AMD Trinity A10-4600M Processor Launched, Tested

MojoKid writes "AMD lifted the veil on their new Trinity A-Series mobile processor architecture today. Trinity has been reported as offering much-needed CPU performance enhancements in IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) but also more of AMD's strength in gaming and multimedia horsepower, with an enhanced second generation integrated Radeon HD graphics engine. AMD's A10-4600M quad-core chip is comprised of 1.3B transistors with a CPU base core clock of 2.3GHz and Turbo Core speeds of up to 3.2GHz. The on-board Radeon HD 7660G graphics core is comprised of 384 Radeon Stream Processor cores clocked at 497MHz base and 686Mhz Turbo. In the benchmarks, AMD's new Trinity A10 chip outpaces Intel's Ivy Bridge for gaming but can't hold a candle to it for standard compute workloads or video transcoding."

Re:Not seeing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 4600 graphics cores, via ten pipelines. Generally most graphic engines (OpenGL, ActiveX) are easily parallizable, and this will have a noticable affect on many computer games.

Re:Not seeing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean AMD TwoStone, right?

Tombstone was the "joke" name people in AMD management gave it, for obvious reasons.

Re:"outpaces Intel's Ivy Bridge for gaming"?

[timeOday]

I shouldn't have quoted that second sentence about Llano, but the first sentence was specifically about Trinity. Here is the follow-on:

This chart and the next chart will thus show a similar average increase in performance for Trinity, but the details in specific games are going to be different. Starting with Ivy Bridge and HD 4000, as with our earlier game charts we see there are some titles where Intel leads (Batman and Skyrim), a couple ties (DiRT 3 and Mass Effect 2), and the remainder of the games are faster on Trinity. Mafia II is close to our 10 percent âoetieâ range but comes in just above that mark, as do Left 4 Dead 2 and Metro 2033. The biggest gap is Civilization V, where Intelâ(TM)s various IGPs have never managed good performance; Trinity is nearly twice as fast as Ivy Bridge in that title. Overall, it's a 20% lead for Trinity vs. quad-core Ivy Bridge.

So, AMD has the lead on average FPS, but it's now small enough that Intel wins in a few cases. AMD's integrated GPU is still a little better normally, but it's not a slam dunk any more.

Re:HTPC

[Rockoon]

All of AMD's A-series processors make a great HTPC platform. Its been over a year now with Intel not offering any real competition at all in this segment once price is factored in. You can trivially get a full 65W A-series HTPC box up and running for under $150 with lots of headroom (thats the price I would quote to friends/coworkers and pocket the difference as labor costs.) The higher end A-series (100W) are only necessary if you are gaming.

' Some might say that Intel Atom solutions are price competitive with the A-series but the Atom solutions, just like AMD's low powered E-series lineup, really only works well for HTPC as long as 100% of your needed video codecs use GPU acceleration. If the Atom is good enough, then an E-series of the same price will be a bit better as well. Its hard to guarantee that all the codecs that you will be using will be GPU accelerated, especially so if you are stacked up on a Linux distro, so the E-series and Atoms are not really a solution that I recommend.

Re:AMD is done and gone...

[Xeranar]

They aren't competitive though. You keep missing the point. Intel's Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge integrated GPUs basically do video playback on laptops at a suitable level. They cannot play any sort of games made within the last 2-3 years at any level beyond the most base settings. the A-series processors by comparison can play the newest games at relatively low settings and the new Trinity based models can do it at reasonable settings. With the newest A10 laptops starting prices around $600 for 17' laptop that's quite competitive since the first Nvidia/AMD dedicated laptops that can hold a candle to them start around $800-900. The small ultrabooks are going to be harder to justify using intel when the A10 will do it all faster and just as thin. In other words AMD has a serious contender in the mobile market for gaming and cost-effectiveness.

The problem remains that Intel holds the cards on mainstream OEMs and will continue to keep the A-series processors out of the big seller's hands because mobile is becoming their bread and butter.

Re:AMD is done and gone...

[pla]

So the "any" is clearly restricted to the GPUs embedded in the CPUs not discrete GPUs in huge cards.

Okay - So talking about AMD having 384 stream processors per die in the 7660, vs... 16 for Intel in the HD4000. Not even the same game, never mind the same ballpark.

Sorry, but AMD wins this round. And although the average Joe hasn't yet realized it, the "number of cores" war has turned a corner, in that the CPU has already started serving merely as an "overseer" of massive numbers of GPU SPs/CUs. If you do, specifically and exclusively, transaction processing - The CPU still wins. In scientific computing, cryptography, signal analysis, physical simulations, CAD, and yes, even gaming - No one cares if you have a 12-way Xeon or an AMD Geode, it matters that you have an AMD 59/69/79xx (and yes, I do mean AMD - despite their overall gaming performance, for GPU computing, even NVidia doesn't even come close, though the uber-expensive Tesla does at least get to share the playing field).


/ Note that the recent Slashdot article on media transcoding dealt specifically with mass-market solutions using hacked-up shader routines, not optimized OpenCL kernels.

Re:AMD is done and gone...

[Narishma]

Well, the benchmarks disagree with you. The HD4000 IGP in the Ivy Bridge processors are DX11 that can run recent games at low to medium settings quite well. The Anandtech review [anandtech.com] for example shows that on some games like Batman Arkham City, Dirt 3 and Skyrim, the HD4000 even outperforms this new AMD APU. It loses on the other 4 games tested but it's still competitive. I'm only talking about gaming performance here, not video decoding where Intel wins by a large margin. Since Sandy Bridge, Intel GPUs have stopped sucking as bad as they used to IMO. They're at least now comparable to the integrated AMD GPUs.