AMD A4 5000 

But in the context of the modest 3,000mAh battery pack, the AMD A4-5000 looks like it should make for some impressively long lasting systems.

By today's standards, 128 graphics shaders is a modest count in a gaming context and there's no getting round that.

As for the graphics part of the equation, AMD is calling the A4-5000's 3D core the AMD Radeon HD 8330.

Things aren't nearly as evenly matched on the graphics side where the PS4 has 1,152 graphics shaders, the Xbox One is thought to have 768 shaders and the A4-5000 has just 128 shaders.

More generally, the fact that AMD specified this test whitebook with a 5,200rpm magnetic drive rather than a solid state drive obscured the APU's ability as a proper Windows 8 chip.

Buying Guide Best CPU: the 8 top processors today As for the A4-5000, it's a variant of what's known as the Kabini APU or Accelerated Processing unit.

Once applications and benchmarks have loaded, disk performance becomes much less of an issue, so what have we discovered?

Put simply, games developers will desperately need to get to grips with multi-threading if they're to have any hope of getting good performance out of these new Jaguar cores.

Storage-wise, we're talking 320GB of old school magnetic hard drive sadly, so we'll do our best to exclude that from our performance assessments.

Instead, super thin-and-light laptops and tablets are essentially the limit for Kabini.

What we want from AMD is something to keep Intel honest in its core market and also provide an alternative in the burgeoning market for tablet PCs running the x86 version of Windows 8, including Microsoft's Surface Pro.

The main thing to appreciate about this chip - and one of the things that makes for an intriguing thought in the context of those new games consoles - is that it's very much a mobile processor.

Battery life looks good, 2D video is strong and the CPU cores are likely just good enough.

More precisely, it's the new Jaguar cores inside this APU that are making waves.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AMD hasn't worked miracles with the new Jaguar CPU core design.