DonahimHaber 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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  • Soulkeeper - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link

    I just built a llano system

    Hopefully trinity will be a drop in replacement
    FM2 sounds like something that should wait for DDR4 to me
  • starcaptor - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 - link

    This update better be "DA BOMB" if you know what I mean.
  • TC2 - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link

    a free of charge idea:
    instead of
    "Details on Trinity - AMD's Next Gen APU"
    you could name the article
    "Details on Trinity - AMD's Next Gen GOSSIP GENERATOR"
    Good luck :)
  • tipoo - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 - link

    I know consoles aren't mentioned much here but I'm curious, a supposed insider recently told tech sites that the next Playstation will use an AMD x86-64 CPU as well as a Southern Islands GPU, so that could either be separate chips or something like Trinity. I wonder if it will use the Trinity APU (southern islands GPU with up to four Piledriver cores) or a separate CPU and GPU, with a SI GPU and the FX-Next-like processor with up to eight cores. The four core might outperform the Cell by magnitudes but they spent a lot of time convincing people that the Cell was amazing, and going from 1PPE plus 6 usable SPE cores to 4 would sound like a downgrade to some who know less about hardware.

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