Mobile Trinity Graphics: Not really better than Intel HD Graphics 4000?

[SickBeast]

Once Haswell comes out it's game over for AMD. AMD will then have vastly inferior CPUs and moderately inferior GPUs inside their APUs. What a mess. Intel came out on top and they didn't even have to buy ATi. One could argue that nVidia's CPU division is now worth more than that of AMD.

 

[Obsoleet]

I'm a big fan of Intel IGPs, using a HD4000 right now. AMD already has vastly inferior CPUs, and it makes 0 difference. I don't think that will be a problem.

There's little point in speculation other than circle jerking for some corporation to succeed or fail, it remains to be seen what happens with the GPU portion of Haswell. I think the i3 and some i5s will retain what will essentially be the existing HD4000.
If so, we'll have a repeat of today.

The higher end i5s and the i7 should have the 2x improvements over HD4000 which will be very interesting against Kaveri. I wouldn't count AMD out in that battle at all, who would other than a fanboy.. seriously.
And you definitely aren't going to get the GT3 across the board for i3/i5/i7 (I wish). I'm going to buy whatever is better, I went Intel for mobile this time but screwed up. A10 is the way to go.

It's kind of trolling to say Nvidia's CPUs are worth more than AMDs in the video forum but since they are all APUs of sorts I guess it's worth mentioning most would rather have an x86 license than be relegated to being Nvidia with ARM as a small fish in a big pond. Irregardless of poor financial performance and mismanagement (who cares), the products are solid, AMD is a small fish in a small pond. Not much choice.

That said, I'm not a big fan of and have zero interest in Tegra3, I'm interested to see Tegra4. Not as relevant to me personally though as I prefer x86 on the desktop.

 

[BoFox]

Once Haswell comes out it's game over for AMD. AMD will then have vastly inferior CPUs and moderately inferior GPUs inside their APUs. What a mess. Intel came out on top and they didn't even have to buy ATi. One could argue that nVidia's CPU division is now worth more than that of AMD.

Wow, Nvidia's CPU division being worth more.. well, the GPU will be vastly more important than the CPU soon.... and also trade places in terms of "worthiness".

I'm a big fan of Intel IGPs, using a HD4000 right now. AMD already has vastly inferior CPUs, and it makes 0 difference. I don't think that will be a problem.

There's little point in speculation other than circle jerking for some corporation to succeed or fail, it remains to be seen what happens with the GPU portion of Haswell. I think the i3 and some i5s will retain what will essentially be the existing HD4000.
If so, we'll have a repeat of today.

The higher end i5s and the i7 should have the 2x improvements over HD4000 which will be very interesting against Kaveri. I wouldn't count AMD out in that battle at all, who would other than a fanboy.. seriously.
And you definitely aren't going to get the GT3 across the board for i3/i5/i7 (I wish). I'm going to buy whatever is better, I went Intel for mobile this time but screwed up. A10 is the way to go.

It's kind of trolling to say Nvidia's CPUs are worth more than AMDs in the video forum but since they are all APUs of sorts I guess it's worth mentioning most would rather have an x86 license than be relegated to being Nvidia with ARM as a small fish in a big pond. Irregardless of poor financial performance and mismanagement (who cares), the products are solid, AMD is a small fish in a small pond. Not much choice.

That said, I'm not a big fan of and have zero interest in Tegra3, I'm interested to see Tegra4. Not as relevant to me personally though as I prefer x86 on the desktop.

x86 on the desktop is about to be obsoleted by the GPU in terms of worthiness, and the same thing is happening for smartphones. Sure, the CPU needs to improve for smartphones, but who needs faster CPUs for desktop pretty much nowadays - if more and more stuff can be programmed to be VASTLY faster on the increasingly flexible GPGPU? That's the way the TITAN supercomputer went, with 90% of the workload being powered by the GPU. At least that's what the future appears to be like.

 

[bgt]

I have a i3-3225 with a 4000IGP as a HTPC but it is not as good as my Trinity HTPC setup is. If you don't see/feel the difference between these 2 than your TV is not the best TV possible. I can really notice a difference in picture quality and smoothness............so does my wife or anybody else.

 

[raghu78]

AMD needs to get some serious bandwidth to unlock the power of Kaveri's 512 stream processors. Kaveri is AMD's first 1 Teraflop APU. (512 x 2 Flops x 1 Ghz = 1TF).

AMD seems to have got some kind of wide DRAM on interposer working for PS4. PS4 seems to have 176 gb/s bandwidth to feed its 1.84 TF GPU.

http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusive-orbis-unveiled/

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=177183&postcount=1387

http://www.smta.org/chapters/files/Arizona-Sonora_Amkor_SMTA_AZ_Expo_2012Dec4.pdf

But PS4 is a custom design. can AMD come up with a high bandwidth solution (atleast 64 GB/s) on Kaveri ? If they can do that Haswell won't be able to touch Kaveri. Also GCN is a far more superior compute architecture than anything Intel will have in Haswell. AMD needs HSA enabled GPU acceleration in more and more mainstream software. If they do that AMD will have a much superior overall solution than Intel. We will get to know by year end.

 

[Obsoleet]

AMD needs to get some serious bandwidth to unlock the power of Kaveri's 512 stream processors. Kaveri is AMD's first 1 Teraflop APU. (512 x 2 Flops x 1 Ghz = 1TF).

AMD seems to have got some kind of wide DRAM on interposer working for PS4. PS4 seems to have 176 gb/s bandwidth to feed its 1.84 TF GPU.

But PS4 is a custom design. can AMD come up with a high bandwidth solution (atleast 64 GB/s) on Kaveri ? If they can do that Haswell won't be able to touch Kaveri. Also GCN is a far more superior compute architecture than anything Intel will have in Haswell. AMD needs HSA enabled GPU acceleration in more and more mainstream software. If they do that AMD will have a much superior overall solution than Intel. We will get to know by year end.

Very interesting. So Kaveri isn't 'doomed' I'm going to need a new laptop soon and it seems like we're on the verge of big improvements from Intel and AMD. Haswell will be released first, but I have to wait for Kaveri before making a decision.

 

[frozentundra123456]

AMD needs to get some serious bandwidth to unlock the power of Kaveri's 512 stream processors. Kaveri is AMD's first 1 Teraflop APU. (512 x 2 Flops x 1 Ghz = 1TF).

AMD seems to have got some kind of wide DRAM on interposer working for PS4. PS4 seems to have 176 gb/s bandwidth to feed its 1.84 TF GPU.

http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusive-orbis-unveiled/

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=177183&postcount=1387

http://www.smta.org/chapters/files/Arizona-Sonora_Amkor_SMTA_AZ_Expo_2012Dec4.pdf

But PS4 is a custom design. can AMD come up with a high bandwidth solution (atleast 64 GB/s) on Kaveri ? If they can do that Haswell won't be able to touch Kaveri. Also GCN is a far more superior compute architecture than anything Intel will have in Haswell. AMD needs HSA enabled GPU acceleration in more and more mainstream software. If they do that AMD will have a much superior overall solution than Intel. We will get to know by year end.

Is it known for sure that Kaveri will have 512 stream processors? Even if so, power mangement will be critical as well as bandwidth. Especially in laptops, how fast will it be able to run and still keep to the rated TDP. A 7750 is 512 stream processors and uses 55 watts. So I dont know how you can keep the cpu+512 stream processors in a 35 or even 45 watt tdp without seriously downclocking it. In a desktop, you can give it more power, but I still would prefer a discrete card in a desktop.

 

[ckay27]

thanks for the interesting thread

 

[BoFox]

AMD needs to get some serious bandwidth to unlock the power of Kaveri's 512 stream processors. Kaveri is AMD's first 1 Teraflop APU. (512 x 2 Flops x 1 Ghz = 1TF).

AMD seems to have got some kind of wide DRAM on interposer working for PS4. PS4 seems to have 176 gb/s bandwidth to feed its 1.84 TF GPU.

http://www.vgleaks.com/world-exclusive-orbis-unveiled/

http://semiaccurate.com/forums/showpost.php?p=177183&postcount=1387

http://www.smta.org/chapters/files/Arizona-Sonora_Amkor_SMTA_AZ_Expo_2012Dec4.pdf

But PS4 is a custom design. can AMD come up with a high bandwidth solution (atleast 64 GB/s) on Kaveri ? If they can do that Haswell won't be able to touch Kaveri. Also GCN is a far more superior compute architecture than anything Intel will have in Haswell. AMD needs HSA enabled GPU acceleration in more and more mainstream software. If they do that AMD will have a much superior overall solution than Intel. We will get to know by year end.

Very interesting!

I like this, and believe that more bandwidth is always better, and that the traditional PC architecture needs some upheaval with regards to the whole bandwidth infrastructure.

In the meanwhile, I'd expect Kaveri to be just as bandwidth-bottlenecked as Trinity, if not more. But then who really knows for sure? Perhaps there would be some surprise? We had GDDR4 ages ago, and yet there's still not DDR4 for the mobo yet! Quad-pumped would be even better... why is it taking so long???

 

[SickBeast]

512 stream processors on an APU? Built in? That's insane if true, and if they can crossfire it with another more powerful GPU then they will have decent performance.

I'm very interested in the PS4. The other consoles, not so much.

 

[MrK6]

Whoops, disregard, different chips.

 

[SickBeast]

Ivy Bridge > A10 IMO.

 

[Shephard]

Ok here are some tests from an actual user of HD4000 since I don't have a graphics card right now.

Sold my 9800gt so I was using onboard Core 2 Quad 7000 something series. Totally sucked. CSGO not playable at lowest settings 800x600. 1-2 fps. Starcraft 2 lowest settings and resolution, 15 fps not very playable.

Got my new computer, but still no graphics card. 3570k and HD4000.

My native resolution is 1680x1050 22inch.

CSGO - 1280x800 (16:10)
Mainly low settings - Shadows High - Detail High.
45-80fps. Quite playable and doesn't look bad at all.

Starcraft 2 - 1680x1050 (native resolution)
Medium settings - Ultra physics
4v4 online - 35-80fps. Maybe even higher at some points I didn't monitor all the time.

I haven't bothered playing anything else right now but I would say that is pretty darn good for onboard. They have come a long way.

 

[absolutezero]

Ivy Bridge > A10 IMO.

LOL, that made me laugh. I hope you mean the cpu part

 

[SickBeast]

LOL, that made me laugh. I hope you mean the cpu part

The GPUs are within 20% of each other, but the Ivy Bridge CPU is twice as good as the A10 IMO. Look at the performance-per-watt. For a laptop it's a no brainer.

 

[RussianSensation]

I recently looked closely at mobile Trinity and Ivy Bridge benchmarks because my parents are buying a laptop for my little brother for Christmas. My dad found a great Black Friday deal on a Toshiba laptop with an i7-3630QM and 1600 MHz DDR3 memory for just $600 USD. I tried talking him into paying a little less to get a laptop with an AMD A8-4500m and Radeon HD 7640G or a little more for a laptop with an AMD A10-4600m and Radeon HD 7660G, but I couldn't make a strong enough case based on gaming performance for him to give up the performance advantage of quad core Ivy Bridge over Trinity. And I've realized: it's because, when it comes down to it, Trinity really doesn't have much of an advantage.

1) Aren't you comparing a slick deal on an i7 3630QM laptop at that time though? On average, i7 3630 or faster laptops cost way more than average Trinity laptops. They don't compete in the same price range unless you find these "slick deals". However, you can similarly find slick deals on an i5 + HD7000M laptop that would smoke the i7 + HD4000 in games just the same. Brings me to point #2:

2) For gaming, there are plenty of options in the price range you listed that trounce both of those choices you mentioned. I'll even use Toshiba.

For $50 more, the i5 3210M(2.50GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1600 750GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi AMD Radeon HD 7670M is what you really should comparing to the quad-core i7 Intel system with HD4000 GPU because these options tend to be comparable in price on average. A lot of Trinity laptops sell in the $400-450 range, not $600 range. It sounds like you are comparing a great deal on an i7 but not looking at deals on other laptops, just looking at highest-end Trinity APU laptops. At $600-650, you can easily find a deal on a laptop with a dedicated gaming GPU like HD7670M or faster.

I agree though that Trinity APUs look way better on the desktop for budget gaming systems/HTPC. AMD needs to ramp up their mobile GPU performance more, or otherwise it's much better to just get an i5 + dedicated NV/AMD GPU as in the example I provided.

Richland should be launching March 19th, and Kabini in late May. It'll be interesting to see if Haswell can outperform Richland/Kabini laptops in gaming at a similar price level.

384SP GCN HD8790M mops the floor with a 480 SP VLIW HD7670M, by 50-60% on average.

The speed increase from 384SP VLIW Trinity APU to 512SP GCN Kaveri APU is going to be a good one assuming AMD can actually deliver Kaveri in 2013.

 

[absolutezero]

The GPUs are within 20% of each other, but the Ivy Bridge CPU is twice as good as the A10 IMO. Look at the performance-per-watt. For a laptop it's a no brainer.

Well, yea. But, the benchmarks took account for the more powerful cpu and intel still lost. No one is going to get an i7 without a discrete graphics card.

What ivy bridge cpu? i3/i5 mobile is not too far from a10. i7 is out of price range

 

[Red Hawk]

1) Aren't you comparing a slick deal on an i7 3630QM laptop at that time though? On average, i7 3630 or faster laptops cost way more than average Trinity laptops. They don't compete in the same price range unless you find these "slick deals". However, you can similarly find slick deals on an i5 + HD7000M laptop that would smoke the i7 + HD4000 in games just the same. Brings me to point #2:

2) For gaming, there are plenty of options in the price range you listed that trounce both of those choices you mentioned. I'll even use Toshiba.

For $50 more, the i5 3210M(2.50GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1600 750GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi AMD Radeon HD 7670M is what you really should comparing to the quad-core i7 Intel system with HD4000 GPU because these options tend to be comparable in price on average. A lot of Trinity laptops sell in the $400-450 range, not $600 range. It sounds like you are comparing a great deal on an i7 but not looking at deals on other laptops, just looking at highest-end Trinity APU laptops. At $600-650, you can easily find a deal on a laptop with a dedicated gaming GPU like HD7670M or faster.

I agree though that Trinity APUs look way better on the desktop for budget gaming systems/HTPC. AMD needs to ramp up their mobile GPU performance more, or otherwise it's much better to just get an i5 + dedicated NV/AMD GPU as in the example I provided.

Richland should be launching March 19th, and Kabini in late May. It'll be interesting to see if Haswell can outperform Richland/Kabini laptops in gaming at a similar price level.

384SP GCN HD8790M mops the floor with a 480 SP VLIW HD7670M, by 50-60% on average.

The speed increase from 384SP VLIW Trinity APU to 512SP GCN Kaveri APU is going to be a good one assuming AMD can actually deliver Kaveri in 2013.

On the one hand, my dad wanted to get a laptop that would last for a good 5 years for general use, and he really liked that quad core Intel processor (and I don't blame him). On the other hand, I wanted to make sure my brother's laptop had a good battery life to performance ratio, so I wanted to get either an iGPU made on 32nm or 22nm, or a dGPU made on 28nm. Stuff like the 7670 was not preferable because it's Northern Islands, and AMD never shrank Northern Islands down from 40 nm (I thought Nvidia never shrank down their refreshed Fermi mobile parts either, only to find out later they did. But still, Fermi is not a very power-efficient architecture). Kepler and GCN laptops were out of our price range. My brother plays games casually but he isn't really a "gamer"; ultimately, the quad-core Intel processor with Intel graphics seemed to meet his needs the best.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Even with Haswell probably won't you are still going to deal with crappy TN screens with heavy input lag anyway plus all the usual laptop caveats, I mean even the average buyer is going to notice how ridiculously better the iPad 4 screen is compared to the average laptop. The GPU performance boost is nice for certain but as a end product laptops just doesn't make sense for most gaming people.

 

[BoFox]

1) Aren't you comparing a slick deal on an i7 3630QM laptop at that time though? On average, i7 3630 or faster laptops cost way more than average Trinity laptops. They don't compete in the same price range unless you find these "slick deals". However, you can similarly find slick deals on an i5 + HD7000M laptop that would smoke the i7 + HD4000 in games just the same. Brings me to point #2:

2) For gaming, there are plenty of options in the price range you listed that trounce both of those choices you mentioned. I'll even use Toshiba.

For $50 more, the i5 3210M(2.50GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1600 750GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi AMD Radeon HD 7670M is what you really should comparing to the quad-core i7 Intel system with HD4000 GPU because these options tend to be comparable in price on average. A lot of Trinity laptops sell in the $400-450 range, not $600 range. It sounds like you are comparing a great deal on an i7 but not looking at deals on other laptops, just looking at highest-end Trinity APU laptops. At $600-650, you can easily find a deal on a laptop with a dedicated gaming GPU like HD7670M or faster.

I agree though that Trinity APUs look way better on the desktop for budget gaming systems/HTPC. AMD needs to ramp up their mobile GPU performance more, or otherwise it's much better to just get an i5 + dedicated NV/AMD GPU as in the example I provided.

Richland should be launching March 19th, and Kabini in late May. It'll be interesting to see if Haswell can outperform Richland/Kabini laptops in gaming at a similar price level.

384SP GCN HD8790M mops the floor with a 480 SP VLIW HD7670M, by 50-60% on average.

The speed increase from 384SP VLIW Trinity APU to 512SP GCN Kaveri APU is going to be a good one assuming AMD can actually deliver Kaveri in 2013.

Superb posts like this only come around once in a while when a Russian graces us with his presence!

I should be adding HD 8790M to the VP ratings.. thanks for reminding me!

 

[RussianSensation]

I should be adding HD 8790M to the VP ratings.. thanks for reminding me!

Thanks!

Yup, it's a very large increase at the same price level. That means soon you should be able to purchase an i5 laptop + HD8700M series for a similar price to an i7 + HD4000 laptop. For gamers that's not even a contest.

Especially in newer titles.

 

[BoFox]

Done! I also added HD 7770M and 7750M along with 8790M in there:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2300495

There's one good interesting article:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/885-6/performances-desktop-vs-mobile.html

 

[Maragark]

512 stream processors on an APU? Built in? That's insane if true, and if they can crossfire it with another more powerful GPU then they will have decent performance.

I'm very interested in the PS4. The other consoles, not so much.

From AMD 2012 FAD Appendix A (slide 34)

"Testing performed by AMD Performance Labs. Calculated compute performance or Theoretical Maximum GFLOPS score for 2013 Kaveri (4C, 8CU) 100w APU, use standard formula of (CPU Cores x freq x 8 FLOPS) + (GPU Cores x freq x 2 FLOPS). The calculated GFLOPS for the 2013 Kaveri (4C, 8CU) 100w APU was 1050. GFLOPs scores for 2011 A-Series “Llano” was 580 and the 2013 A-Series “Trinity” was 819. Scores rounded to the nearest whole number."

 

[raghu78]

From AMD 2012 FAD Appendix A (slide 34)

"Testing performed by AMD Performance Labs. Calculated compute performance or Theoretical Maximum GFLOPS score for 2013 Kaveri (4C, 8CU) 100w APU, use standard formula of (CPU Cores x freq x 8 FLOPS) + (GPU Cores x freq x 2 FLOPS). The calculated GFLOPS for the 2013 Kaveri (4C, 8CU) 100w APU was 1050. GFLOPs scores for 2011 A-Series “Llano” was 580 and the 2013 A-Series “Trinity” was 819. Scores rounded to the nearest whole number."

yeah thats the slide you need to see.

1. GCN has a superior architecture with improved tesselation and compute performance and better performance per shader compared to VLIW4 used in Trinity / Richland
2. Kaveri comes with 15 - 20% higher clocks over Richland (desktop sku comparison - 844 mhz on Richland vs 1000 mhz+ on Kaveri)
3. Kaveri has 33% more shaders than Trinity Richland (512 vs 384)
4. Kaveri should have better memory performance because of a truly unified memory architecture.

Kaveri could easily be 40 - 50% faster than Richland provided there is bandwidth to feed the GPU. The only thing that AMD needs to address is bandwidth required to unlock that beast. If they do that they can stay well ahead of Haswell.

 

[BoFox]

1050/819 = 28% increase in GFLOPS for Kaveri over Trinity - both using 100W! If the bandwidth can also be increased by over 20% then we'll be seeing at least 25% increase in overall performance. Even with a truly unified memory arch, there still needs to be considerably more bandwidth due to the CPU also being clocked 15-20% higher (and probably 25% more bandwidth-hungry) as well.