The AMD Trinity Review (A10-4600M): A New Hope
by Jarred Walton on May 15, 2012 12:00 AM ESTAMD Trinity General Performance
Starting as usual with our general performance assessment, we’ve got several Futuremark benchmarks along with Cinebench and x264 HD encoding. The latter two focus specifically on stressing the CPU while PCMarks will cover most areas of system performance (including a large emphasis on storage) and 3DMarks will give us a hint at graphics performance. First up, PCMark 7 and Vantage:
As noted earlier, we ran several other laptops through PCMark 7 and PCMark Vantage testing using the same Intel 520 240GB SSD, plus all the ultrabooks come with SSDs. That removes the SSD as a factor from most of the PCMark comparisons, leaving the rest of the platform to sink or swim on its own. And just how does AMD Trinity do here? Honestly, it’s not too bad, despite positioning within the charts.
Obviously, Intel’s quad-core Ivy Bridge is a beast when it comes to performance, but it’s a 45W beast that costs over $300 just for the CPU. We’ll have to wait for dual-core Ivy Bridge to see exactly how Intel’s latest stacks up against AMD, but if you remember the Llano vs. Sandy Bridge comparisons it looks like we’re in for more of the same. Intel continues to offer superior CPU performance, and even their Sandy Bridge ULV processors can often surpass Llano and Trinity. In the overall PCMark 7 metric, Trinity ends up being 20% faster than a Llano A8-3500M laptop, while Intel’s midrange i5-2410M posts a similar 25% lead on Trinity. Outside of the SSD, we’d expect Trinity and the Vostro V131 to both sell for around $600 as equipped.
A 25% lead for Intel is pretty big, but what you don’t necessarily get from the charts is that for many users, it just doesn’t matter. I know plenty of people using older Core 2 Duo (and even a few Core Duo!) laptops, and for general office tasks and Internet surfing they’re fine. Llano was already faster in general use than Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 class hardware, and it delivered great battery life. Trinity boosts performance and [spoiler alert!] battery life, so it’s a net win. If you’re looking for a mobile workstation or something to do some hardcore gaming, Trinity won’t cut it—you’d want a quad-core Intel CPU for the former, and something with a discrete GPU for the latter—but for everything else, we’re in the very broad category known as “good enough”.
When we start drilling down into other performance metrics, AMD’s CPU performance deficiency becomes pretty obvious. The Cinebench single-threaded score is up 15% from 35W Llano, but in a bit of a surprise the multi-threaded score is basically a wash. Turn to the x264 HD encoding test however and Trinity once again shows a decent 15% improvement over Llano. Against Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, though? AMD’s Trinity doesn’t stand a chance: i5-2410M is 50% faster in single-threaded Cinebench, 27% faster in multi-threaded, and 5-10% faster in x264. It’s a good thing 99.99% of laptop users never actually run applications like Cinebench for “real work”, but if you want to do video encoding a 10% increase can be very noticeable.
Shift over to graphics oriented benchmarks and the tables turn once again...sort of. Sandy Bridge can’t run 3DMark11, since it only has a DX10 class GPU, but in Vantage Performance and 3DMark06 Trinity is more than twice as fast as HD 3000. Of course, Ivy Bridge’s HD 4000 is the new Intel IGP Sheriff around these parts, and interestingly we see Trinity and i7-3720QM basically tied in these two synthetics. (We’ll just ignore 3DMark Vantage’s Entry benchmark, as it’s so light on graphics quality that we’ve found it doesn’t really stress most GPUs much—even low-end GPUs like HD 3000 score quite well.) We’ll dig into graphics performance more with our gaming benchmarks next.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
271 Comments
View All Comments
Wierdo - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I'll start recommending an integrated Intel GPU once I feel more confident about their driver support, which is more important than performance.At least now the IGP in Ivy Bridge is a decent solution for basic gaming needs, but they really need to work on their drivers, no more of that "driver update five years after product is obsolete" bs.
Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
I agree, although even that seems to have improved somewhat; at least from the base standard of "what works to begin with". Here's hoping for further progress.medi01 - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
Except there is one thing which isn't visible on charts: quality. Check how horrible Intel's AF is on toms Trinity review.fumigator - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
"AMD still has better drivers than Intel, but it's more like 20% better "Unluckly I had an Ivy Bridge HD4000 notebook sitting for a week, and out of 29 games, only 60% were barely playable (performance), 15% crashed, and the rest run with strange artifacts but stable enough though.
While I don't worry alot about gaming in a laptop, the true fact is that intel is way behind AMD in this, and we are not talking about 3D render quality. Oh my, you have to take a look at that and you won't doubt it a second. AMD and Nvidia renders are better.
While I still hoped more from trinity, not sure to make a judgement until I grab one and put a decent super fast ram module on it and go testing.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Could you please provide a list of the games that were unplayable and those that crashed? I'd love to be able to confirm problems.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
The gpu is "several orders of magnitude" better than intel's best? You do realize that an order of magnitude is 10x right? So how many orders of magnitude better 2, 3, 4 (100x, 1000x, 10000x). Overstate much?In fact trinity is on average what, 20-30% better than HD4000? Hardly one order of magnitude much less multiple orders of magnitude.
Overall the chip is OK, but I was actually hoping for more improvement on the GPU side. Yes, it is improved, but not enough to really make a game go from unplayable to playable.
BSMonitor - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Most laptops from that time did not use Intel's IGP on the chipset. Most had AMD or nVidia dGPU's. And these new Trinity APU's probably compete pretty closely to that.RussianSensation - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Core 2 Duo came out in 2006 not 2004.Intel doesn't sell Core 2 Duo laptops anymore in mainstream segments. They sell IVB laptops.
Are you implying that C2D user will want to upgrade to Trinity?
Most users would be far better off getting an Intel laptop with low end Kepler GPU such as GT640 than this.
Lugaidster - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Assuming equal pricing sure. But there's no way an IVB with a low end Kepler will be near a trinity laptop in terms of pricing. Most likely it will be a few hundred dollars more, which depending on the target, can make a difference.Sure you can recommend that, but not everyone will see that as worth the extra couple of hundred dollars. Considering that aside from CPU performance, a trinity notebook is roughly equal to an IVB one, with price in their favour, they can sell lots of these.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I expect we'll see dual-core IVB with Kepler going for around $800-$850 at the low end of the scale. I also expect we'll see a lot of the early Trinity laptops with A10-4600M selling for closer to $700. Hopefully I'm wrong on the Trinity side, but they did the same thing with Llano. "It's new! Charge more for it!" Not AMD's fault at all, obviously, but still irritating.