AMD Trinity slides leaked, 17W APU detailed

ComputerBase has leaked a couple of slides from AMDs CES 2012 press deck, covering performance gains expected over Llano, as well as battery life. The focal point is certainly the 17W variant designed for "ultrathins" - AMDs answer to ultrabooks.

Performance improvements expected for mobile Trinity are upto 25% for the CPU and 50% for the GPU over equivalent mobile Llano A-Series APUs it will succeed. The APUs benchmarked were 35W variants for both Trinity and Llano. However, these numbers are just projections and may vary with the final shipping product. AMD claims the 25% CPU performance increase is in the PC Mark Vantage Productivity benchmarks - a benchmark which has traditionally favoured Intel CPUs. The massive 50% uplift in GPU performance is in 3D Mark Vantage benchmark, while actual games may not scale as much. Trinity will also bring notable performance improvements to the desktop, though of lesser magnitude than the mobile variants - roughly 15% for the CPU, 30% for the GPU.

Trinity introduces Turbo Core 3.0 and new video capabilities - possibly including VCE (Video Compression Engine) to take on Intel QuickSync. The battery life is stated to be 12 hours at idle, and as much as 3:20 hours / 200 minutes running 3D Mark 06 workfload. However, battery capacity used was not mentioned for these tests.

AMDs power efficiency improvements not only improve battery life and performance, but also enable new platforms. Trinity will be available in 17W variants - directly competing with Intels ULV products. Trinity 17W APUs will find themselves in "ultrathins" - AMDs answer to Intels "ultrabooks". However, the key difference is lower pricing, as AMD seeks to drive ultrathins into mainstream markets.While Intel ULV parts are restricted to dual-core, AMD is bringing all four cores to 17W.

Trinity is set to release in mid-2012, and will directly compete with Intels Ivy Bridge. While Intel will continue to maintain a dominant lead in raw CPU performance, Trinity is expected maintain AMDs leadership on the GPU front. The 17W quad-core Trinity is especially shaping up to be a very promising product, competing with dual-core Ivy Bridge, and driving thin and light notebooks into more affordable mainstream segments ultrabooks are unlikely to achieve for a while.

Source: ComputerBase