AMD Hondo Tablet APU Arrives in 2012 with 4.5W TDP

AMD has officially announced that 2012 will witness the introduction of a new low-power APU, code-named Hondo, specially developed to be used in tablet devices, which will improve upon the specs of the current Desna Z-01 accelerated processing unit.

AMD made the existence of this chip official during the company’s 2012 Financial Analyst Day, when it also unveiled a series of details regarding the Hondo APU.

Much like the Z-01 accelerated processing unit that it’s designated to replace, Hondo will also use the Bobcat CPU core, which will be paired with a DirectX 11 capable onboard GPU.

According to AMD, Hondo APUs can include either one or two x86 computing cores and will be built on the 40nm node, while its TDP is estimated at a rather low 4.5W.

This is a significant improvement when compared to the 5.9W TDP of Desna, and should help tablets powered by AMD’s next-gen Z-series accelerated processing units to deliver even better battery life.

Going forward, AnandTech revealed that AMD wants to get into the sub-2W market with a new APU design, most probably based on the 2013 Tamesh processor, which will be AMD’s first tablet APU to use a true system-on-a-chip (SoC) design.

From an architectural standpoint, Tamers is a rather interesting chip since it will include a graphics core based on the company’s recently launched GCN architecture, enabling applications to take advantage of the improved computing performance and Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) of the chip.

Moving back to Hondo, AMD expects this APU to arrive in the second half of 2012, just in time to power some of the first Windows 8 tablets.

AMD hasn’t said who will build these devices, but if the chip maker manages to stick to its schedule, quite a few Hondo-powered tablets should make their arrival in the fourth quarter of this year.

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