AMD Richland chips will arrive in notebooks next month, promise better graphics, battery life and a few extras

 
Yearly product cycles? AMD doesn't need that long, thank you. It's planning to release a fresh batch of low-power APUs just 11 months after Trinity. Known as Richland, this generation won't be vastly different at the silicon level, as it's built on the same 32nm process as Trinity, has the same number of transistors and offers very similar compute performance in terms of raw GFLOPs. However, there are some noteworthy upgrades in attendance, including a move to Radeon HD 8000M graphic processors, which are claimed to deliver a 20-40 percent increase in "visual performance" in higher-end models, plus power-saving tweaks that should provide over an hour of additional battery life while watching 720p video -- perhaps even enough for two extra episodes of House of Cards. Some Windows 8 enhancements will also tag along for the ride, and these will promptly be revealed if you read on past the break.

AMD Richland slide deck

 

Let's deal with Richland's hardware performance claims first, which are detailed in the slide deck above and include the obligatory "vs. Intel" comparisons that we've learned to treat with some caution. The top-end quad-core A10-5750M is claimed to beat a laptop Core i7 by over 50 percent in terms of 3DMark performance, and even a dual-core A6-5350M is said to have a 20 percent advantage. There's no sign of any all-round computing benchmarks, however, or even real-world gaming frame rate comparisons, so we'll wait to round up reviews of the new chips before making any judgement.

As for software enhancements within Windows 8, Richland includes face unlocking, off-screen gesture control (i.e., flapping your arms around to scroll) and AMD's own solution for WiFi-based screen mirroring to a DLNA-compatible display. As the video above shows, we had a quick play with a couple of these features back at MWC -- but they were demoed on a tricked-out Trinity laptop because Richland wasn't quite ready at the time. (You can also see more on the publicity video below.) Not every software feature will come with every Richland chip. Face unlock will only work on the quad-core A10 and A8 variants, for example, while Screen Mirror will work all the way down to the A6. We're not exactly sure why such limitations exist, given that even a dual-core ARM-powered Galaxy Nexus can handle face unlocking without much a-do, but there we go. In terms of the release schedule, here's where shortened product cycles can make things a little complicated: Richland should arrive in regular-shaped laptops (with TDPs between 20 and 35 watts) starting next month, while ultra-thin notebooks (17 watts or less) and desktop parts should get here by the Summer. By then, we'll be a lot closer to the launch of AMD's Kaveri APUs, which are to due to ship before the end of this year and should represent a more radical leap than Richland. And in the midst of all this, of course, we're also keeping a lookout for a fin in the water, aka Haswell.

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