AMD has had a tough time competing with Intel on the desktop lately, but when it comes to mobile technology, in the notebook arena, performance, value and power efficiency are measured against a very different yardstick. That's not to say that CPU throughput and IPC isn't important in a notebook, not by a long shot, but multimedia performance in these highly integrated designs can matter much more than desktop designs where discrete graphics engines are easily accommodated.

Back in January of this year, we covered AMD's launch of their Kaveri core-based A8-7600 APU. Targeted for desktops and with integrated AMD GCN graphics on board, Kaveri also had a number of optimizations and enhancements made to its Steamroller CPU cores as well. All told, Kaveri represents a much-needed upgrade to AMD's base APU lineup...

Today we're going to take a look at what AMD's Kaveri architecture can do in a mobile application, a full featured notebook form-factor to be specific, none of that netbook or hybrid clamshell stuff. AMD had us out to sunny San Francisco for a press and analyst day recently, and though we didn't get to take a Kaveri-powered notebook back to the labs for a full-bore benchmark bake-off, we did get to spend some quality time on site with a pre-release whitebook. Let's take a look...