A couple of weeks back, we got the chance to get some hands on time with AMD’s upcoming mainstream and low-power APUs (Accelerated Processing Units), codenames Beema and Mullins. These APUs are the successors to last year’s Temash and Kabini APUs, which powered an array of small form factor and mobile platforms. With this release, however, AMD was laser focused on improving power consumption and efficiency, expanding the platform’s capabilities through both hardware and software tweaks, and of course improving performance over the previous generation.

Beema and Mullins are based on the same piece of silicon, but will target different market segments. Beema is the mainstream part that will find its way into affordable notebook, small form factor systems, and mobile devices. Mullins, however, is a much lower-power derivative, designed for tablets and convertible systems...

These latest AMD APUs aren’t strictly CPU and GPU cores crammed onto a single piece of silicon. They are full SoCs with on-die memory controllers, PCI Express, SATA, and USB connectivity, and a host of other interface elements. Connect one of these APUs to some memory and storage, and some I/O ports and you’ve essentially got a complete low-power, X86 compatible platform, with modern Radeon graphics.