Trinity review

[n0x1ous]

Dont thing so,

Again what is sad is the fact that a 32nm 35W Trinity humiliates the 22nm tri-gate 45W IB in games. If that is your "Intel doing better", then AMD did the unthinkable with Trinity and certainly didnt fucked up .

You think the i3 and i5 IB will be 45W? All anand had to test the HD4000 was a high end i7.

Bottom line is Intel's is gaining ground on AMD IGPU's. AMD is losing ground to Intel CPU's. Come Haswell, AMD will lose on both fronts and then continue to fall further and further behind unless intel gets bored or is worried about appeasing anti-trust investigators.

 

[cebalrai]

We've only known about Intel and Nvidia's cross licensing a few months back. It is impossible for them to implement in a matter of months. These stuff takes years of planning before it even hits the market.

As far as Trinity goes, its good but not good enough. If Haswell is a huge leap in IGP improvement, AMD's APU is in hot soup.

I wish AMD's mobile APUs supported faster RAM......

 

[laputan machine]

You think the i3 and i5 IB will be 45W? All anand had to test the HD4000 was a high end i7.

Bottom line is Intel's is gaining ground on AMD IGPU's. AMD is losing ground to Intel CPU's. Come Haswell, AMD will lose on both fronts and then continue to fall further and further behind unless intel gets bored or is worried about appeasing anti-trust investigators.

Why are we already discussing haswell? Ivy just got launched and trinity is busy getting launched. Talking about how the follow up to either will dominate is silly at best. Plus, you sure about AMD losing out on the cpu vs Intel with this? Ivy was just a small improvement over sandy on that part and this is a significant improvement over llano. Sure, they're still very far behind but this was a step in the right direction.

 

[Khato]

Did Intel get there on its own? Didn't they settle some sort of lawsuit with Nvidia where they paid a lot of money to NV but got access to a bunch of NV Graphics IP? I seem to remember reading about that many months ago.

No. The lawsuit was with regards to Intel effectively cutting Nvidia out of the chipset business. The settlement did include an IP agreement, but that's commonplace on the design side of the tech industry. Basically, it's inevitable that Intel's designs will infringe upon some of Nvidia's patents and vice versa, so instead of being like the smartphone industry and letting the lawyers benefit they enter into cross-licensing IP agreements. (The monetary portion of the agreement was in part because of the chipset thing, and in part because Intel's the dominant player and hence has far more to lose.)

 

[happysmiles]

Trinity is not a failure, seeing that Bulldozer came out late last year they quickly improved it in months.
I think it can only get better from here, especially since they have more time to work on the next iteration.

 

[n0x1ous]

Why are we already discussing haswell? Ivy just got launched and trinity is busy getting launched. Talking about how the follow up to either will dominate is silly at best. Plus, you sure about AMD losing out on the cpu vs Intel with this? Ivy was just a small improvement over sandy on that part and this is a significant improvement over llano. Sure, they're still very far behind but this was a step in the right direction.

IB was a standard tick improvement on the CPU front. In a year when 22nm is matured Haswell will be a large increase in CPU performance.

So yeah I am pretty sure about AMD losing out on the CPU like they have been for the past 6 years and for most of their existence except for 1 architecture in 2003.

Though yes it was a step in the right direction and Im glad they did something with the CPU end of it and not just upped the GFX. I would love to see some competitive AMD CPU's like the Athlon day's but I just done see it - hell they dont even see it based on their roadmaps and what they are emphasizing.

 

[cebalrai]

When Llano was brand new there were driver issues. I wonder if that's a factor holding Trinity back at all right now.

Are they doing the dual graphics thing with Trinity btw?

 

[guskline]

Let's hope that Trinity's improvement from LLano translates into at least an equal gain by the Desktop Piledriver from Bulldozer.

 

[dma0991]

I wish AMD's mobile APUs supported faster RAM......

I wish that AMD would have gone with a form of sideport memory instead for the IGP. Faster RAM is great but it just adds cost to the laptop which is not what most people want. AMD has to price Trinity laptops below Intel's offerings to be competitive and any added cost that might make it priced similar to Intel's offerings is just going to hurt their sales. I want to see what Haswell with its L4 cache is capable.

 

[cebalrai]

I wish that AMD would have gone with a form of sideport memory instead for the IGP. Faster RAM is great but it just adds cost to the laptop which is not what most people want. AMD has to price Trinity laptops below Intel's offerings to be competitive and any added cost that might make it priced similar to Intel's offerings is just going to hurt their sales. I want to see what Haswell with its L4 cache is capable.

True, but with the current low price of RAM it's aggravating. My Gateway A8 laptop supports DDR3-1600 but it came with DDR3-1066.... Fail.

 

[laputan machine]

IB was a standard tick improvement on the CPU front. In a year when 22nm is matured Haswell will be a large increase in CPU performance.

So yeah I am pretty sure about AMD losing out on the CPU like they have been for the past 6 years and for most of their existence except for 1 architecture in 2003

Like it or not, they had more improvement in 2012 than Intel had. Next year is next year, and if you remember bulldozer it's not a good idea to accept improvement for something before it's released. Just accept that trinity was a good improvement over llano and that intel still has the better cpu while amd still has the better gpu. For now.

 

[pelov]

When Llano was brand new there were driver issues. I wonder if that's a factor holding Trinity back at all right now.

Are they doing the dual graphics thing with Trinity btw?

Yea, they're doing crossfire and it looks like it's VLIW4+VLIW5.

Considering the gaps between theoretical performance and some of the gaming benchmarks I'm also inclined to say that some beta drivers seem to be holding Trinity back in some games, namely Metro2033 and Batman Arkham Asylum. VLIW4 does very well in DX11 and it seems it should be doing better.

Faster DDR memory frequencies won't help on the laptop because it means increasing voltage (until we get cheaper 1866 at 1.25v). It's in the memory controller and bus saturation that AMD need improvement. On the desktop there will probably be a bigger difference, like we saw with Llano between 1333mhz and 1600mhz.

ninja edit - Trinity doesn't support 1866 on mobile anyway but it wouldn't make a difference even if it did.

 

[micrometers]

It's going to be pretty cool when the desktop version of this comes out.

If the mobile part's GPU is clocked around 450 mhz, the desktop I've heard will be 800. Probably can hit 1ghz with good water cooling.

 

[lifeblood]

We've only known about Intel and Nvidia's cross licensing a few months back. It is impossible for them to implement in a matter of months. These stuff takes years of planning before it even hits the market.

The announcement was made in Jan of 2011, a year and four months ago (although it does seem only a few months ago.)

http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index...ense-agreement-intel-to-pay-nvidia-15-billion

That's more than sufficient time to include it into a product. I bet that HD4000 owes part of its performance increase to Nvidia IP.

 

[n0x1ous]

Let's hope that Trinity's improvement from LLano translates into at least an equal gain by the Desktop Piledriver from Bulldozer.

Would be nice if it was better than Trinity since it should have more frequency and power legroom

 

[n0x1ous]

Like it or not, they had more improvement in 2012 than Intel had. Next year is next year, and if you remember bulldozer it's not a good idea to accept improvement for something before it's released. Just accept that trinity was a good improvement over llano and that intel still has the better cpu while amd still has the better gpu. For now.

Fair enough, but its reasonable to have more faith it what intel says is coming than AMD dont you think?

 

[Khato]

http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index...ense-agreement-intel-to-pay-nvidia-15-billion

That's more than sufficient time to include it into a product. I bet that HD4000 owes part of its performance increase to Nvidia IP.

I'd suggest actually reading some of the linked article, specifically the below.

It's for all practical purposes impossible to build a desktop GPU without infringing on an AMD/NV patent. This agreement allows Intel to continue producing their IGPs, just as how the original 2004 chipset agreement allowed Intel to produce more modern IGPs in return for NVIDIA getting a chipset license.

 

[laputan machine]

Fair enough, but its reasonable to have more faith it what intel says is coming than AMD dont you think?

Definitely, and I'm hoping that Haswell will be a tremendous upgrade (it already sounds good with crystalwell). I like sff so I'm hoping to see the death of all but the more powerful graphics cards.

 

[cebalrai]

It's going to be pretty cool when the desktop version of this comes out.

If the mobile part's GPU is clocked around 450 mhz, the desktop I've heard will be 800. Probably can hit 1ghz with good water cooling.

My A6-3500 HTPC rig reaches 800 mhz, which is as far as the mobo will let it go.... So I think what you say is pretty likely.

 

[coffey]

Is the A10-4600M and i7 processors with HD4000 even in the same price range?

Jarred writes about 600$ laptops, but the only 3720QM laptop that I found in a quick newegg search was a tricked out $2100 ASUS G75.

I know the 3720QM is not the cheapest of the lineup, but if manufacturers insist on putting i7 processors in $1000+ laptops, then Trinity will be competing against HD2500 in price.

Feel free to bash me, as I have no idea on how the market will evolve.

 

[Roland00Address]

So in sum the A10-4600m is
* Single and Multithreaded cpu performance similar to the i3 2nd (sandy) and 3rd (ivy) generation 35w dual cores. The i5 versions are faster.
* Gaming graphics similar to a sandybridge i5 with gt540 (fermi 96sp). See Acer TimelineX 3830TG-6431 vs trinity in mobile bench.
* Gaming graphics is inferior to sandybridge i7 ulv with gt640(kepler 384sp. See Acer TimelineU M3-581TG-9326 vs trinity in Mobile bench. Since an i5 full voltage is faster than an i7 ulv it will stand to reason an gt640 will always beat trinity when combine with an i5.
* Better battery life than sandybridge and ivybridge in the similar voltage, with the exception of h264 playback. Also sandybridge ultrabooks gets better battery life in all scenarios.

These following comments are not facts but personal opinions of myself
* We are going to find A-10s in the 600 and less price category for items not on sale for the standard 15 inch with just apu graphics. The a-8s were always in the category from several brands. (this is personal opinion but I am very sure on this).
* AMD has a very good chip that is competitive with intel and superior than its old chip. The die size barely went up 7.8% comparing llano a8 with trinity a10 yet the chip is superior to llano by a good margin. The intel 2 cores in both sandy and ivy bridge are superior if you get the i5 version in cpu benchmarks
* AMD has the faster gpu and better drivers compared to intel
* If you are spending less than 750 and are gaming then amd is the way to go for notebooks. If you are spending more than 750 intel and nvidia kepler gpus will be better. I recommend nvidia over amd since with optimus you can get drivers directly from nvidia while most OEMs will discrete radeon drivers only allow you to use there special radeon drivers.
* For non gamers whether to get intel or amd is whether you want better cpu or gpu. Both sides cpus (under $750) are fast enough to do what most people want, if you need more cpu horsepower than amd you are going to want to spend more than 750 anyway which gets you into i7 territory which will stomp amd in cpu tasks.
* I still want to know how good is this generation of asymmetric crossfire but I haven't seen anybody do a review yet.
* I still want to know if you can overclock these cpus with k10stat or similar software like you could llanos.

 

[Olikan]

Let's hope that Trinity's improvement from LLano translates into at least an equal gain by the Desktop Piledriver from Bulldozer.

not likely.....

bulldozer is very good when kept the voltages lower,
once you need to more volts to achieve highter clocks, things go downhill

 

[pelov]

Is the A10-4600M and i7 processors with HD4000 even in the same price range?

Jarred writes about 600$ laptops, but the only 3720QM laptop that I found in a quick newegg search was a tricked out $2100 ASUS G75.

I know the 3720QM is not the cheapest of the lineup, but if manufacturers insist on putting i7 processors in $1000+ laptops, then Trinity will be competing against HD2500 in price.

Feel free to bash me, as I have no idea on how the market will evolve.

No, you're right. AMD's Trinity is currently priced way below the i7 IBs with HD4000. The 3720QM costs close to $400 for the chip alone so that's 2-3x more than AMD is charging for the Trinity A10 and close to a brand new A6 Llano laptop... yes, the cost of the entire laptop and not just the APU

If we get i5 and i3 Ivy's with HD4000 then it's going to be interesting, but if Intel only equip the lower end with HD2500 then Trinity will stomp on anything in its price range. I hope they offer some i3's with HD4000, as that would make me debate whether to go Intel or AMD this round.

As far as bang for your buck goes, Trinity seems to do very very well against Sandy-based i5's and i3's even with discrete graphics. It's definitely impressive. -8% disadvantage in first pass of x264 and -30% in cinebench single-thread. If you consider how far behind Bulldozer was, 20-50%, those are some good gains...

I'm still hoping somebody does some overclocking tests with those Trinity laptops. Llano was well known to overclock 20%+ over stock settings with k10stat, but I'm not sure k10stat works with Trinity considering it's a different architecture Some IPC comparisons between Llano/Sandy/Trinity at equal clocks would be nice as well

 

[coffey]

So in sum the A10-4600m is
......

+1

 

[Nemesis 1]

I wish that AMD would have gone with a form of sideport memory instead for the IGP. Faster RAM is great but it just adds cost to the laptop which is not what most people want. AMD has to price Trinity laptops below Intel's offerings to be competitive and any added cost that might make it priced similar to Intel's offerings is just going to hurt their sales. I want to see what Haswell with its L4 cache is capable.

Intel haswell does not have an L4 cache . What it has is crystelwell which is not L4 cache google is your friend