We take a look at desktop Kabini's potential. AMD invigorated its desktop Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) lineup recently with the launch of Kaveri parts presented in an FM2+ form factor. Designed to take over from previous Richland and Trinity APUs, these new chips brought the Steamroller core and GCN graphics to play for the first time on the desktop.

Yet Kaveri isn't the first AMD APU to bake GCN graphics into the die. That honour goes to the embedded and laptop-bound Kabini and Temash APUs released last year. Not only that, Kabini also uses low-power Jaguar CPU cores instead of variants of the Piledriver architecture routinely found on desktop APUs.

Kabini chips are APUs in their broadest meaning; they integrate everything into the silicon, including CPU, GPU, I/O, and memory controller. System-on-chip (SoC) is a better term for explaining their design, which makes sense as they go into space- and thermally-restricted environments.