AMD has officially announced its socketed Kabini chips and the AM1 platform. Information on the chips and motherboards have been slowly trickling out since CES, but now they are finally official and available for purchase at retail.

Specifically, AMD has launched four desktop Kabini processors under the Athlon and Sempron brands. In addition ASRock, ASUS, Biostar, ECS, Gigabyte, and MSI all have AM1 platform motherboards ready to accept the new AMD chips. The motherboards come in mini ITX and micro ATX form factors.

AMD Kabini Chips Now Available At Retail - Processors 2

The AMD Athlon 5350 SoC Installed in the ASUS AM1I-A motherboard which was used in our full Kabini review.

All four of the AMD chips have 25W TDPs and integrated GPUs with 128 stream processors. The Kabini chips support four PCI-E 2.0 lanes, two SATA III 6 Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and eight USB 2.0 ports. Motherboard permitting, the Kabini GPU supports up to three display outputs (HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA). The chips differ by CPU and GPU clockspeeds, core count, and DDR3 memory frequency support. On the low end, the $34 (MSRP) Sempron 2650 is a dual core part clocked at 1.45 GHz with a GPU clocked that 400 MHz that supports a maximum memory clockspeed of 1333 MHz. The top-end Athlon 5350 is a quad core processor clocked at 2.05 GHz with a GPU clocked at 600 MHz and supports DDR3 1600 MHz. This chips has a $59 MSRP. The desktop chips are similar to their mobile counterparts, with slight differences in clockspeed and (of course) price and the socketed implementation.

Processor TDP CPU L2 Cache GPU Maximum Memory Speed Price
Athlon 5350 25W 4 cores @ 2.05 GHz 2MB 128 SPs @ 600 MHz 1600 MHz $59
Athlon 5150 25W 4 cores @ 1.6 GHz 2MB 128 SPs @ 600 MHz 1600 MHz $49
Sempron 3850 25W 4 cores @ 1.3 GHz 2MB 128 SPs @ 450 MHz 1600 MHz $39
Sempron 2650 25W 2 cores @ 1.45 GHz 1MB 128 SPs @ 400 MHz 1333 MHz $34

The motherboards for the new Kabini processors will come in mini ITX and micro ATX. We previously covered AM1 platform boards from ASRock, Biostar, and MSI. In general, the boards offer up most of the standard IO and other functionality that enthusiasts are used to from existing AMD motherboards including multiple display outputs, networking, audio, and a plethora of USB ports on the rear IO panel and SATA ports, PCI Express slot(s), and two DDR3 DIMM slots internally. Interestingly, the boards are fairly bare and free from chipsets because the IO is included in the processor itself. This enables motherboards that are notably cheaper than, say, FM2+ and AM3 boards.

When AMD first launched the AM1 platform, the company stated that a combination of a Kabini chip and FS1b-socketed motherboard would add up to about $60. Now that the platform is official, retail prices are starting to pop up. With the Kabini processors and motherboards each ranging from around $30 to $60, AMD has technically hit that mark. Adding a hard drive, RAM, and enclosure will get you a baisc and complete system for less than $150.

AMD's Kabini chips are set to compete against Intel's Bay Trail-D processor which comes pre-soldered onto motherboards. The AM1 platform does look to be the slightly cheaper option that also gives users the choice of motherboard and the possibility of upgrading to soecketed Beema (Kabini's successor) SoCs.

If you are interested in desktop Kabini, be sure to check out our full review of the AMD Athlon 5350 at PC Perspective!