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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fic2 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Didn't Anand or someone here do a side-by-side of a bunch of chips clocked 1GHz? Would be nice to add BD to that list. And yeah, see how low the voltage can go and the power usage at that speed.silverblue - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
I'm not sure. I know somebody (Toms?) did a single core comparison a few months back, though.fic2 - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
That sounds like what I was thinking of.C300fans - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
We all need magic to boost up. If 4 threads Trinity can gain 20% improvement against Llano, it means 8 threads can gain 40%.. That would be a deal.Hubb1e - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
keep dreaming. Reports from AMD say that Piledriver is 10% more efficient than Bulldozer per core. The 20% performance gains probably come from clock speed. Llano had a really really pathetic 2.9 ghz clockspeed for 4 cores. Trinity could likely launch at 4.2 ghz on 2 modules and eventually scale to high 4ghz or even into the 5s if they get the process working. This plus the 10% gain in efficiency over Bulldozer could give it a pretty substantial single threaded edge over Llano making up for the fact that it's only a 2 module chip.And IMO mainstream customers are much better served by fast 2 core chips than slower 4 core chips. Your mom runs very few Apps that take advantage of the extra 2 cores on Llano making the 2 module approach a pretty decent strategy. I think Llano would have been a better mainstream chip if it had 400 stream processors, and only 2 cores at 3.7-3.8 ghz. Likely what happened with Llano is that they didn't reach high clocks because they let automated tools design the chip knowing it's just a stopgap until a new architecture.
IlllI - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
"IPC will be higherSingle threaded performance will be higher"
Malih - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
yeah, that one really hit potential customer in the face. I doubt they'll deliver the planned 20%, maybe more like 20% in one specific application, and the rest of them are below that.Mishera - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link
They've been pretty reliable on their projections at least for the past few years. Although with this whole "what's a core" thing there may be some confusion on what that 20% is.I'm just worried about the heat this thing is going to produce with a gpu attached.
They got water-cooling for laptops?
frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Well here we go again with another chip for the forums to speculate and argue about, and more promises from AMD that they may or may not be able to back up. The threads from Bulldozer havent even died down yet!!I thought the best place for Llano was in the mobile market. Unless they can lower the power consumption, improve IPC, and reduce the die size, I am not sure that a trinity based APU will be an improvement over Llano. At least maybe they can get better graphics performance with a reasonable power envelope. The first Llano was not quite strong enough in either the graphics or CPU performance, although decent at both. The problem was Intel CPU performance was much better. AMD graphics was better, but still not quite good enough for the kind of gaming that I want to do.
BTW, did anyone else think that the headline was a bit misleading?? Dont really see any "details" here, just a general overview and the projections from AMD. Lets hope they come closer to the mark than Bulldozer did.
fic2 - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - link
Not to mention nothing new here. Pretty sure all of this has been known for a while now.