While tidying up my lab, I found an interesting MicroATX motherboard that I never had the opportunity to power up. It’s dated 2013 and based on the tiny AMD FS1b Socket. FS1b was originally called Socket AM1 and was launched officially in April 2014 as a low cost, low power platform designed for AMD’s socketed Kabini APUs. They were branded as the Athlon and Sempron and were aimed at low-end desktops. This platform was unique compared to most other low power platforms due to being upgradeable.
The FS1I1V (not FS111V) Rev 0.2 came with a FS1b CPU labelled ZD515098H4462. The date code showed that he was built on week 35 of 2013 (late August). This is an early engineering sample of the Athlon 5150 that will be commercially released on April 2014. The CPU is based on the Kabini (Jaguar microarchitecture, the same that was used on PS4 and Xbox One) and features 4 cores at 1.6 GHz, 2 MB of shared L2 cache, a single-channel DDR3-1600 controller and an IGP (Integrated Graphic Processor) named “Radeon R3” with 128 shader processors at 600 MHz. The TDP is set at 25W.
The board can only be powered on using Lenovo’s proprietary “Slim Tip” power connector. Fortunately, it’s easy to find adapter to USB-C today, that will deliver the required 20V at 3A.
The board booted immediately and showed the Lenovo logo. The BIOS seems to have been upgraded several times, as it now includes Agesa Kabini PI 1.1.0.0, a firmware revision much newer than the engineering sample itself.
The Full Processor Name String is ZD515098H4462_00/16/08/06_9830.
A full Memtest86+ v9.10 pass completed successfully, but the CPU has the same issue than many AMD CPU from this generation (wrong CPU temperature reported by internal registers).
The board name is “LENOVO Kabini CRB”, “CRB” meaning “Customer Reference Board”. It was probably used as a first prototype step for the next generation of Lenovo’s thin-client back then.