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Review of AMD’s Project Discovery Tablet: CES 2014

AMD’s project discovery tablet was introduced at the CES 2014, a mobile gaming device called Mullins. Many more features besides its Kaveri APUs were revealed at a press conference. Designed for tablets, according to the chip maker, Mullins offers “more than two times the performance per watt of the previous generation chip”

Las Vegas: AMD displayed its internally-developed 11-inch gaming tablet along with a controller cradle with a Mullins APU inside. Simply called Project Discovery Tablet, the gaming device was not for commercial release, the company chief claimed. It was just to demonstrate what AMD could do with the Mullins chip when it comes out in the second half of the year.

The Mullins tablet can run on 64-bit Windows 8 and came in a brushed magnesium shell. Its attractive sleek looks and size are however not meant for one-handed use. It has to be held in a controller cradle. The placement of the joysticks and shoulder triggers, a bit too far from the controller buttons did not hinder the playing of Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 with excellent responses. This is because of AMD’s DockPort technology that allows APUs to use DisplayPort inputs for all the necessary functions.

It was a design done before by Razer and the likes. But AMD spent some good amount of R&D funds on the designing the concept gaming device. Mullins that is built on a 28-nanometer architecture using Radeon graphics gave some good gaming performance.

There are no frame rate dips or struttering while gaming. The device proved flexible at high and medium settings thanks to Mullins power. It enables running of PC-grade games on mobile SoC without any hassles.

It is disappointing that the tablet is not for sale as yet. But if AMD is keen it can definitely design a Mullins-based gaming device worth the price. The sophisticated looks of AMD’s Project Discovery Tablet are an innovative alternate to PC gaming graphics and its performance is world-class. Easily it would be a cut above the rest once it comes out in the market. But AMD wants to just demonstrate to its manufacturing partners what its Mullins chip can do.