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.
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bji - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
What exactly about the review turned you off from Trinity for HTPC purposes?Was it the good-enough-for-HTPC CPU performance?
The superior GPU performance?
The better power efficiency?
The lower power use?
The cooler GPU?
The lower price (than the i3 you mentioned)?
Honestly just curious about why you so summarily concluded that Trinity wouldn't be a good choice from your HTPC when I can't see anything in the article that would allow you to draw that conclusion.
Unless it was the CPU chart comparison against at 3x as expensive CPU that you would never use in an HTPC anyway?
cjs150 - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
The main purpose will be as an HTPC, video transcoding is very important, look back to Jarred's review, Intel are winning by a large margin.For the case I intend to use as long as TDP is under 50W there are no concerns.
For me the i7-3770T will be the way to go. But you may want to try AMD. If I had built the HTPC last year there would have been no question that AMD would have been the right choice - Atom is/was useless. Maybe next year the table will turn again.
Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
Soooo... AMD are good against Atom, so you would have bought them then... but now you're buying an i7 with which they (obviously) cannot compete? That particular argument is a little difficult to follow, unless your requirements have drastically altered. :)To be fair to AMD, most people I know don't do transcodes while at the machine so speed isn't terribly relevant past a certain point, but I understand this may be different for you.
DellaMirandola13 - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I have really been looking forward to this review, nice to see a reasonably competitive CPU-market. Thank you.I am not a (serious) enthusiast, my best suit is lurking, but I was very excited to learn about the heterogeneous aspect. Is it possible you could elaborate or perhaps link to a comprehensive elaboration on the prospects of heterogeneous computing.
As far as I could tell, it seemed very useful in navigating within GIS-applications (particularly when you have to load roads or other kinds of grids on a map), but that's pure speculation.
Jedibeeftrix - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I would be interested in a 14" hp sleekbook if it comes with the 25w 4655M APU, as the full 384 shaders would be nice, otherwise I will wait till 28nm APU's arrive in 2013 sporting GCN.Ps test trinity with blender cycles.
Veroxious - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I am rather baffled by the fact that Ivy Bridge did not bring substantial battery life improvements with it 22nm process. Is it as a result of the trigate transistor tech? By extension when AMD moves to 22nm will it also be trigate seeing that they no longer have their own foundry? Has trigate given the purported benefits that were punted when it was announced, or is it simply a case of the 22nm node not being mature enough?JKnows - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
It would be nice to see those game test in High settings! My personal tests shows in high details settings Llano faster than HD4000, Trinity should be much faster.tipoo - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
This is true. The HD4000 falls further and further behind as you increase the detail settings; that's where AMDs implementation shines.JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Go look at Mobile Bench: the results for our "High 900p" testing is in there.http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/600?vs=580
But just to summarize, at 900p "High" settings, Trinity's lead over HD 4000 grows to 26% in our seven "2012 Suite" games. Also worth note is that Trinity is >30 FPS in three titles (DiRT 3, Portal 2, and Total War: Shogun 2) while Ivy Bridge is >30 FPS only in DiRT 3 (but comes very close in Skyrim).
Alexko - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
"I’d say AMD GPUs as well, but I’m still waiting for a better switchable graphics solution."You mean like Enduro?