14 DAY TRIAL // When thinking of PC processors, a vast majority of people will immediately conjure Intel in their minds, but to be fair there are other chip makers out there with a solid fan base.
Each of these chip makers has its own strategy at surviving in this competitive market and a big part of that is providing solutions for the budget-friendly market.
For example, AMD introduced Beema and Mullins, which are updates to the lower-power Kabini (aimed at notebooks) and Temash (aimed at tablets) SoC back in April.
Beema and Mullins products are scarce
However, since then we haven’t seen a lot of products bundling the architecture arrive on the market. HP has proved to be the only significant win for AMD, as the company launched two notebooks taking advantage of Mullins, the HP Pavilion 10z and HP Stream 14.
As for tablets, we haven’t seen anything of the sort (or at least as far as we’re aware of). Anyway, it appears Taiwanese manufacturers have taken an interest in AMD’s low-power Mullins processor.
One of the first tablets running AMD’s E1 or A4 micro series processors has been spotted being put on display at an event.
Meet the BungBungame Photon2 tablet, a device taking advantage of a more powerful AMD A10 Micro 6700T Mullins processor (as seen at APU Silicone).
We only hope that the producing company’s silly name won’t prevent future customers from taking the device seriously.
If we take a look at the tablet’s specs, they are quite decent so maybe it would be worth forgetting about the inspired naming routine.
BungBungame Photon2 spec round-up
The Photon2 is a Windows tablet arriving with a 10.1-inch display with 1920 x 1200 pixel resolution, 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage.
Furthermore, the tablet can be paired with an optional Bluetooth keyboard cover and a digitizer pen that allows pressure-sensitive input, so you can also use as a laptop, when you feel like you should be getting more productive.
So far, the Photon2 sounds like your regular Windows 8.1 tablet with a better than average display. But what’s special about it is the processor keeping it alive on the inside. It’s a 4.5 watt, quad-core processor that can go as far as 2.2GHz, so overall CPU performance should be comparable to Intel’s Atom Bay Trail family.
But the perk is that the AMD chip embeds a Radeon R6 GPU, so the tablet taking advantage of the architecture should be able to deliver better graphic performance than a Bay Trail chip.
The tablet also comes with an HDMI port, microSDXC card slot, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and NFC. It has two cameras and measures 10.4 x 7.2 x 0.4 inches / 264 x 183 x 10.16 mm.
Last but not least, you should know the tablet relies on a 30Wh battery and is expected to go on sale for a pretty hefty $550 / €432 price tag. It will start shipping in December and will be available world-wide via Amazon.
