400$. And that's without having into account promotions, which WILL happen just as they happen to those precious i3 Ivy Bridges of yours. You seem to forget that promotions happen to all notebooks. And if you keep bringing ULV i3 Ivy Bridges for that price, then guess what? I'll get a TRINITY APU notebook instead for that price! Because I can also get them!! And they have a much stronger GPU power than Kabini, and Ivy Bridge and I can also get some quite decent ultrathins. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkTrinity and ivy bridge ULV are very similar in gpu performance. ULV ivy demolishes ULV trinity cpu wise though. Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkThe top Trinity LV APU (the A10-4655M) beats the Ivy Bridge ULVs in terms of GPU performance. The issue is that there's barely any notebooks for sale with it (The Samsung Series 5 ultrathin is one, the HP Sleekbook another).
The A8-4455M is available in the Asus U38N and a Lenovo model and that one is weak. It's comparable to a Ivy Bridge i3 em terms of CPU/GPU performance (weaker single-thread but better multi-thread - more cores).
However, Trinity powered notebooks are usually cheaper than Ivy Bridge ones and you can get them with great promotions now. Reply
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkThey are very similar and within error range (+/- around 10%). Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkNo, they're not. A A10-4655M with dual channel RAM beats the living crap of a HD4000. You just don't want to admit that. Go dig for benchmarks before spouting falsehoods. Reply
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkNo, mobile amd apus do very good in 3d mark but poorly in games because games have more cpu load (unlike 3dmark which is very cpu light) and the gpu can't boost as high. For instance the 7660G generally ties with the 630m in 3dmark but loses by about 20% in games. Thats a 25 watt part so it will do better than the 17 watt ULV but beat the living crap? NO. Even the 7660G only beats the HD4000 on average by 30%, move that down to ULV and the difference is less. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkAnd by the way. HP announced the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart for 400$ with this A4 and the A6 APU. So 20% less than those wonderful i3 Ivy Bridges of yours and with a 10 point touchscreen.
Jeez, I wonder if it's good enough to compete? Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThere are already $400 ivy bridge touchscreen i3 ULV notebooks. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkWith promotions. And there's no one saying that 400$ is the minimum price point that Kabini can achieve. Lets see what other OEMs will show in Computex. Because it can go lower.
Ivy Bridge is an architecture in end of shelf life. Promotions are bound to happen. Those weren't the normal prices of notebooks of a freshly released architecture and if you were intelectually honest instead of trolling like a jackass you would recognize that. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkCore i3 ULV laptops are routinely selling for $400 now. The ASUS VivoBook X202E for instance is at Amazon for $399 right now and comes equipped similarly to the Kabini prototype (other than the LCD of course), and it provides a touchscreen:
The closest I can come to that with an AMD APU right now has...a Kabini processor and it's on preorder. What's more, it's the A4-1250 Kabini that cuts the CPU and GPU clocks by about 30% relative to A4-5000. The A4-5000 might be competitive with an i3-3217U, but the A4-1250 won't be (other than battery life, which should be slightly higher).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CM1AAOG/ref=as... Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkYou should refrain from commenting because you are just digging yourself deeper and showing bias against AMD. Which is pitiful since with a website with the reputation and impact that Anandtech has you should strive for impartiality. HP announced that the Pavilion 11 Touchsmart will come with a Temash and Kabini APU. Price will start at 400$ at launch.
Less than that Acer, which I agree is a terrible deal and is overpriced because it is sporting hardware from a new generation. But again, you are just showing poor knowledge since that Acer doesn't bring a Kabini APU but a Temash APU. An APU with even lower TDP than what you reviewed in here - and you can also go check a decent review of the APU in that notebook in other websites since you guys don't seem to bother or care with those details since "it's AMD".
But you, more than anyone else should know that when a CPU generation is nearing the end of its shelf life you usually see a lot of deals of notebooks with that silicon. Good consumers will use that chance to get cheaper and great notebooks but that doesn't invalidate the launch of new hardware that, when launched will sell for higher prices. Reply
JarredWalton - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkYou're one to talk about bias; check the mirror please. All I'm saying is that Kabini (and Temash) need to offer compelling price/performance/features against the competition. It doesn't matter whether the competition is "nearing the end of its shelf life" -- it's there and AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, etc. have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. I recommend products based on what's best, at a given price, and right now a $400 Ivy Bridge ULV laptop is going to be difficult to beat with a slower APU and a similar price point.
Your "Ivy Bridge ULV is EOL" comments are actually wrong as well. Did you know ULV Pentium and Celeron parts just launched last quarter? Did you know that Intel is still making and selling Core i3 Sandy Bridge parts? Of course you did, because you want comparisons against the two-year-old Sandy Bridge parts so that Kabini looks better. The truth is that laptops with Ivy Bridge are going to be around for a long time. Pretending otherwise is dreaming, and of course you'll disappear when proven wrong or come back as a new user to spread more FUD when your fantasy predictions don't pan out.
Ultimately, it will depend heavily on what the OEMs deliver -- and when they deliver it. The Pavilion 11 Touchsmart at $399 doesn't seem too bad, but what do you really get? Oh, that's right: it *starts* at $399, and that will almost certainly be with Temash as you're so keen to point out. But Temash is just Kabini at lower clocks and potentially two CPU cores instead of four. Do you know how bad an A4-1250 will look compared to an i-3217U, or a Pentium 2117U, or even a Celeron 1037U? Those should all be priced $400 or less, with the major difference being L2 cache and the lack of Quick Sync on Pentium and Celeron. I've seen some benchmarks elsewhere, and basically the A4-1250 is often half the performance of the Kabini A4-5000 reviewed here.
Kabini is much better than Brazos and Atom, no doubt about it. It's also slower than Ivy Bridge ULV in many tests, and areas where it does win (some GPU benchmarks) are often meaningless for the Windows laptop market. ("Oh, you're faster at running games! I can get an unplayable 15FPS compared to an even more unplayable 13FPS!") On an Android tablet, Kabini and Temash will do much better, but for Windows they're at best "fast enough", while other similarly priced laptops are going to be faster. Who buys a slower part for the same price? I'm not sure, but as an unbiased tech journalist I'm certainly not going to recommend doing so. Reply
rocketbuddha - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkThe reason why Kabini and Temash are good for AMD is the following.
Clock for clock they are better than Sandy i3 ULVs and equal to Ivy i3 ULVs. They provide a better battery life than the ULVs but most importantly they have a smaller die size than their Core competition and are being made in a mature 2 + year 28nm Bulk HKMG process from TSMC.
For the first time, AMD is giving a good performance and a lower die-size than Intel. Previously AMD had to compete in price and/or price/performance with a large die-size. No longer is it handicapped in that manner and this time it can definetely make an impact.
Also JAGUAR architecture has made its way into both PS4 and XBox-one as semi custom APU and it will only make things better and easier for AMD. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThe name calling is uncalled for. I can respectfully disagree. Who cares about promotions or not? I care (and the consumer cares) about the price that they are paying out of their wallet; that is what matters in the market. Ivy Bridge is going to get discounts because its going EOL. That is the market that kabini will have to compete in. Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkYes, the consumer cares about promotions but my point is: Kabini notebooks won't have to compete against Ivy Bridge discounted notebooks except for a small portion of their commercial life.
And if Kabini needs to compete with that, the same can be said about Haswell, Richland, etc, etc. Every new notebook that gets in the market now will compete with promotions for the older models being cleared out and it's not those promotions that will affect their success or not.
And that's the point I am making and that you fail to understand. Promotions happen all the time, they direct the consumer to one product above another but they are temporary. And the flaw in your reasoning is assuming that Kabini/Temash notebooks will face Ivy Bridge notebooks with promotional prices during all the time they are going to be for sale and not recognizing that promotions happen for all products and aren't exclusive of Ivy Bridge notebooks. Reply
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkNo haswell will be more expensive but offer more performance.
Promotions happen all the time but if they happen all the time then they might as well be considered as non temporary (like dell's discounts).
I have no doubt that promotions will happen for kabini I'm just saying that $500 is too much for a notebook of this class. Its not an i3 ULV competitor (see TH for i3 ULV comparison) and at this moment must be compared pricewise to the market its in. Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkI'll beg to disagree with that. As a non-promotional price, for a notebook with a 1080p touchscreen display I think that 500$ is more than fair. As for promotions happening your line of reasoning seems to assume that discounts will only affect Intel notebooks which isn't clearly the case.
While you may get cheap Ivy Bridge notebooks when in promotion, go search for cheap Trinity/brazos notebooks with promotions and you'll find them even cheaper. The same will be said of Temash/Kabini notebooks.
I fail to understand why you don't seem to acknowledge that.
Or the proposition of an APU that beats Pentiums and Celerons in performance (excluding single-thread performance, which is much less relevant nowadays) and has superior battery life.
Will Atom and Haswell Pentiums offer better performance/efficiency/price ratio? It remains to be seen. Reply
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkDepends really. With a 1080p screen its a good price. Sales happen all the time. Yes you can and will get i3 ULV systems for cheap and can get kabini systems for cheap. I'm simply saying given the fact that these promotion happen all the time literally (go to newegg laptops, sort by price-lowest and more than 75% of the notebooks on that page are on sale) you have to take these things into consideration. Kabini is competing against discounted but perfectly fine notebooks in this segment. You can get a nice lenovo g580 with SV i3 for $350. Any promotion that runs with a kabini notebook will have to match that price/perf and kabini is much weaker than SV i3.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... Reply
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkSale % was taken from .ca g580 price from .com for .ca about half are on sale. Reply
dusk007 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThe performance quite poor and notebookcheck doesn't really tell a different story. An i5 is the right CPU to compare it too because it runs in the same performance envelope. With all the other stuff that goes into a decent notebook or tablet/hybrid the CPU cost alone does make that much of a difference.
The problem with Kabini is Single Threaded performance which matters for responsivness in plain old office work loads. Which is what most of these notebooks do. x264, cinebench, ... none of that really matters.
And gaming. In game low settings don't do much for CPU requirements and that is why even at low many games aren't playable. Something Intel can offer despite its HD 4000 which has nowhere near the reputation of AMD's GCN. If all you want is an office notebook for some casual gaming like a bit of Starcraft. An i5 is still a worthwhile investment. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThe i5 is the right CPU because it runs in the same performance envelope??????? How about no??
How much more does the i5 cost? Reply
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkWell theres two arguements. One is cost, and yes amd will come in cheaper because intel likes their margins. So if cost is your primary motivator than this chip looks good.
The other argument is performance/watt and peak performance, both of which make an i5 look much better than this chip.
Now it's true an i5 doesn't scale down to 3.9W, so in that market this chip appears to be a real contender and the one to beat. But that's not the version that was tested here today so we don't know that for sure.
Personally, I'm disappointed, and think haswell will compare very favorably in all metrics except price. I'm not sure haswell will be tablet suitable though, where some sku's of this chip should be.
Not saying this chip is terrible, just saying for anything 8-9W and up it seems to me haswell will be the clear choice if price isn't a major factor. Reply
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkAnd this is a product that competes on price and battery life. Not performance as Haswell does. Reply
dusk007 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkJust that it does compete on performance doesn't mean performance isn't valuable information. How much speed loss are you dealing with when going with cost effectiveness. This isn't a smartphone CPU that will ultimately end up running different software. It is still Windows and the same games and programs as an i5 is used for.
The cost difference in the end product isn't that huge or insurmountable. The buyer would like to know how much they get when paying up or who much they loose when going cheap. Comparing it only with Atoms would be cheating and something marketing folks do not a review site that wants to have some reputation.
These chips don't go into Smartphones not even Tablets (that is Temash) they go where 15W Haswells will go and 2/3 of those sub $800 notebooks BOM is still none CPU related. So even if Kabini was given away for free the notebooks would still cost something. Reply
Parhel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - linkBut price is always a major factor. It's the "majorest" factor. This is a site for enthusiasts (read geeks) but think of the person at the AT&T store who picks the 2 or 3 generation old iPhone because it's $50 cheaper. Reply
tunaman - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkAMD set the standard with x64 that Intel evetually agreed was superior and joined. With the introduction of these hUMA (fully shared CPU and GPU memory) chips AMD has again set the standard that Intel will have to copy.
As I've said before; Intel hasn't been a tech leader in a decade and, again, they'll be playing catch up once they cave to AMD's superior design. But by then, just as has been true for years, Intel graphics and multitasking will continue to lag behind AMD. Intel's only bragging right is saving one or two watts and slapping an "Intel Inside" tatoo on products, but charging twice as much for it. http://goo.gl/OItwV Reply
Gigaplex - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI don't think these chips are hUMA yet. Reply
silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkI don't think we're even getting that until Kaveri, unless the console setups feature it. Reply
HalloweenJack - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkwhy are you including a cpu which isn't in the same market? `hey here's a good AMD APU , but were going to ignore that and put an IB in the graphs for lol factor cause its far better and we don't want AMD to look good for once`. seriously anandtech. Reply
haukionkannel - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThis could be really nice in 7" to 8" windows8 tablet! Faster than atom, cheap and eat less power. Finally one can get surface pro tablet near 300-400$ and still get resonable good performance...
Yeah Haswell ULV will be much faster, but then the cost will be near 1000$ for tablet, I am not so interested in that alternative!
Fanny how AMD can beat intel in ultra portable devices! We really need a new version of Atom to compete with this. Luckily it is coming so we will see some old fachioned competition in that sector! Competetion is good! We just have to see what has happened in highend CPU and see stalling situation in there... Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkThis is using way more power than the atom z2760. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkGo check benchmarks for Temash. Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIts still using about twice as much power.
z2760 tdp is 1.7-3 watts. Reply
axien86 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD Jaguars destroys Atom Z2760 in performance while costing the same. Consumers win. Reply
silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkWith Toms, they were told by AMD that Kabini should be compared to stuff within the same price bracket, hence the Pentium and i3 in their review.
Here, AT doesn't have comparable hardware (they don't get sent it). Reply
CajunArson - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkDude.. AMD put together a laptop and shipped it to Anandtech for benchmarking. How is it Anandtech's fault that AMD intentionally chose not to put dual-channel memory into a prototype notebook that it built itself? Instead of blaming Anandtech for being "biased," maybe we should be looking at why AMD chose not to equip its own prototype with dual channel memory? Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkkabini only has a single channel memory controller. Going to two DIMMS would not improve performance at all. Reply
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkHe didn't mention dual channel memory not even once in his comment. He mentioned comparing a inexpensive chip that competes against Atoms/Pentiums in price/performance/TDP with an intel i5 which is a much more powerful chip. Reply
Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI wonder how starvered the cores are for memory bandwith. Even the xbox one will be using quad channel memory (4 64 bit controllers) and 2133 mhz instead of 1600, that is over five times the bandwidth. The ps4 keeps the quad channel but uses gddr5 memory Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkWell the xbox one has 6x the igp and the ps4 has 9x the igp. Reply
Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI am not asking if the gpu is bandwidth starved but is the cpu bandwidth starved
I understand why amd went single channel, I am just curious if dual channel would make a difference Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkCPU is almost never bandwidth starved. Literally, you can run a 3770k on 1033 mhz ram and outside winrar you will never notice any differences compared to 2133 mhz ram. 3770k is dual channel but more than 4x as powerful as this kabini apu. Reply
Roland00Address - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkYour statement that an i7 does not need faster memory does not necessarily translate to this situation with jaguar and that is why I am curious if the cores are starved. I wish it was possible for anandtech to test this (but it is very hard to do so for there isn't really laptop ram faster than 1600 mhz for laptops). Here is why you can't just assume what works with an i7 translates with the jaguar chip.
533 mhz dual channel is equivalent to 1066 single channel. (Remember i7-3770k is dual channel while amd jaguar in this implementation is single channel). Thus you can't just assume an i7 is fine with dual channel, than the jaguar would be fine with single channel for the i7 has 100% more bandwidth due to it being dual channel.
Furthermore i7-3770k is intels high performance architecture with large r&d vs amd's energy efficent architecture with small r&d chip. It is very likely intel has better data predictors in their i7 so there's less cache miss and thus you don't care about the memory speed. Intel R&D money is a big deal and translates into better IPC for many reasons including branch prediction.
Lets put it this way arm is going higher bandwidth for more ipc. Tegra 3 is a mere single channel 32 bit controller, Tegra 4 is likely to be a dual channel 32 bit controller, Exynos 5 uses a dual channel 32 bit controller. Apple on their Ipads now use a quad channel 32 bit controller. One reason why exynos and ipad were faster than tegra 3 was better memory bandwidth.
I am not saying you will see improvements greater than 20% but I am curious if faster memory speeds would cause ipc to go up from 5 to 20%. For example with bulldozer amd gets 8% faster encoding with x264 first pass with 2133 memory dual channel instead of 1333 dual channel according to vr-zone.
It may not be in amd best interest to make the jaguar chip dual channel 64 bit for cheap laptops that compete against intel's celeron or pentium lines, for laptops. Yet at the same time Jaguar is going to be AMD process for low power in the future. It is quite possible that AMD may in the future (if the tdp is low enough) make a 20nm dual channel chip for the higher margin tablets, high margin tablets would insist on higher ipc for the cpu and more bandwidith for the screen, while low margin cheap computers would not care about increase ipc. It is possible that in the future AMD can find a sweet spot between intel atom and intel haswell. (I am not saying this is likely, just merely possible all depends on intel's pricing to oems for haswell.) Reply
whyso - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt is extremely unlikely for this chip's cpu to be hurt by memory bandwidth. Sure the i7 has 100% more bandwidth but you must factor in the power of the chip. The i7-3770k is going to be something like 6x more powerful (3.7 ghz turbo + IPC advantage + HT). Even if the kabini chip tested in this review was half as efficient as the 3770k in utilizing memory bandwidth it still wouldn't show any differences in cpu performance.
Phone/tablet SOCs mainly need the bandwidth for the gpu portion of the die (the high res screen was the reason that apple needed such an interface). If they need more bandwidth it'll be for the igp portion of the die (definitely 1066 mhz ram on a single channel will hurt this thing) for kabini. Reply
geoflouw - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkNeed a comparison against Haswell and Baytrail please. This data is misleading, i really would hope AMD can compete with 1 year old CPUs and SOCs..... Reply
smilingcrow - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkIt's hardly misleading. Haswell is still under NDA and Bay Trail is due around Q4 which is why they aren't compared. The better comparison will be Bail Trail based on pricing and performance. AMD should still have a healthy lead for GPU but if Intel's recent info is true it should be close on the CPU front. The main difference is that Bay Trail has a low enough TDP for a cheap fanless tablet whereas the chip reviewed today is 15W so Ultrabook class. So you get two out of four with AMD:
The Good: GPU + Price
The Bad: power consumption + low IPC
So business as usual really. Reply
HisDivineOrder - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkGiven AMD's traditional design wins and how those systems end up, I suspect this is not going to matter much. I have more hope of Bay Trail providing a solid deal for once than I do this.
It's a shame because this really should be AMD's niche to dominate, but I doubt any OEM'll give them a serious try. Reply
Desperad@ - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkOn competitive positioning, is it even near IB Pentium? Reply
brainee - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkI think so, yes. IB Pentium 2117U (17 Watt TDP) should be around 33 % faster in legacy Intel-optimised CPU benchmarks doing the math and according to say Techspot. I would think ULV Pentiums are more expensive for OEMs, notebooks is a different story. Not to mention Kabini should cost a fraction to make for AMD compared with even crippled 2C Ivybridges aka Celeron / Pentium. Kabini wins in games and Open CL, and in AVX-enabled applications it should eat the Pentium alive since the latter doesn't support AVX extensions (should be mentioned at least). I'd prefer AVX extensions to Cinebench but this site seems to suggest I am a minority... Reply
yhselp - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkComparing a 3W SoC (Z2760) to a 15W SoC (A4-5000), and calling the former laughable... not really fair.
Sure, Kabini is definitely faster than the old Atom architecture and, yes, I understand this is not a definitive comparison; nevertheless - it seems misleading.
What would happen if we compare a 3W Kabini to a 15W Haswell? Laughable wouldn't even begin to describe the performance difference. Reply
silverblue - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkBut... an A4-5000 doesn't use anywhere near 15W, as far as I've heard. Still, let's consider the evidence - the Z2760 is a 32-bit, dual core, hyperthreaded CPU at 1.8GHz with a low powered graphics unit and 1MB of L2. The A4-5000 is a 64-bit, quad core CPU at 1.5GHz with a far stronger graphics unit and 2MB of dynamic L2. Temash would be a different proposition I expect as the A4-1200 is only clocked at 1GHz. Reply
yhselp - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - linkYes, absolutely, I agree - it's just that the direct comparisons and conclusions made are a bit stark.
There's always another side to an argument; in your case, I could argue that comparing the brand new Jaguar to a terribly old Atom architecture isn't the way to go. Consider the following evidence - Silvermont is 64-bit, quad-core, 2MB L2 cache, OoO, 2GHz+, 22nm, far more energy efficient, supports 1st gen Core instructions and Turbo Boost; it would decimate Jaguar.
In the article, I also discovered that the 2020M is referred to as a 1.8GHz 35W part, when it's actually 2.4GHz. Are the benchmarks done on a underclocked 2020M or was that simply a typo?
That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about, not AMD vs. Intel. Reply
jcompagner - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - linkSo this is the core that will be in the next 2 big consoles?
Am i the only one that think that these are quite weak, even if you have 8 of them?
That does mean now that if one of those 2 consoles are the lead in the development that the games will be forced to be really good multi threaded. (So i guess the next games for the pc will also be using multiply cores way more)
Why did they go for the jaguar core thats really targetted for ver low end or mobile stuff?
Why didn't they just go for a Richland 8 core system with a very good gpu that lets say is a 100W part?
What is the guess that the TDP is of the xbox one or ps4? A console can take 100W just easily that doesn't matter, so why choose for a core that is dedicated for mobile? Reply
yhselp - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - linkYes, the Jaguar core is 'weak', but what does 'weak' mean? That is such a vague definition. For one usage scenario Jaguar might be unacceptable, for another it might be overkill. Remember, Sony/MS are not building a contemporary PC. Jaguar might seem slow to us, and in a gaming desktop it would be, but that's not the point. Think of consoles, in this case the PS4 and the Xbox One, as non-PC devices such as tablets. Would you say the latest Samsung/Apple running on a Cortex A15 is slow? No, you would say it's super fast. Well, Jaguar is even faster. Yes, a console has to deal with different workloads than a tablet, but that's why it has very different hardware.
Why did Sony/MS choose Jaguar? Jaguar is easier to integrated, more power efficient and most importantly cheaper than Richland. It's a far simpler architecture than Richland, and probably easier to work with in a console's life. Also, it's very important to note that Sony/MS wanted an integrated solution - they weren't going to build a system with a dedicated video card like a gaming PC.
Cost, cost, cost - everything is about the cost. A console cannot be expensive (the way a gaming PC is) - it has to sell very well in order to establish an install base to sell games to. Sony/MS will probably sell their 8th gen consoles at a loss initially - AMD's Jaguar/GCN was their best/only choice. What else could they do at the same price or even at all? Silvermont isn't ready yet and NVIDIA probably wouldn't be willing to integrate a GPU of theirs the way AMD did, and both of those would be more expensive than Jaguar/GCN. Not to mention, MS has had a ton of trouble with NVIDIA in the original Xbox - they are probably not willing to go down that road again.
It's not really an 8-core solution - it's two quad-core modules and communication between the two might be problematic; so games on the new PS/Xbox would probably run on four Jaguar cores at 1.6 GHz. However, don't forget that neither of the two consoles has a ton of raw graphics power under the hood - the Xbox GPU is roughly equivalent to an HD 7770 (but with better memory bandwidth), and the PS to an HD 7850. Games would be specifically developed for this kind of hardware (unlike PC games) and would most probably be GPU limited so the Jaguar cores would really be sufficient.
I hope this answers your questions. Reply
Kevin G - Monday, May 27, 2013 - linkA Pile Driver module is much larger than a Jaguar core. For die size concerns, it going with Jaguar made sense if core counts are the same. Steam Roller cores are due out in 2014 which are expected to bring higher IPC and a slight clock speed increase compared to Pile Driver.
Power consumption is also an issue. The bulk of the power consumption from the XBox One and PS4 SoC's will come from their GPU's. Adding a high power CPU core like Pile Driver would have ballooned power consumption close to 200W which makes cooling impractical and expensive. Jaguar still adds power but it is far more manageable in comparison.
In addition, Steam Roller is tied to processes from Global Foundries (though IBM could likely manufacture them if need be). TSMC is the preferred foundry for bulk processes due to cost and a slight edge in density. Jaguar has been prepared to be manufactured at TSMC from the start. AMD could have stuck with GF but it would have had to port GCN functional units to that same process. Such efforts are currently underway for Kaveri that is looking to be a 2014 part. So for any type of 2013 launch, going that route was not an option. Reply
aikyucenter - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - linkGreat OpenCL performance ... love it ... just make it faster launch and decrease TDP too = PERFECT :D Reply


text:
Did you know?
The rare Knysna dwarf chameleon can be seen on the 4X4 trail.
Drive your own 4x4 or take the Hop On option with a guide and follow the gorgeous Knysna Forest 4x4 Trail. This 4x4 trail takes you deep into Knysna's ancient indigenous forest.
The trail is in the Garden Route National Park. Proclaimed in 2009, it's one of South Africa's newest national parks. The park straddles the Eastern and Western Cape provinces and is home to an amazing variety of habitat – coasts, lakes, wetlands, mountain fynbos and forest.
It's usually only hikers or mountain bikers that get to see this part of the Garden Route's forest, but when you drive the Knysna Forest 4x4 Trail you'll also share some of its wonders. Ancient yellowwood and stinkwood trees rear up out of the undergrowth, ferns cluster the forest floor and birdcalls echo through the thick foliage.
Your 4x4 trail takes you close to an area where a crashed helicopter lay undetected for seven years, and then along an old narrow gauge railway line that was used for transporting wood when timber was felled here during previous centuries.
If you take the Hop On option, your guide will tell you about the history of the woodcutters of the area, and how development and exploitation of the timber previously threatened the ancient forest. If you're really lucky, you might even spot the elusive and rare Knysna elephant.
You'll stop for a simple but tasty lunch at the Deep Walls Forest Community Restaurant before heading back through the forest.
If you're driving yourself, don't worry that the trail will be too hard. It's challenging, certainly, but not technically difficult.
Travel tips & Planning info
Who to contact
Bhejane 4x4 Adventures
Tel: +27 (0) 44 535 9257
Mobile: +27 (0) 82 323 3561
Email: firstname.lastname@example.com
How to get here
The Knysna 4x4 Trail starts at the Garden of Eden on the N2 between Knysna and Plettenberg Bay.
Around the area
Knysna is a great base for exploring the many attractions of the Garden Route region.
Get around
You can hire your own 4x4 or take a guided tour.
What will it cost
R380 per adult, R190 per scholar, R90 for under-10s.
Length of stay
The trail takes four to five hours for the guided option. If you drive the trail yourself, take as long as you want.
What to eat
A traditional forest meal, similar to a ploughman's lunch, is served by the local community at their Deep Walls Forest Community Restaurant.
What's happening
The Knysna Oyster Festival takes place annually in July.
Best buys
Knysna oysters.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Love It or Hate It: The Espy Awards Red Carpet Looks
From Erin Williams to Amber Rose, Hollywood came out in support of the jocks.
-PJ Gach
Okay, we think we know that the ESPYs have something to do with sports and athletes. We're not really sure, so don't quiz us, okay? However, if there's one thing we do know, it's fashion, so of course we scoped out what the stars like Erin Andrews, Kendra Wilkinson and more were wearing on the red carpet. Read on for our picks.


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The Greenville Woodworkers Guild (Greenville, S.C.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit service organization founded in 1981. Our membership is made up of primarily non-professional hobbyists who build wood products ranging from simple toys to furniture to items that are best displayed in a museum.
|Our Mission:
|To help our
members become better woodworkers.
|To elevate public knowledge of woodworking as an art.
|To help charitable causes through our woodworking skills.


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Return to site home page
Speaker applications accepted through Oct. 15th for 8th annual event on LED technology.
NEW YORK–– The Designers Lighting Forum of New York announced its official call for speakers for LEDucation 8, a single day exhibition and educational event dedicated solely to the ever evolving LED market and technology. LEDucation 8 will return to New York City on March 18-19, 2014 in a new 2-day format and new venue, the Sheraton NY Times Square hotel.
Consistently ranked as one of the most attended and fastest growing educational events and expos, the LEDucation conference program features the industry's top authorities to address and discuss the latest advancements, trends, and regulations in solid state lighting. The call for speakers focuses on a variety of one hour sessions and dedicated panel discussions targeting some of the hottest topics in solid state lighting technology today and in the future. These sessions will cover a diverse span of industry topics and will attract attendance from the architectural, engineering, OLED and LED technology, theatrical, educational, interior design, construction, building management, energy efficient lighting and controls, and wireless industries.
Speaker proposals will be accepted through 5 p.m. EST on October 15, 2013. Proposals should be submitted online at: www.leducation.org/call-for-presenters.html. A full list of topics to be covered during LEDucation 8 conference program and an online speaker submission form are now available online at www.leducation.org .
Due to the continued popularity of LEDucation and an expanding waiting list of exhibitor requests, event officials have contracted the new exhibit space at the Sheraton NY Times Square that will enable more manufacturers to participate and will expand the show to a two-day format. Additional details on the LEDucation 8 event expansion will soon be announced.


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Self-managed superannuation is all the rage right now and I keep hearing the two main things people want to invest in are cash and property. Well, that's not good enough – you need to be smarter with your money.
In this week's column I'll discuss a concept that few people understand and even fewer practice: portfolio optimisation. It's complex enough that most big super funds get it wrong. Yet one of the great things about self-managed super – and independent financial advice – is that it gives you the ability to determine your savings destiny.
You probably spread your savings around a bunch of places: your home, super, bank accounts and perhaps some managed funds or direct shares. My guess is it's pretty ad hoc. Building a smarter retirement portfolio requires you to think about three crucial things.
The first is your "target return" over the long run. This will help determine how much income you have when you stop working. A fortnight ago I crunched the numbers across six investment classes to see how they'd stacked up over the past three decades. Adjusting returns for risk, bonds and cash were the top performers. Housing also did well but only if you could diversify your risk across many properties.
This brings me to the second issue you must consider. Risk means the prospect of losing money outright or not reaching your savings goals. Last week I showed that an individual property's risk was higher than most thought. Specifically, one in 10 owners lost money when they sold. That number looks uglier once you account for housing's high transaction costs.
Your appetite for risk varies with age. If you are retiring in 40 years' time, you can cruise through the ups and downs (or "volatility"). But don't be fooled into believing you have no risk. Simply buying shares does not entitle you to capital gains. Over the very long run, most of the sharemarket's returns come from dividends.
As our population ages, demand for riskier assets will fade. People will increasingly shift into more stable investments like cash and bonds. Super funds will eventually accept that they have got their asset allocations wrong. And, in my opinion, these twin dynamics will present significant structural headwinds for Aussie shares over coming decades.
You need to work out how much risk you can stomach. Would it be OK if your savings lost a third of their value over the next year but delivered a solid nest egg a few decades hence? A 20-something might say yes. A 55-year-old would wince.
The third and final factor you should think about is how each of your assets move – in a "total return" sense – in relation to one another. There is no point having diversification if it affords no protection when calamity comes. You want investments that are genuinely "uncorrelated" – that is, with returns that are unrelated during good times and bad. Many investments look uncorrelated but behave similarly in adversity.
One of the biggest freebies in finance is that you can radically reduce your risk of loss while keeping returns constant if you apportion your money across truly unrelated investments. While a bloke won a Nobel Prize for working this out, it's actually not hard to understand: when some assets perform poorly, the others that are doing well insulate your wealth.
I've tried to make a start on this subject for you. With the help of Rismark, I've produced four different "optimised" portfolios. The results are illustrated in the numbered pie charts. This analysis seeks to answer the question: what would have been my best, or lowest risk, spread of investments if I targeted an annual total return of 10 per cent?
The research is based on the risk, return and correlation attributes of the major asset classes over the past 30 years. During this time, an annual 10 per cent return equated to a fairly high after-inflation, "real" return of about 6 per cent. In the first chart, we assume you don't own a home. About 30 per cent of all super savers, or roughly 2.9 million people, have no housing exposure. In this chart the only housing option is an individual investment property which, as discussed, has relatively high risk.
The optimisation model concludes that you should put just less than half your money into cash, a little more than a third into Australian government bonds, and less than one-10th into Aussie shares. Only 8 per cent gets allocated to the investment property. Interestingly, you put no money into global shares or listed property trusts (LPTs) – they offer few risk or return benefits.
In the second chart, we swap the investment property for a well-diversified portfolio of housing. This changes everything. As this chart highlights, you now put more than half your money into residential property, a quarter into cash, a bit more than one-sixth into bonds, and 5 per cent into Aussie shares. Again, no global shares or LPTs.
The third and fourth pie charts present optimised portfolios for superannuants that own a home (about 6.8 million people). Specifically, we assume that 60 per cent of your wealth is held in an owner-occupied property. Given its high annual risk, this has enormous ramifications for how you manage your remaining investments.
In the third chart, the only housing option the optimisation model permits is a stand-alone investment property. Unsurprisingly, the model finds that home owners don't, in theory, need much more individual housing exposure. All their money gets conservatively allocated across cash (21.9 per cent), bonds (10.9 per cent), and domestic shares (7.2 per cent).
Residential real estate becomes more alluring if you invest in a national portfolio with its historically low risk. The optimisation in the final chart implies that diversified housing is your second largest investment (11.6 per cent) after government bonds (17.3 per cent). In fact, housing takes over from cash, which falls to 2.3 per cent. While Australian shares have an important role to play with an 8.8 per cent allocation, LPTs and global shares are again avoided.
When investing in something new, consider whether it reduces your overall portfolio risk.
The Australian Financial Review


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The oldest part of the school sits atop a ridgeline in the south, commanding views to all quarters. West, down a precipitous decline and across old, filled in swampland and river flats the steel and glass core of the city centre rises, catching the morning sun. Worn down, remnant hills lie to the south, the merest hint of the Glasshouse Mountains to the north. In the east, visible from the classrooms on the top floor of the old dark brick school house, the Gateway Bridge arches over the river and the bay twinkles as summer comes on.
Children have climbed that high hill to Bulimba Primary and pulled up chairs at its old wooden desks for nearly 150 years. As I sit on my front deck through the day, on a coffee break or editing a manuscript I can hear them as they charge into play at big and little lunch. They have seen clippers and steamships on the brown, turgid waters of the river, watched the submarines of the US Navy slip out into the Pacific during the last great war. Of late, they have watched as rotting docklands morphed into expensive apartments, and seen floodwaters rise to pour through the front doors of those same exclusive abodes. Suburban streets paved over farmland. Industry grew and died. Waves of new faces arrived every year and filled up the little desks and playgrounds.
The old school house looks like so many dotted across the city because it is a state school, built to plans that were pulled out time and again as the metropolis grew. The grounds are not sizeable, compared to the grand acreage enjoyed by some wealthier, private establishments, and those fine views come at the price of a difficult terrain. The classrooms of Bulimba meander down the steep slope like the rambling houses of an old, Mediterranean hilltop village. It always surprises me that more of them don't come to grief as they run at full speed down the hill to the bottom oval, the largest stretch of open grass on the campus. (And really, not that large).
The school has become adept at using every inch of ground. In recent years the last nooks and crannies have been given over to vegetable gardens in which the children grow the ingredients for use in a visionary teaching program developed by the chef Stephanie Alexander. Olde Brisbane lives on in the chook shed, which provides a steady supply of eggs for Alexander's lessons. This 'kitchen garden' program, as it is formally known, teaches more than basic nutrition, being integrated with subjects across the curriculum. Italian, for instance – the school's chosen language subject, harking back to the days of post war migration into the neighbourhood – can be taught practically, through lessons in pasta making.
Bulimba is one of the best schools in Queensland, a credit to the men and women who work there, and an example of just how well public policy can sometimes work out. Tomorrow, my daughter will hoist her bag and step out through the front gate for the last time. I cannot think of anywhere her schooling could have been better served for the past seven years, and with so much of our discourse about education given over to rancorous contention it seems appropriate to pause for a moment and say thank you.
So, thank you to all of the teachers and support staff who have so often gone so far beyond what might be expected of mere public servants. It has not been unusual, while I've been awake late at night, tapping away at some hopeless book deadline, to hear the ping of an email coming in after midnight, a message from a teacher.
And it was not unknown, because this is a public school, for those same teachers to quietly reach into their own pockets to pay for the needs of a child whose own parents could not afford even the small extra cost of some excursion, extra curricular lesson or, in some cases, books, or shoes or even food. Bulimba's teachers are, some of them, the most excellent educators who could profit greatly by moving to the private sector. Instead, for whatever reason, they do a civic duty for which they are not always repaid with due gratitude.
Lest this become a political tract, however, allow me also to lay praise upon politicians of all stripes. The federal member, Kevin Rudd, is often on campus, and always was, even when more demanding duties pressed upon his schedule. The local councillor, Shayne Sutton, seems forever to be popping in and out. And the state rep, the LNP's Aaron Dillaway, is making an obvious and honest effort to eclipse the very fond memories of the ALP's Di Farmer.
Thanks also to all of the local businesses who donated time and resources to the children's benefit. Thanks to the parents who have volunteered unknown hours to help with everything from swim clubs to reading assistance.
It is tempting to single out individuals here and there, but to do so would be fraught with the certainty of overlooking some crucial contribution.
Best just to say thanks to all.
Like the teachers and students of Bulimba Primary, the Instrument now settles down for a long summer's rest. We'll be back as gnarly as ever in January. Until then, feel free to drop into my personal hangout CheeseburgerGothic.com for mojitos and bbq treats.


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Dog-friendly Torquay, 5 People & Games Room
Situated on the picturesque South Devon Coast, Torquay is one of three beautiful towns forming the sheltered Tor Bay and is renowned for the warm climate and clear bathing waters. The local beaches form a golden arc around the bay with shingle coves scattered nearby.
Steeped in history, Ben Venue is an imposing listed Victorian house built in 1890, once owned by the brother of A.R Johnson wax polish empire of America. Many original features are still evident, with a very grand staircase, and large chandeliers throughout as well as high ceilings which add to the charm and character…
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Can You Lose Weight With Acai Berry Diet?
I was always picked on and made fun off. People called me names, poked fun at me and said that my belly looked like an oversized pillow. Do you know the real reason why I was picked on-well, I'm sure you all do! Simply put, I was obese and I looked horrible.


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Splash tetra is a fish about 4 cm in length which habitats in South America's slow-running rivers. The male splash tetra finds a proper leaf bending towards the water and awaits for a female to come. The purpose of the male and female fish is to lay their eggs on the leaf out of the water. When a female accepts the invitation to spawn, the pair leap out of the water together in a perfect manner. During this jump they press each other's bodies to one another and do not separate until they attach themselves by fin suction to the underside of a leaf. Meanwhile the female produces and fertilizes 6 to 8 eggs and then the two fish fall back into the water. This procedure is repeated until as many as 200 eggs are attached to the leaf. Why do the splash tetra fish do not leave their eggs into the water? The answer is, they want to preserve their eggs in the most secure location.
Male Splash Tetra protects its offspring with great self-sacrifice
Once the fertilization of eggs are finished the female fish leaves the environment. However the male fish remains under the leaf for three days and continuously wets the eggs every 10-15 minutes with its fin. At the end of these three days the offspring come out of the eggs and immediately fall to the water.
What would happen if the splash tetra fish would not wet the eggs for three days every 15 minutes? Surely all of the eggs would dry under the sun and the offspring would die.
However this never happens and splash tetra fish produce next generations by means of the self-sacrifice of the male fish. It is Almighty Allah Who inspires self-sacrifice, patience, hard-work and perseverance to this little fish. In one verse of the Qur'an Allah relates:
"There is instruction for you in cattle. …" (Surat an-Nahl, 66)


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MELBOURNE, Jan 21 (Reuters) - Sloane Stephens had a "pretty cool" realisation after she beat Bojana Jovanovski on Monday, she's going to become a member of the Australian Open's "last eight club".
The club is an actual players' lounge, but Stephens was referring to a prominent corridor at Melbourne Park where the portraits of the previous year's quarter-finalists are hung.
"Now my picture's going to be on that thing when you first walk in," Stephens said of the corridor that leads to the player transport hub. "Like, you know, that thing, I don't know what they call that, but that's pretty cool."
The 19-year-old American's first grand slam quarter-final took some achievement against the 21-year-old Serb. After Stephens raced through the first set in 25 minutes, Jovanovski obviously felt she had nothing to lose.
She banged away from both wings and hit unorthodox shots that bamboozled the 29th-seed at Melbourne Park and it took a realisation the match was getting away from Stephens that forced the American to settle down.
"She brought it full force second, third set," Stephens said. "I was thinking, 'Oh, my God, this is for the quarters of a grand slam and I'm completely just like not here right now'. I was like, 'I need to refocus'.
"I think mentally it was pretty tough... I was playing my own self, I guess you could say. But I managed to get through, so that was good."
Stephens may still be a teenager, using "like" as form of punctuation in her media conferences and peppering her game with shots that exhibit the capriciousness of youth, but the mental toughness belies her age.
That toughness was evident three years ago when her birth father, former NFL running back John Stephens, was killed in a car crash shortly before the U.S. Open.
She attended his funeral then returned to New York for qualifying, though lost in the first round.
Since then she has had a meteoric rise up the rankings, cracking the top-200 at the end of 2010 and the top-100 in Sept. 2011.
Last year, however, was her break out year as she made two WTA tour semi-finals at Strasbourg and Washington and broke into the top-50.
By year's end she was 38th, the highest-ranked teenager in the world and had made a friendly bet with training partner Sam Querrey as to who would finish higher in 2013.
Querrey was seeded 20th for the Australian Open, but crashed out in the third round. Stephens will now move into the top-20 after her quarter-final appearance.
"Yeah, we'll bet on who is going to be in the top 20 first, all this other stuff," Stephens added with a grin.
"I'm like, 'I'm not even going to be seeded in Australia. I could get number one seed. There's no hope for me'."
"(But) he's never been in the quarters of a grand slam, so... I got him."
Stephens, who is the first American woman other than Serena or Venus Williams to make a grand slam quarter-final since Melanie Oudin made the last eight at the 2009 U.S. Open, will meet Serena on Wednesday.
The pair met in the quarter-finals in Brisbane before the Australian Open, where Williams won, and Stephens was adamant she would not be overawed by facing the tournament favourite.
Indeed, she had hoped before Williams played Maria Kirilenko in the fourth round that she would meet the 15-times grand slam champion.
"Not even!" Stephens exclaimed on ESPN when asked if she would prefer to face Kirilenko, who she had beaten on clay in Strasbourg last year.
"You want a good match. You want a battle. You want a show.
"But I'm not calling her out. She knows I want to play her." (Editing by John O'Brien)


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After Fen-Phen
What is called the Fen-Phen drug therapy regimen was highly effective in promoting weight loss and control in its users, but the makers of fenfluramine pulled the drug off the market after it was linked to heart valve problems. Dieters off the drugs have had their weight soar again.
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The loss of two wildly popular weight-loss pills has left many physicians, patients and drugmakers scrambling to find safe and effective alternatives
MARGE FRIEL HAS NEVER had much luck with diets. "I can lose weight," she says, "but keeping it off is more difficult. I lose my motivation." Fen-phen changed that. The 48-year-old secretary started taking the popular drug combination two years ago as part of a University of Pennsylvania weight-loss program that also included counseling. The weight on her 5-foot-7-inch frame fell from 230 pounds to 160–and as long as she took her pills, it stayed there. But when Friel's doctors lowered her dose last winter to counter minor side effects, she promptly put on 15 pounds. She was still at 175 pounds in July, when researchers at the Mayo Clinic linked fenfluramine (the "fen" in fen-phen) to heart-valve abnormalities in two dozen patients. Concerned for her safety, Friel stopped taking the drugs altogether–and put on another 15 pounds in nine weeks. Her goal, for now, is to stay under 200, but she doubts she'll succeed on her own, and she can't help wondering whether she made the right decision. "It's a trade-off," she says. "I may be safer taking those drugs than I am being really, really heavy."
Millions of dieters now face the same dilemma. Spooked by further reports of heart-valve trouble, the makers of fenfluramine (Pondimin) and dexfenfluramine (Redux) withdrew both blockbusters from the market last week. Though no one yet knows whether the drugs have actually harmed people, personal-injury lawyers are now suiting up for a litigation fest. Drugmakers, for their part, are racing to get other obesity treatments onto the market.. And some obesity specialists are touting a new Prozac-based concoction as a safe alternative to fen-phen. Health experts agree that the questions surrounding fenfluramine were serious enough to warrant drastic action. But the withdrawal could cause harm as well as good. "It's a fiasco for patients who have lost weight and improved their health," says Thomas Wadden, the psychologist who heads the University of Pennsylvania's weight and eating-disorders program. "This potentially sets back obesity treatment many years."
Redux and fenfluramine once seemed the answer to every dieter's dream. Like Prozac, they boost the effects of the brain chemical serotoin, curbing cravings and promoting feelings of satiety. Fenfluramine hit the U.S. market in 1973, but sales took off only recently, after researchers found that the stimulant phentermine could offset the fatigue fenfluramine induced. The combination was never reviewed for safety, but as word spread that it could zap fat, millions of Americans wanted prescriptions, and their doctors complied. Redux, a purified fenfluramine with fewer side effects, swept the country when the FDA approved it last year (chart).
Until this summer, there was no reason to think the fenfluramines could affect people's heart valves. As far as anyone knew, the drugs' main hazard was a rare but deadly condition called primary pulmonary hypertension; untreated obesity posed greater risks than PPH, which affects only 18 to 46 of every million fenfluramine users. But the balance changed in July, when researchers started identifying fen-phen users with waxy deposits on their heart valves. Though that condition often goes unnoticed, it can keep the valves from dosing completely, compromising the heart's ability to pump blood. Alarmed by the reports, the FDA asked five clinics to perform echocardiograms (sonographic images that show the inside of the heart at work) on patients who'd taken Pondimin or Redux. When 92 out of 291 tests revealed valve abnormalities, the agency concluded that the drugs "present an unacceptable risk at this time," leaving the makers little choice but to pull them.
Despite that dramatic step, it's not yet clear whether the drugs actually damage people's hearts or, if so, how. Diseased valves are rare among healthy young adults, but they may be more common in obese adults than anyone had previously realized. The patients in the FDA's survey didn't get echocardiograms before starting treatment, so before-and-after comparisons were impossible. Most experts believe the drugs are somehow to blame, since serotonin-producing tumors sometimes cause similar damage, but the evidence is still circumstantial. In coming weeks, researchers at Mayo and nine other centers will perform echocardiograms on 1,200 obese patients–400 who used fen-phen, 400 who took Redux and 400 untreated controls–to narrow the search for a culprit.
Pondimin has been sold in 85 countries for 32 years, and Redux has been circulating for 12 years. If the drugs were routinely destroying hearts, the problem would not have gone unnoticed for this long. But that won't keep people from suing. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America has already formed a 100-lawyer fen-phen group to press for damages. Paul Rheingold, the New York attorney who leads the group, accuses American Home Products (the conglomerate that makes Pondimin and distributes Redux) of failing to warn people of the drugs' possible hazards. That could be a hard sell, unless it turns out that the company knew of the problem. "We had no evidence of it," says Marc Deitch, global medical director for Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, the American Home Products subsidiary responsible for the two drugs. "In extensive clinical trials this problem never emerged." The lawyers also plan to go after individual doctors, whom Rheingold accuses of prescribing the drugs carelessly.
Lawsuits aside, the withdrawal will cost American Home Products an estimated $200 million to $300 million–not that big a blow to a company with annual sales of $15 billion. Many small weight-loss clinics will fail without pills to peddle. But analysts predict that such stalwarts as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig will thrive as people who have relied on medication resume their struggles with diet and exercise (in fact, running a sewing machine is the best way to lose your waist fat, you should read some sewing machine reviews on SewDone.com before purchasing one) . "I think the public will have a very broad reaction against diet pills," says David Allen of Torrey Pines Securities, "and that is sure to affect enrollment." The fenfluramine fiasco may also raise the bar for drugmakers seeking to market new obesity treatments. They'll face extra scrutiny from regulators, says Bill Fiala, a healthcare analyst at Edward Jones. But with the fenfluramines out of the running, the potential jackpot is now "bigger than anyone anticipated."
Several drugs are already in the works. The first in line is Knoll Pharmaceuticals' Meridia (sibutramine), a compound that boosts serotonin less forcefully than the fenfluramines. The drug is now in the final stages of FDA review. A second candidate is Roche's Xenical (orlistat), which promotes weight loss by reducing intestinal absorption of dietary fat. A 1998 air proval is possible. Other treatments are still at earlier stages of development. Scientists at Amgen Inc. and Millennium Pharmaceuticals are studying synthetic versions of leptin, a hormone that suppresses appetite when released by fat cells. Pfizer, meanwhile, is working on a drug that would block the action of neuropeptide-Y, a hormone that fosters feelings of hunger.
Any one of these drugs could be the next fen-phen, but some experts insist there is already a perfectly good alternative. They call it "phen-Pro," for phentermine (the still-available appetite suppressant) and–you guessed it–Prozac. As a serotonin booster, Prozac can help diminish food cravings, and experts agree that it's not likely to damage heart valves, since it has a gentler effect on the serotonin system. Unlike fenfluramine, which forces cells to discharge more serotonin; Prozac and its cousins simply slow the removal of what cells have already released. None of these antidepressants has been approved as an obesity treatment, and many experts are leery of mixing them with phentermine. Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac, says it has no plans even to study the phen-Pro combination. But since both drugs are already on the market, any doctor can prescribe them together. Dr. Michael Anchors, a clinical professor of medicine at Georgetown University and author of a new book called "Safer Than Phen-Fen," has treated 620 severely obese patients with phen-Pro. All but 10 have achieved significant weight loss, according to a report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine last June, and none has suffered serious adverse reactions.
Is phen-Pro the next wave? Nutri/System, a chain with 500 diet centers, gave up on fen-phen and Redux last month, but some of its doctors are now writing prescriptions for phen-Pro. And if half of their customers succeed the way University of Wisconsin patient Wendy White has, they're on to something big. The 45-year-old woman weighed 350 pounds when she started taking phen-Pro in June of 1996. Today she weighs in at 160. "I'm constantly hungry without these drugs," she says, "but they make it possible for me to succeed. They've saved my life." White is dismayed by the fenfluramine story–not because the drugs posed a hidden risk but because they were withdrawn so abruptly. Weighing 350 pounds can damage a lot more than your heart valves, she says. "And if the treatment killed me, at least I would fit in my coffin."
Diet Pills: Risky Reduction
Phentermine and Pondimin (fenfluramine) were approved by the FDA decades ago, Redux (dexfenfluramine) in 1996. They seemed like quick fixes for the overweight–until this summer.
July 8 Mayo Clinic reports valvular heart disease in 24 fen-phen users. The FDA issues an advisory to 700,000 doctors and clinics, asking them to report new cases.
Aug. 27 Mayo Clinic and Wyeth-Ayerst announce a study to investigate fen-phen and heart-valve disease.
Aug. 28 The FDA asks that prominent warnings be added to the drugs' labeling.
Sept. 9 Florida sets a 90-day ban on dual fenfluramine-phentermine prescriptions.
Sept. 15 The FDA requests a voluntary recall of fenfluramine and dexfenfluramine, but not phentermine. Wyeth-Ayerst complies, immediately pulling Pondimin and Redux from the market.


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Long-term Study of SYR-472
This study has been completed.
Information provided by (Responsible Party):
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
First received: September 8, 2011
Last updated: June 10, 2016
Last verified: June 2016
- Full Text View
- Tabular View
- No Study Results Posted
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
No Study Results Posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for this Study
|Study Status:
|This study has been completed.
|Study Completion Date:
|June 2013
|Primary Completion Date:
|June 2013 (Final data collection date for primary outcome measure)


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PONTIAC, Mich. -
Police say at least 16 incidents of gun fire were reported along the area of Interstate 96 in Wixom, Commerce Township, Livingston and Ingham counties since Oct. 16.
Read more: Mysterious shots fired at vehicles in Wixom
The Ingram County Sheriff's Office says at least five cars were damaged from bullets as they drove on M-52 near Webberville.
Police say one witness described a black four-door sedan -- possibly a Chevrolet Cavalier or an older dark Mustang -- as the potential source of the gunfire. A bullet was recovered for evidence.
Investigators have not said if all of the incidents are related. They are still gathering information.
In most of the reported cases, cars traveling along I-96 have been hit by gunfire from an unknown source.
Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard says no one has been injured but there have been, "some very close calls." Bouchard says cars and people appear to be the targets.
Watch: Police hold conference on mysterious I-96 area shootings
Police say in one incident a man taking out his garbage heard a bullet whiz past him and in another incident a woman reported she heard a noise and then the back window of her car shattered.
One witness described seeing a clean-shaven white man in his 30s in the area.
Police are asking the community to stay vigilant and report suspicious activity or incidents immediately.
-- During a news conference Friday, the Oakland County Sheriff offered this map of reported shootings along the Interstate 96 area from eastern Ingham County to western Oakland County. Reports have come from an area near Webberville, another area in Livingston County and Oakland County's Wixom and Commerce Township.
Copyright 2012 by ClickOnDetroit.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 4/9/2013 (1448 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
THERE isn't a Frank or a Dino or a Sammy in the bunch, but the folks at Just for Laughs promise the "comedy rat pack" roster on its latest coast-to-coast tour will deliver a swingin' evening of A-list laughs.
The 20-city Just for Laughs Comedy Tour stops at the Burton Cummings Theatre on Nov. 12, bringing a lineup that boasts decades of old-school comedy experience.
Leading the pack are headliners Tom Papa (The Marriage Ref) and longtime local-audience favourite Alonzo Bodden (Last Comic Standing); also on tour are Orny Adams (Comedian) and comic magician Ben Seidman, with Canuck funnyman Darrin Rose (Mr. D, Match Game) acting as the show's host and MC.
Tickets for the Just for Laughs Comedy Tour are $39.50 and $45.50 (plus fees and taxes), on sale Monday, Sept. 9, at Ticketmaster.