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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Taft12 - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
He said "better".http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol...
"Linux OS supports manual switching which requires restart of X-Server to switch between graphics solutions."
They ain't there yet!
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Enduro sounds like it's just a renamed "AMD Dynamic Switchable Graphics" solution. I haven't had a chance to test it yet, unfortunately, but I can say that the previous solution is still very weak. And you still don't get separate driver updates from AMD and Intel.Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
Drivers is the big deal here. I like that I get standard drivers using my Optimus laptop.What I don't like is that it f#@!s up Aero constantly and occasionally performs other bizarre, unpredictable manoeuvres.
ToTTenTranz - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Greetings,Is it possible to provide some battery life results with gaming?
It's true that an Intel+nVidia Optimus solution should be better for both plugged-in gaming and wireless productivity (more expensive too, but that's been covered in the review).
However, a 35W Trinity should consume quite a bit less power than a 35W Intel CPU + 35W nVidia GPU, so it might be a worthy tradeoff for some.
Furthermore, when are we to expect Hybrid Crossfire results with Trinity+Turks? Is there any laptop OEM with that on the roadmap?
That should give us a better comparison to Ivy Bridge + GK107 solutions, as it would provide better gaming performance at a rather small price premium ($50 the most?).
x264fan - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
thanx for the nice review author, but let me write you some very important information regarding your test.1. x264 HD Benchmark Ver. 4.0 you used is using quite old x264.exe for encoding. It is important for Bulldozer/Piledriver to replace it with the newer once which contain specific assembler optimisation, which gives nice performance boost for AMD processor by using new instructions introduced in those CPUs. You can find how many they are here:
http://git.videolan.org/gitweb.cgi?p=x264.git;a=sh...
I would suggest to download new x264 build from x264.nl and replace it, then run the benchmark again. It would also show you how beneficial new isntructions are.
Another suggestion would be to run this benchmark using x64 build of the x264 throught x86 avisynth wrapper avs4x264mod.exe In this way you can see how much difference x64 uinstructions give.
iN FACT X264 IS SO NICELLY OPTIMISED IT CAN BE USED FOR CPU TESTING.
2. You have used Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition for measuring playback of h264 streams and battery life. So am I, unfortunatelly every time I want to use it with DXVA acceleration on my i7-2630 laptop I end up with terrible artefacts on smaller bitrate content. Blocks are floating and destroying picture quality. It is not as much visible on Blu-Ray content where the picture is more recommpressed than recreated using x264 transformations, but it is still there. My point is that if the INTEL decoding/drivers are so buggy which makes this dxva mode so unusable, how can anyone would like to measure battery life with this mode?
Without DXVA intel numbers would not be so good, but so far this mode is only usable.
3. I must say i am amased how good hd4000 is, but what about picture quality. From time to time we see the reports that nvidia or amd has cheated in drivers sacrifacing picture quality, so how about intel...
I hope you read my comment and update your test.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
So, help me out here: where do I get the actual x264 executables if I want to run an updated version of the x264 HD test? We've tried to avoid updating to newer releases just so that we could compare results with previously tested CPUs, but perhaps it's time to cut the strings. What I'd like is a single EXE that works optimally for Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Llano, and Trinity architectures. And I'm not interested in downloading source code, trying to get a compiled version to work, etc. -- I gave up being a software developer over a decade ago and haven't looked back. :-)x264fan - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
http://x264.nl it is newest semi-official build. It contains all current optimisations for every CPU, but since its command line you can turn on and off them. I also heard that this week there will be new hd benchmark 5.0 which would have the newest build in it.plonk420 - Monday, July 9, 2012 - link
the problem with this is that then the test isn't strictly "x264 hd benchmark version x.00" ... and would be harder to compare to other runs of the same test.if they did this in ADDITION to v4.00 or whatever (and VERY clearly noted the changes), that might be some useful data.
jabber - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
....how about adding a line/area to the benchmark graphs that stands for "Beyond this point performance is pointless/unnoticeable to the user".That way we can truly tell if we can save ourselves a boat load of cash. All out performance is great and all but I don't run benchmarks all day like some here so it's not so important. I just need to know will it do the job.
Or would that be bad for the sponsors?
bji - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
It is an interesting idea but it would such incredible fodder for fanboys to flame about, and even reasonable people would have a hard time deciding where that line should be drawn.I think the answer to your basic question is that, any mobile CPU in the Llano/Trinity/Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge lines will be more than sufficient for you or any other user *unless* you have a specific task that you know is highly CPU intensive and requires all of the CPU you can get.