AMD’s New Mobile PC Processors Intended To Challenge Intel’s Dominance

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AMD (NYSE:AMD) announced the mobile version of its Kaveri processor at the ongoing Computex 2014 in Taipei, this week. The company introduced its Kaveri desktop APUs at last year’s show, and the same began shipping earlier this year. The new performance mobile APUs (Kaveri) are designed for ultrathin and high-performance mobile PCs for both personal and professional use. In addition to having an improved Steamroller CPU core and Radeon R7 series GPU core, the Kaveri mobile APU is the first CPU to use the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) design, which makes the CPU and GPU cores work more efficiently together. The Radeon graphics processors used in the Kaveri APUs are similar to the ones found in the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. [1]

The Kaveri chips will be used in laptops starting at around $400 and compete with Intel’s core processors code-named Haswell, which dominate the market currently. [1] Intel accounts for approximately 85% of the notebook processor market share, whereas AMD has a less than 15% market share. AMD claims that the Kaveri mobile APUs can be compared to Intel Core i5 and i7, and in some cases even beat them in graphics performance. Contributing here are the integration of GPU cores and the HSA design.  The new AMD chips replace the older chips code-named Richland, with the CPU getting a speed boost of up to 20%. [1]

The company also introduced a professional line of the APUs (AMD Pro A-series), keeping in mind the needs of an evolving commercial marketplace for longevity, performance and stability in enterprise systems. Though AMD has significantly lowered its dependence on the PC market, it continues to derive a considerable portion of its revenue from the segment (including GPUs and APUs). It intends to focus on growing in segments where it is underrepresented, such as the commercial PC business.

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AMD’s new APU lineup aims to build on its leadership in graphics across devices. The company claims to have established a strong growth momentum in the low-power mobile computing market in 2013 and aims to build on the same with an updated product portfolio. AMD shipped over 80 million APUs between 2011 and 2012. The company expects shipments to rise to 150 million in 2014 and cross 300 million within a few years. [2]

Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba are some of the key players that will start shipping laptops using the Kaveri mobile APUs, this year. HP unveiled a complete range of the Elite Series notebook using AMD’s Pro A-series, which will also start shipping later this year.

Our price estimate of $3.79 for AMD is almost in line with the current market price.

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Notes:
  1. AMD’s Kaveri chips bring console-like experience to PCs, PC World, June 3, 2014 [] [] []
  2. AMD Next-Gen ‘Kaveri’ Chips to Ship to OEMs This Year, eWeek, November 11, 2013 []