"The better GPU"- is no issue, unless you want to play games on your future HTPC or if you want to use it as server in your future distributed setup (serving mulitple streams). Welcome to the era of "good enough" computing.
While Brazos made great computers for HTPC purpose (AMD shipped 50M SKU's), Intel is leader ever since.
After all those unavailable and incremental Brazos updates (from E-350, via E-450 to E2-1800), those 28nm Kabini's are really welcome to give Intel some competition. At least in the HTPC market.
AMD Kabini's Line up
//update: some more announced socs: a6-5250, a6-5350, a4-5150, a4-5100, E1-2200, E1-2600, E1-2650 and E2-3100.
//
Note: A6-5200 offers CPU performance similar to Core i3-3227u and GPU performance is pretty close to the best performing Haswells HD 4000 versions. It sure beats the hell out of current Cover trail Atoms
Note2: Knowing AMD's incremental update strategy, the next iteration will give some new models, called Beema with clockspeed-tuning and Turbo Core and will be HSA-compliant and will also still use socket FS1B, which introduces AMD famous socket compatibility over APU-generations.
Note3: Anandtech review on A4-5000, which performs around 15% (clock by clock) better than E-350 while being 40% more power-efficient..
Most-likely (and hopefully for AMD) those Kabini products ship months (retail availibility Q3/Q4-2013) before
22nm bay trail Atom-m/d (12w, no usb3, sata600 & PCIE3.0) will hit the market in Q1/Q2-2014.
Nevertheless, I know for sure Kabini will be favourite as a new HTPC above those new ATOM bay trail m and d/Celeron 1037u/i3 4130-t thanks to it's price and performance. For sure on Windows and if you don't care about uncompressed HD Audio bitstreaming also on Linux.
Note: I'm also looking forward to ARM15 products (like Tegra4 or Snapdragon 800) for XBMC on Android. But not untill it's as usable as my x86 HTPC (meaning E-350 performance and XBMC Windows/Linux-experience).
Note2: I prefer AMD SoC's above the overpriced Intel ones and the weaker from ARM.
Contrary to Brazos, the great thing for those Kabini boards is that the Linux ecosystem (kernel, Alsa, Mesa, distributions) and the fglrx-driver will supports this platform from day 1. So the usual
"AMD/ATI on Linux"-bashing should be limited to the fglrx driver limitations:
a) mpeg2 and mpeg4 hw accel
b) Limitation to bitstream HD Audio over HDMI (but for most people, virtualized 5.1 will do just fine for movies);
c) So-so deinterlacing quality.
Note: XBMC is also (still!) missing mainline support for xvba;
Note2: AMD OSS Driver is getting better and better, even supporting HD-Audio. Also Bridgeman says some major stuff can be expected.;
Note3: Don't think Nvidia & Intel are perfect HTPC's.
Thin-ITX Gigabyte Brix Kabini GB-XM1
Gigabyte deserves a special mention with their
Kabini Gigabyte Brix. This is a better equipped Intel i3 NUC competitor with a price similar to the Celeron NUC.
While supporting 4 different APU'S, I also expect Usb3 booting, mSATA, CIR-headers, a passive design, SO-dimm, 2x HDMI 1.4a, Wireless (qi) charging station, USB audio, spdif.
mini-ITX
The announced mini-ITX boards are all made by the expected partners (Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS, AsRock) and I also assume bigger players like Dell, Lenovo and HP to deliver great SFF products based on Kabini. Expect Asus and Zotac to announce better products in the near future. Zotac is a litttle late at the Kabini party but they normally show up with low-quality products but with perfect HTPC fit.
Brazos also showed that:
- MSI uses a very solid and power efficient design for their motherboards (100% solid caps);
- ASrock give great value for their money (also the only one including CIR-headers);
- Gigabyte (great warranty and BIOS support) and Asus give great specs at higher prices;
- ECS, Sapphire, Foxconn, Biostar and probably also Jetway need to improve their offering to compete above.
Except for the Brix, current announched boards make me moderate happy: The paper specs look like a simple upgrade to the new SoC and thus a recycled motherboard-design. And Asus and Zotac also offered a passive design for E350. Thus upgrading my current E350 setups doesn't justify the costs to me. I only get extra CPU and GPU speed (which I don't need), more power efficient (but integrated) SoC (which I like) and faster and better memory and caching. It's just to little and I don't blame AMD (since they delivered with this new SoC) but the motherboard designers (who forgot to go passive and didn't show yet the full capabilities for HTPC's: seen the
Gigabyte killer range for gamers?)
These Kabini APUs will be using the FM2+ socket, which is backwards compatible with Trinity/Richland FM2 APUs (FM2 based motherboards are not forwards compatible), as well as a new chipset in the form of A88X, A78 and A55. Normally AMD has the lead in feature complete chipsets but this upgrade is only a smaller proces node and a step so partners can prepare for Kaveri. These new APUs offer native support for PCIe 3.0 (Kaveri only) as well as DX11.1 and 4K support – something all AMD partners will be keen to promote since customers buy themselves also an upgrade path to Kaveri.
If for expample AsRock could have managed to have MSI power-usage and a fanless/passive heatsink like Asus/Zotac brought to the E350.... Or design boards to boot from a SDCX card (and save on a expensive SSD). Or add a CI+ slot.
Let see what this Kabini platform offers once products will hit the market but those
first benchmarks and product announchements give me the strong impression there is a new HTPC winner:
A6-5200 offers CPU performance similar to Core i3-3227u and GPU performance is pretty close to the best performing Haswells HD 4000 versions while being cheaper than ATOM's/Celerons