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.

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AMD R-464L, AMD R-272F APU Vs i7-2710QE

Here is the first benchmark about the next AMD APUs products with "Trinity" core inside, AMD will release new APUs products based on the new "Trinity" SKU core with a lower power consumption and will be branded as "R-Series", expecting that it will be similar to mobile "Trinity" editions.

A PDF file leaked on AMD website show an interesting comparison between the Sandy Bridge CPUs from Intel and the new AMD R-464L, AMD R-272F, according to external resources, the AMD R-464L specifications are 4 cores, which clocked at 2.3 GHz, and using an HD 7660G GPU requiring 35 Watt TDP to run stable, based on these number the new AMD R-464L can be a rebrand of the mobile A10-4600M chip, the R-272F APU can be a dual-core one and use a lower GPU.

Moving to the benchmark result, the snapshot show that the AMD R-464L perform 106% faster than Intel i7-2710QE sandy bridge based CPU which use the Intel graphics HD 3000, and the AMD R-272F is 45% faster when using graphics applications, and even when compared with the new intel graphic HD 4000, the AMD R-464L could easily win,

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