Final Thoughts

If y'all were expecting something powerful from Kabini you'll be sorely disappointed -- dare we say a little delusional, perhaps. The A4-5000 certainly isn't designed to compete with products such every bit the Intel Core i7-3517U, plant on the recently reviewed Gigabyte U2442F ultrabook.

Clocked at just 1.5GHz with no Turbo Boost-similar feature, the A4-5000 was e'er going to exist light on power.

Considering information technology does characteristic four dedicated cores, the bit actually performed better than expected in some of our tests, and could surprise yous in applications that utilize four threads well. That said, when compared to the dual-core Pentium 2117U, the A4-5000 was left red faced on more than one occasion.

While some tests were rather shut, such as Excel 2022, AMD simply wasn't competitive in others like WinRAR and Photoshop CS6. The A4-5000 as well took a serious chirapsia in our encoding tests. These might not be the kind of programs users are expected to run on a Kabini powered notebook, but information technology goes to testify how far the company is behind Intel in terms of core efficiency.

Nosotros expected the A4-5000 to best Intel's Pentium 2117U when information technology came to gaming operation, and information technology did in the three games tested. However, with dismally low frame rates on AAA games like Far Cry 3 or Battlefield 3, casual or quondam games is the best y'all'll be to go out of either AMD or Intel offerings. The A6-5200 might have more of a gamble here with its 33% college clocked processor and 20% faster clocked GPU.

One area where the A4-5000 actually shines is in power consumption. At merely 9 watts while idle with the screen turned off and 23 watts with 100% CPU and GPU load (again the screen was off), power draw wasn't just incredibly low, it was less than half the amount consumed past our Intel Pentium 2117U test system.

When compared to more powerful and more expensive options, such equally the Gigabyte U2442F ultrabook mentioned earlier, A4-5000 powered devices should run at least twice as long on the same capacity battery. They should also toll less than half as much and allow for smaller designs.

Using the PowerMark counterbalanced test the AMD whitebook organization ran for 3 hours and 31 minutes. Past comparing, the Gigabyte U2442F ran for simply ii hours and 43 minutes in the same test.

Benchmarks aside, from our perspective the AMD A4-5000 was fast enough for general usage. With an SSD in tow it would open nigh applications in seconds. For those wanting to surf the Internet, e-mail, conduct some word processing or even a little graphics design, the A4-5000 will provide enough power and the run time to avoid you looking for another power socket the moment you disconnect it from ane.

If you expect at the image above, AMD sees an opportunity on a changing landscape where performance laptops are not everything, but mobility, integrated hardware and high efficiency play every bit much of a factor. The A4 SoC is feature rich and quite competent for productive multi-tasking and that may just be the right answer for new affordable ultraportables.

Pros: True quad-cadre x86 SoC opens possibilities for manufacturers to create affordable integrated Windows-based devices. Power consumption and resulting battery life should be excellent. Processing ability is acceptable for productive multi-tasking.

Cons: Graphics functioning is skillful if compared to the competition simply not gaming-level as AMD wants you to believe. Single thread performance suffers without Turbo Boost.