Details on Trinity - AMD's Next Gen APU
by Kristian Vättö on October 25, 2011 10:53 AM ESTDonahimHaber has leaked a slide concerning AMD's next generation APU, called Trinity. The slide does not reveal any detailed specifications, it's merely an overview of Trinity. Lets begin with a table comparing Llano and Trinity:
| Comparison of AMD's Higher-End APUs | ||
| Llano | Trinity | |
| Core | Husky | Piledriver |
| Core Count | Up to 4 | Up to 4 |
| RAM | Up to DDR3-1866 | Up to DDR3-2133 |
| GPU | AMD 6000 Series | AMD 7000 Series |
| Socket | FM1 | FM2 |
Those are the differences in a nutshell. Husky core is based on upgraded 10h microarchitecture (also known as AMD K10), the same microarchitecture that is used in Phenom II CPUs. As for Piledriver, AMD is referring to it as second generation Bulldozer core (see our Bulldozer review). Trinity will have up to four cores, just like Llano, which means up to two Piledriver modules (each Bulldozer/Piledriver module has two cores). In terms of speed, AMD is claiming up to 20% increase over Llano. Bulldozer's poor single-threaded performance might cause the performance upgrades to be limited to multithreaded tasks though, unless AMD can do magics with Piledriver (aka 2nd gen Bulldozer). RAM support is also up from DDR3-1866 to up to DDR-2133.
GPU department will also get an overhaul. We already reported that Trinity's GPU will be named as AMD 7000 Series, which suggests that it will be based on the same design as other 7000 Series GPUs (this might sound obvious, but Llano's GPU was named as 6000 Series, yet it was based on 5000 Series "Redwood" core). The leaked slide supports this since it mentions support for next generation DirectX 11, most likely DX 11.1. AMD will also compete with Intel's QuickSync by including Video Compression Engine (VCE) in Trinity. Performance increase will be around 30% compared to Llano's GPU according to AMD.
Trinity will continue to use the same chipsets as Llano. However, the socket will change to FM2, which will most likely be compatible with FM1. Another leaked slide shows that mobile Trinity's package is FS1r2, whereas Llano's is FS1. The APU after Trinity, called Kaveri, will use FS2 package. This suggests that FS1 and FS1r2, as well as FM1 and FM2, are very similar and hence backwards compatible. This has not been confirmed though.
Availability is unknown but if roadmaps are to believe, Trinity should make its first appearance in Q1'12, full availability being in Q2'12.
Source: DonahimHaber
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Boogaloo - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
A 30% increase in integrated graphics performance is laughably low.silverblue - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
Do remember that Trinity is at the same process as Llano. You can't just magic up a massive performance boost if you're looking to keep die size sensible, and regardless, the memory interface can only be improved so far.Mugur - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
What if some of the performance issues will be corrected by simply using the memory controller at cpu speed, like Intel does, instead of the same 2-2.2 Ghz like it's now...?silverblue - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
It'd certainly reduce latency. I'd laugh if a good deal of Bulldozer's problems are solved by doing just that.arjuna1 - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
"In terms of speed, AMD is claiming up to 20% increase over Llano. Bulldozer's poor single-threaded performance might cause the performance upgrades to be limited to multithreaded tasks though, unless AMD can do magics with Piledriver (aka 2nd gen Bulldozer)"Yet another intel fanboi biased comment from from Kristian Vättö, hey Anand, hire a couple of AMD geek's, I mean, to even the scales, this is making your site look really bad.
silverblue - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
There's nothing fanboyish about the remark. Piledriver and future iterations of the architecture are rumoured to bring 10-15% improvements on the CPU side, but that is in comparison to the first generation Bulldozer which appears to perform slower clock-for-clock than K10.5.Unless there's something easily fixable with Bulldozer, Piledriver isn't exactly going to set the world alight. In any case, there's limited space so you can't very well throw in a GPU that's an order of magnitude stronger than the one in the A8-series.
A 20% improvement across the board would be nice.
kenyee - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
Sorry, but I'm an AMD fan and have designed chips in a former life. I'd agree w/ that comment unfortunately. Given how BD is roughly the same speed as a Phenom II in single threaded apps, I don't see how it's going to be faster in Llano form. It'll be a dual core 4 thread system :-Pkrumme - Thursday, October 27, 2011 - link
No you are not. You are not sorry, you are not an AMD fan and you havnt designed chips.Sorry.
Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
The numbers are what they are, you can't change them. It's hard to praise AMD since they haven't been anything else but an underdog in the CPU segment lately.Anonymous Blowhard - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
Yeah, that "telling the truth, no matter how much it hurts" is really a bad approach.U MAD BRO?