Published in PC Hardware

Mobile Kaveri tips up in HP laptop

by on05 May 2014



19W quad-core

AMD launched the first Kaveri parts a couple of months ago, but the rollout has been limited. The company is currently selling just two desktop SKUs in retail. There are no mobile parts and there are no 45W desktop parts, either.

However, the first mobile Kaveri parts could be just around the corner and this would hardly be news were it not for the surprisingly low TDP. Computerbase.de came across a curious HP leak which points to a new 19W part with some rather interesting specs. 

Meet the A10-7300 low-power Kaveri


The part in question is the A10-7300, a quad-core rated at just 19W. We still don’t know anything about its GPU though, but the rest of the spec looks rather promising. The A10-7300 runs at 2GHz, but it can hit 3.2GHz on turbo. That compares well to older mobile APUs. The same HP laptop is available with the A10-5750M, which is a 2.5GHz part capable of hitting 3.5GHz with Turbo Core, but it’s a 35W part.

As for the GPU, we can only speculate at this point. When it comes to low-power APUs, AMD usually tries to keep the core count high and saves energy by reducing the clocks. For example, the A10-5545M, a 19W Richland quad-core, ships with 384 shaders clocked at 450MHz to 554MHz (the CPU is clocked at 1.7GHz/2.7GHz). The A10-5747M is a closer match, as it’s clocked at 2.1GHz/2.9GHz. It features 384 Radeon cores clocked at 544 to 626MHz, but it’s a 25W part.

We would be very surprised to see anything less than 384 GCN cores on quad-core Kaveri ULV parts. On dual-core designs with a single module the number should be 192, but AMD could surprise us. 

Does it stand a chance against Haswell refresh parts?


AMD hasn’t had much luck in the mainstream mobile market for years and Kaveri isn’t about to change that overnight. However, the TDPs look quite a bit better and we’re expecting AMD’s integrated GPU to be as competitive as ever. After all, this is a 28nm part, we expected significant improvements. 

It’s still not enough to make a dent on Intel’s market share, but Kaveri is starting to look a lot better than Richland. While it won’t be able to take on many Haswell SKUs, it should offer relatively good overall performance and value, with superior GPU performance as its main selling point.

AMD’s iGPU performance isn’t only a concern for Intel, as it has long-term implications on the discrete market. The attach rate is slowly going down as Intel and AMD pack ever more powerful GPUs into their mainstream parts. This is bad news for Nvidia, which has dominated the mobile discrete landscape for years. The need for low-end discrete GPUs in mainstream notebooks is disappearing fast.

Last modified on 05 May 2014
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