AMD has officially announced its new tablet-specific Z-60 processor, known as Hondo, and it promises rather a lot. In fact, the chip manufacturer claims it will allow you to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on your Windows 8 tablet, at 30 fps on a 1024 x 768 display. Sounds zippy.
AMD claims that the Z-60’s integrated Radeon HD 6250 graphics have five to six times the performance of Intel’s last-gen Atom chips — if that’s really a benchmark worth bragging about — made possible by creating a more power-efficient version of its low-end laptop processors. That’s the opposite approach to Intel, whose Clover Trail tablet processor line is a beefed up version of its Medfield smartphone chip.
The Z-60, then, will pack a dual-core 1GHz chip with 80 graphics cores for video and gaming, and by the sounds of it should hold its own in terms of performance. Sadly, it sounds like AMD’s offering will lag behind Intel when it comes to battery life, though: AMD claims the Z-60 should squeeze 6 hours of 720p HD video playback out of a 30Wh battery, while Intel promises 10 hours. Similarly, Intel claims 3 weeks of standby time, while AMD offers just 2.
All in, it seems like AMD’s processor may pack more punch than Intel’s Clover Trail, at the expense of battery life. It may, of course, come down to a question of cost — at which point it’s not clear just yet who the winner will be. [Verge]