The AMD Athlon and Sempron return... sort of! These new Athlon and Sempron parts (codenamed Kabini) are nothing like the ones of days past. These puppies sport an on-chip GPU (Radeon R3, Radeon HD 8400 graphics) making them APUs, AMD's System on Chip (SoC) innovation. It incorporates all of the I/O functionality that has traditionally been built into a separate south bridge chip, now in a brand new socket: the AM1.

AMD first released the Kabini last year as the quad core A4-5000,A6-5200 and the dual core E1-2100, E1-2500 , E2-3000. Kabini and it's sibling, Temash, by conventional definitions are the first System on Chip (SoC) released into the wild. These previously released Kabini APUs were designed for the laptop market while Temash was aimed at the tablet market. The new Kabini socket AM1 caters to the entry level desktop market and contains either 2 or 4 Jaguar cores depending on the model. As an aside, it may be interesting to note that both the Xbox One and the PS4 are powered by 8 Jaguar core chips from AMD.

In this review I be looking at the AMD Athlon 5350 APU and the new socket AM1 mini-ITX AM1I-A motherboard from Asus. Let's take a peek at the specs for both the Athlon 5350 and the ASUS AM1I-A.