Much in the same vein as Intel's "North Cape" reference tablet, AMD has unveiled its reference design for two convertible tablet/notebooks that is based on the company's upcoming next-generation APUs and comes with a number of interesting features.
From the live demonstration video (available below), the business-oriented tablet is based on the quad-core Temash APU, which features four Jaguar x86 cores paired with a Radeon HD 7000 series graphics engine. The multimedia focused design features an A6 "Kabini" APU, which despite generally being found in low-power/entry level devices, appeared to flawlessly run Torchlight II in 1920 x 1080 at 25 fps in DirectX 11 mode.
Both devices feature AMD's innovative Turbo Dock technology that not only provides a keyboard and more ports to the tablet when docked, but also contains an active cooling system, which will allow the processor to operate at a higher frequency, thus delivering better performance. Similarly, the technology will also reduce power consumption by downclocking the processor when idle or when performing light tasks such as web browsing or watching videos. AMD's Turbo Dock is expected to be commercially released later in Q3 / Q4 2013 on hybrid devices based on the Temash processor.
If greater convergence is indeed the future of computing, it will be interesting to see what the next generation of hybrid devices from AMD and Intel have in store for us.
