New chip families will feature the PUMA/Steamroller cores and Graphics Core Next GPU compute units

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) announced a pair of sporty upcoming x86-based, 28 nanometer (nm) processors that will front its mobile processing efforts. It also announced a new HTPC-geared CPU+GPU combo chip that’s sure to please budget shoppers. Officially these chips won’t launch until 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). But AMD’s revealed enough that it’s painting a very interesting picture for the 2014 chip market as it tries to capitalize on its sales strengths and improve upon its struggling lines.

I. Trinity and Llano Kick Things Off

Since their 2010 introduction AMD’s “accelerated processing units” (APUs) (AMD’s marketing lingo for PC-geared system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs) have sold well, and have been very competitive in some niches. But as mobiles users’ battery life expectations have risen AMD has struggled with power consumption. Even as Intel Corp. (INTC) pioneered industry leading node technology, AMD’s third party fab partners struggled to keep pace in terms of die shrinks.

Ultimately this struggle has had more of an affected on the lower end mobile geared APU stock, than AMD’s desktop-geared offerings.

On the high end of AMD’s APU line is the A8 and A10 brands, the former of which deployed in June 2011 with the launch of the first generation Llano APU and the latter of which deployed in Oct. 2012 as a late add-on to the Trinity series.

Since day one AMD’s APU line competed for very specific market niches — budget laptops with no discrete mobile GPU card — and leaned heavily on price as a selling point. But AMD’s graphical leadership made this formula not only work, but flourish as AMD’s chips rivalled even low-end discrete mobile GPUs at a reduced bill of materials net cost for the GPU+CPU.

Picture top to bottom: Brazos, Trinity (middle), Tahiti (whom Trinity’s on-die GPU is partially derived from) [Image Source: Jason Mick/DailyTech LLC]

Last year’s follow-up to Llano, the 32 nm Trinity line of “accelerated processing units” (APUs) added an improved on-die GPU (sometimes referred to as a “dGPU”), which fell somewhere between a Radeon 6000 HD and 7000 HD in architecture. Trinity also ditched the aging K10 architecture for a leaner, enhanced Bulldozer core, code-named Piledriver. Power fell to between 65 to 100 watts.

Full Story: DailyTech – 28 nm AMD APU Lineup is Complete, On Course for H1 2014 Launch.