AMD revealed via Twitter that the company has won two CES 2014 Innovation Awards for what appears to be a direct competitor to the Razer Edge gaming tablet released earlier this year. The news arrives after AMD revealed its new Beema and Mullins APUs last week, the latter of which will be used in the unannounced tablet.
AMD has confirmed its existence and the device's codename: Project Discovery. "AMD's goals are to show the world what we can do in the tablet space around our next generation APU, Mullins," an AMD representative told TechRadar. This rep also confirmed that AMD doesn't plan to enter the market with a branded tablet and peripherals, meaning the company is likely taking the Tegra Note route and allowing OEMs to build units based on AMD's designs.
However, based on product images, there's no question that AMD may be competing directly with Razer's own tablet solution by offering a controller peripheral that the tablet slides into. Like the Razer Edge, the device is presumably 10.1 inches and sports Windows 8 (or in this case Windows 8.1). A shown docking station, likely supporting AMD's DockPort technology, would seemingly turn the tablet into a home console, just like Razer's solution.
AMD's Mullins APU is a low-power chip targeting fanless designs like tablets, 2-in-1 devices and ultrabooks. AMD's upcoming 28 nm chip is expected to consume as little as 2 watts of energy during use. AMD has achieved a 2x increase in performance per watt with both Mullins and Beema, the latter of which will be in the 10 to 25 watt range. They're full single-chip solution SoCs packed with two or four Puma cores, which is an iteration of the Jaguar cores. They will also continue to have Graphics Core Next graphics (GCN).
"We do have the capability with these products to support Microsoft Connected Standby now, which has a certain level of low power in deep sleep states, additional deeper sleep states. So the advantage of that, whether you implement the full Microsoft Connected Standby or not, is that we can go into deeper sleep and lower power states to extend your battery life when you're in standby," said AMD's Gabe Gravning, director of marketing for the company's client business, last week.
AMD actually hinted to the tablet last week, saying that we'll see cool docking solutions at CES, and things AMD is doing with Dockport and its new Mullins tablets. This docking tech supports up to four monitors, mouse and keyboard, external HDDs, optical drives, printers and virtually any other device or peripheral that will support the standard.
We've reached out to AMD to get more details, but for now that's all we have. That said, stay tuned and we'll add any comments received from AMD right here. Meanwhile, TechRadar has a bunch of product shots here.
