AMD C-50 and Z-01 Windows 8 Boot Performance Compared, Video Included

AMD was present at Microsoft's BUILD conference with a series of tablet designs based on its low-power accelerated processing units, the C-50 and Z-01 to be more precise, which were put in a head-to-head battle to see who can boot up Windows 8 faster.

The two tablets used for this test by the Netbook News website were the Acer Iconia W500, powered by a C-50 APU, and the MSI WindPad W110W that is based on the new AMD Z-01, or Desna, tablet chip.

We have come to know pretty well both of these slates in the last couple of months, but this is the first time we've seen the Metro UI running on them.

The first thing to note when taking a look at the video is just how smoothly these seem to work with Windows 8, the Metro UI responding quite nicely to the limited set of commands they were put through.

As far as boot performance is concerned, the two tablets seem to behave nearly identically, although the Z-01 definitely takes a little more time than the C-50 to reach the home screen. However, this is normal considering Desna wasn't optimized for Windows 8 yet.

The AMD Z-01 APU, or Desna, is a specially developed version of the C-50 that features the same dual 1GHz out-of-order x86 Bobcat cores as its older brother as well as the built-in Radeon HD 6250 graphics core.

However, the APU's TDP was lowered in order to make it better suited for tablet use, and the Z-01 requires 3.1W less than the C-50 to operate (5.9W in comparison with 9W).

Most of the energy savings were achieved by using lower core and north bridge operating voltages as well as a new local hardware thermal control mode that wasn't previously available in AMD's Ontario chips.