AMD’s Processor Hondo Ready for Windows 8 Launch

Texas-based CPU designer Advanced Micro Devices, also known as AMD, is currently preparing and gathering stocks for the Q4 launch of the company’s first tablet targeted processor called Hondo.

The chip is reportedly made at TSMC in the same 40 nm manufacturing process as Brazos 2.0. AMD’s long awaited Trinity architecture will arrive this month as we’ve revealed here, while the desktop Piledriver versions will have to wait until August. The Hondo CPU will be an Ultra-Low Power product for AMD and the expected TDP is around the 4.5 watts mark.

With such a low power consumption, AMD’s Hondo will likely come in contact with Intel’s Clover Field later next year and a plethora of ARM based CPUs. We honestly don’t know what to believe when comparing AMD’s iGPU with the one Intel has licensed from Imagination Technologies for its Clover Field tablet processor. It may be that, because of the fact that most applications in a Winodws 8 environment will be DirectX optimized, AMD’s iGPU might come out on top.

On the other hand, a 40 nm CPU from AMD can hardly compete in battery life with a 32 nm or 22 nm processor from Intel. Brazos and Llano have been a pair of great successes for AMD, but now the ARM players are much more powerful than they were back in the Cortex A8 days. Windows 8, along with its ARM version will likely level the benchmarking field somehow, as we will be able to directly compare Qualcomm Adreno and Imagination technologies GPUs with iGPUs from AMD and Intel.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview