Today AMD is introducing two new SoCs, Beema which SemiAccurate told you about last week, and Mullins. These two products sit below Kaveri and are aimed at the really mobile space.
As you may know the successor to the ‘big core’ Trinity/Richland is called Kaveri, the one after that has not been named by AMD. Luckily we solved that problem last week too. Today AMD is announcing the two little cores that flesh out the low-end, Beema is the Kabini replacement and Mullins supplants Temash. What comes after Beema and Mullins? No clue, AMD didn’t say that either. *COUGH*. The 2014 AMD CPU lineup looks like this.
The last column seems to be missing
Officially speaking Beema is a 2-4 Puma core SoC with a 10-25W TDP. AMD did not go in to detail about what Puma is nor did they explain why this version drops the “+” from the core name but whispers say it is a mildly updated Jaguar. AMD now officially supports Microsoft’s evil Connected Standby virus propagation technology in hardware, a clear regression that follows Intel’s shameful lead.
The only big bang with Beema is the official addition of an ARM A5 core as a security processor. In essence it adds ARM Trustzone to x86 CPUs just like we told you a year and a half ago. In essence Kaveri exposes the functionality to the world or at least to the low-level security focused developer community. You could say what ARM giveth, Microsoft taketh or thomething like that.
Mullins is just an ~2W version of Beema in the same way Temash was a lower power version of Kabini, the silicon is the same in both. Both Mullins and Beema were listed on documents SemiAccurate saw recently as having a “Full HSA programming model”, AMD representatives said quite directly that only Kaveri would support full HSA. We have no explanation for this backpedaling.
Other than the Mullins name there wasn’t anything new AMD disclosed about these two variants, the others we named last week were completely absent. A5s are official, Steamroller lost its “B”, Puma lost it’s “+”, and Connected Standby is still evil and anti-user. In essence the more things change the more wagons are circled or some related mixed metaphor.S|A
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Charlie Demerjian
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