AMD announces low-cost desktop chipset AM1

[Himanshu Arora]

With an aim to dominate the desktop in emerging markets, chipmaker AMD has announced the AM1, a new low-cost SoC. It's effectively a sibling of the Kabini family of chips, that were launched last year with both dual- and quad-core CPUs and GPUs on the same chipset -- very similar to what just landed on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. While Kabini was destined primarily for portables, AM1 is designed to take on desktops.

The company is offering the chipset and motherboard combo at an estimated starting price of $60. While the price seems quite reasonable, the chipset has some restrictions. According to ArsTechnica, motherboard manufacturers ASRock and Gigabyte say that AM1 will be limited to a 25W maximum power draw from the chipset, along with a PCIe 2.0 restriction. The company hasn't yet formally announced specs for the AM1.

AMD says that the new chipset is better than Intel's Bay Trail platform, as it has higher memory speeds, 16 GB memory support, an upgradable socket, and Windows XP support. With emerging markets witnessing a decline in PC sales due to an increase in adoption of smartphones and tablets, it would be interesting to see how well the AM1 is received. The new chipset is set for launch on April 9.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/55910-amd-announces-low-cost-desktop-chipset-am1.html

 

[Kibaruk]

Although this sounds cool, what do they mean by upgradable socket? upgradable CPU?

Sounds nice for nettops and xbmc servers, though we still need information on frequency and whatnot.

 

[GhostRyder]

Interesting enough, but I do not know how much of a point this will have in my book except to people who just want a really cheap desktop. The power draw will be nice for people who don't want high electric bills I guess but this just really does not seem necessary.

 

[Kibaruk]

Interesting enough, but I do not know how much of a point this will have in my book except to people who just want a really cheap desktop. The power draw will be nice for people who don't want high electric bills I guess but this just really does not seem necessary.

Cheap and low powered NAS server sounds like something I could use this for $60 plus a cheap case with integrated power and a ram dim for less than $110, along with topbox or streaming device, or VPN or whatnot. All depends on the clocks.

 

[GhostRyder]

Cheap and low powered NAS server sounds like something I could use this for $60 plus a cheap case with integrated power and a ram dim for less than $110, along with topbox or streaming device, or VPN or whatnot. All depends on the clocks.

Now see, a low power server sound like an excellent idea in my book because in reality except for a minute amount of things, haveing a high multi-core processor with low power consumption can be more than enough to run a couple VM's and server side things without much trouble. I just don't see a desktop (Except maybe as you said for streaming) being a good idea with something like this.

 

[TheLastPanda]

Really disapointed the high end desktop market seems to have been abandoned by amd. The fx9xxx series was an overclocked furnace of a disaster from what I hear (the stock cooler was changed to a closed loop water cooler because the tdp was something like 125W). That leaves the bulldozer and pile-driver chips like the 6300 and 8300 or the negligibly better 6350/8350. Most motherboards for the am3 socket they used are very dated and intel even in the mid range dominates them all in single threaded performance. Mantle was my last hope after watching the whole ces conference and it has yet to be implemented well.

That being said, I have only found one game (arma 3) where my 6300 bottlenecks a 280x but I would at least like to see something worth upgrading to by the time its obsolete

 

[cliffordcooley]

Really disapointed the high end desktop market seems to have been abandoned by amd.

Probably for the best! If AMD can keep a foothold in the mobile space, they will survive the long hall.

 

[TheLastPanda]

Probably for the best! If AMD can keep a foothold in the mobile space, they will survive the long hall.

but amd and intel are the only two companies with the legal rights to produce chips on an x86 architecture, so they enthusiast pc market will have a pseudo monopoly on it. It will also be a legal monopoly since it is only on a price range of pc's and not on the market in general. Competition is healthy, and to me this looks like they aren't willing to put up a fight in contested areas

 

[dividebyzero]

but amd and intel are the only two companies with the legal rights to produce chips on an x86 architecture

VIA also has an x86 licence FWIW

Competition is healthy, and to me this looks like they aren't willing to put up a fight in contested areas

Competition was largely an illusion built upon a single good AMD architecture arriving in conjunction with a flawed Intel one (NetBurst). AMD have always lived in Intel's shadow- from before their inception ( Intel's Bob Noyce invested his own money and name to allow AMD to reach their working capital target for incorporation), being at Intel and Zilog's beck and call in the early years, through to the unequal fight against a much larger, diverse, and better equipped Intel since AMD started relying upon their own architecture.

 

[Kibaruk]

AMD relies on (or used to) their bang for the buck, I used to find a better performance per dollar spent on AMD's solutions, not sure how things are now since haven't built or looked into nowadays machines.

 

[theBest11778]

I forget the exact amounts, but I remember reading Intel invests something like $50B a year on R&D + Fabs, AMD invests like $5B on both CPUs, and GPUs. If you want to give AMD $10-$20B a year for R&D they'd probably catch up. Instead I find it incredible that they're competitive AT ALL. Not to mention they keep Nvidia on their toes constantly. I think it's smart for them to find profitable markets that they can compete in. Anyone thinking AMD will ever win the single threaded performance crown again have lost their minds. As gaming is the most intensive task I use my PC for (besides the occasional video encoding,) I'm really hoping they ramp up the APUs. I want to see R9 270X equivalent integrated with comparable CPU gaming performance to Intel (Mantle should fix that over time,) with a 75w TDP or less, and I want it for $150-$200. Bet that's what AMD wants too, because most of us on here would be pretty good with that vs a $200 Intel CPU and a $200+ Nvidia GPU. I say give it 2 years.

 

[GeforcerFX]

This makes sense the most common desktop computers I have sold in the last 6 months have has either a A4-5000 or A6-5200, HP and Lenovo both made towers with those cpus in them, they run off laptop ac adapters but there still in a normal mATX mini tower like there normal desktops are, kinda weird, but there cheap, powerful enough, and there selling.