AMD A10-4600M(Trinity) high-end processors AMD

While Intel is currently dominating the high-end processors AMD has been successful on another front with their low power APUs; processors with graphics built-in. The APUs have been especially popular on notebooks as they offer a lot of performance per watt and even come with decent graphics capabilities built in.

Today AMD is presenting the next generation APUs: Trinity, also called 2012 A-series APUs. The goal with this generation of APU’s is to offer more performance, better media capabilities, better game performance and all that while still offer long battery life.

FEATURE OVERVIEW

If we compare Trinity with Llano we notice that the chip is slightly larger and has a few more transistors.

The 2012 A-Series mobile APUs will be available in various configurations from dual core up to quad core with a 17”, 25” and 35 W TDP design. The 17W APU will be half as power hungry as the best Llano APU, making it ideal for the new small thin Ultrathin notebooks that AMD want to sell.  The “Piledriver”-cores are derived from the Bulldozer architecture.

3rd generation AMD Turbo Core technology makes sure that the power is automatically shifted between the CPU and GPU depending on application needs.

The APU now supports DDR3-1600 as well as low power 1.25V DIMMS. The ISA instruction sets have added support for the FMA3 and F16C instruction sets in addition to AVX, AVX 1.1, and AES.

Inside the APU we find a “Northern Island” HD74/5/600-based GPU (codename Thames), which comes with enhanced DX11-support and other improvements like an improved tessellation unit.  The GPU-core can be combined with an discrete card giving us Crossfire-support in a notebook.

One cool new feature is the fact that the APU now supports DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort 1.2 and that together in Eyefinity meaning that a notebook now could support up to 4 screens.

MEDIA SUPPORT

The 2012 A-Series mobile APUs now comes with something called AMD HD Media Accelerator.  The AMD HD Media Accelerator will take advantage of new hardware assisted video conversion using the new AMD Accelerated Video Converter. The new AMD Accelerated Video Converter block supports multi- stream H.264 HD encoding, video quality optimizations and numerous interfacing features to support video conferencing and wireless display capabilities.

One slightly weird feature is that there will be plugins available for all major browsers that incorporates AMDs Steady Video feature that stabilizes shaky video. We are not sure we really want our Youtube-video to be stabilized instead of being shown as intended but it will be there if you need it.