AMD Z-60 APU For Skinny Windows 8 Tablets Revealed

AMD has revealed its new processor for tablets, the AMD Z-Series APU, intended to take on not only Intel's Atom but the ARM-based chips found in the majority of slates on sale today. The AMD Z-60 has, with a 4.5W TDP, the lowest power consumption of AMD's line-up, and is expected to bring its 1GHz dualcore speed to tablets as slim as 10mm with the first models – running Windows 8 - tipped for later this year.

The Z-60 includes Radeon HD 6250 graphics with 80 cores, as well as 1MB of L2 Cache and USB 3.0 support. There's also support for AMD Start Now, the company's fast boot/resume system, as well as an HDMI output capable of Full HD, and Microsoft's DirectX 11.

AMD's tablet reference design is built around a Z-60 paired with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 30Whr battery, and running Windows 8. On that sort of setup, the company says it's seeing up to eight hours of browsing or six hours of playing back a looped 720p H.264 video with the display brightness set to 60 nits.

That's on the dim side, mind. AMD's own anecdotal research from back in 2009 found that many people set their displays at more than 2.5x that brightness as a level of minimum comfort, and that 60 nits is roughly equivalent to 20- to 30-percent brightness settings on notebooks tested at the time.

At idle, AMD is supposedly seeing up to 10hrs of runtime. AMD is already shipping the Z-60 to its customers, with tablets running the chip expected later in 2012. No word on what sort of pricing we can expect.