The AMD Trinity Review (A10-4600M): A New Hope
by Jarred Walton on May 15, 2012 12:00 AM ESTAMD’s Heterogeneous Computing with Trinity
It’s not all about just CPU or GPU performance, though—or at least that’s what we’ve been hearing from various parties for a while now. The real question is how a platform performs as a whole. There are some tasks where pure CPU performance is what really matters, and there are other tasks where the parallel nature of GPUs pays serious dividends. AMD (and NVIDIA) has been pushing for more applications to make use of the GPU for tasks where it can provide a lot of number crunching prowess.
With Trinity, AMD provided us with a selection of applications that now leverage—to varying degrees—AMD’s App Acceleration, OpenCL, OpenGL, or other tools. For some of these applications, we don’t have any good way of measuring performance across a wide selection of hardware, and for some of those where benchmarks are possible I’ve run out of time to try to put anything concrete together. I don’t want to skip this section entirely, so what follows is a list of the applications, how they benefit from heterogeneous compute, and some general impressions of the application. We also have graphs for a few of the applications where performance seemed to matter the most.
Adobe Flash 11.2—The latest version of Flash continues to add GPU acceleration features, and now there are 3D hooks in addition to the video offload acceleration we first saw with Flash 10.x. There’s not too much of note here, as NVIDIA and Intel also support the latest features of Flash 11.2. Flash works fine on Trinity, but the same goes for Ivy Bridge and various NVIDIA GPUs. If you never saw the Epic Citadel demo for iOS or Android, there’s now a Flash-based version of the same demo that will run in your browser. (Warning: that link can take 10-15 minutes on a decent connection to download all the textures and other data!) Epic Citadel looks just as nice as it did on iOS, but now we need some actual games to take advantage of the tools. Then perhaps we can start looking into benchmarks of browser games or something….
Adobe Photoshop CS6—Photoshop started to take advantage of GPU acceleration back with the CS4 release, using OpenGL to improve performance on certain filters and features. With CS6, Adobe has begun using OpenCL. Fundamentally, I’m not sure how big of a change this represents, but there are quite a few functions in Photoshop that are now supposed to be faster/better with an OpenCL compatible graphics card. There are also two new features that leverage OpenCL; one is Iris Blur, which allows you to mimic depth of field using Photoshop instead of your camera, and the other is Liquify. Unfortunately, I’m by no means a Photoshop expert, so I’m not sure how much the features really help “power users”. I did try doing a benchmark of general Photoshop CS6 performance using the Photoshop Retouch benchmark with and without GPU acceleration enabled; unfortunately, it looks like most of the filters in that action script don’t benefit from the GPU acceleration, as the scores I got were essentially unchanged with or without GPU/OpenCL enabled. Overall, I’ll take the GPU acceleration, but for most of what I do in Photoshop it doesn’t appear to benefit; if you’re interested, you can read more about AMD’s work with Adobe.
GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)—Going along with Photoshop CS6, AMD provided a special preview build of GIMP 2.8. GIMP is sort of the poor man’s Photoshop, as it’s completely free. At present, there are 19 filters that utilize OpenCL to speed of processing, and over the coming months as the release version of GIMP looks to take their new engine live there will undoubtedly be more additions. For now, probably only five of the filters are things I would use (e.g. noise reduction, maybe a light blur). I tested several of these, and there is sometimes an order of magnitude speedup vs. doing the work on just the CPU. The problem is that it also looks like GIMP isn't incredibly well threaded in many of these tasks, putting multicore CPUs at a disadvantage. My biggest complaint isn’t even about performance, though; sadly, I just find the GIMP UI and general performance to be really bad compared to Photoshop. I've tried several times over the years to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, but I’ve never felt comfortable with the tool. If on the other hand you prefer GIMP, hopefully when the current GEGL menu gets integrated into the main program you’ll realize a healthy performance boost.
ArcSoft MediaConverter 7.5—MediaConverter should be a familiar name by now if you’ve been following our reviews, as it’s one of the showcase titles for Intel’s Quick Sync transcoding. When we reviewed Ivy Bridge last month, we found that on Llano at least the version of MediaConverter we had ran slower on the GPU than on the CPU; with Trinity on the other hand, enabling GPU acceleration results in times that are about 60% faster than the CPU alone. That’s a good performance increase, but we’re looking at 154 seconds on the CPU compared to 98 seconds using the GPU. In contrast, dual-core Sandy Bridge on CPU transcoding took 127 seconds and with Quick Sync it only took 28 seconds—a 5X improvement. Quad-core Ivy Bridge was just as impressive, going from 68 seconds on the CPU down to 16 seconds with Quick Sync (4.25X). We’ve been hoping to see something more from AMD’s new Video Codec Engine (VCE), first announced over six months ago with HD 7970, but unless there’s substantial room for improvement it looks like Intel’s Quick Sync will continue to be the fastest transcoding tool for now.
CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5—This tool is very similar to MediaConverter, and the results are also better this time around. We measured the assisted encode time at 74 seconds compared to 135 seconds on the CPU alone. The 74 second transcode time actually makes Trinity potentially faster than CPU-based transcoding on dual-core Sandy Bridge, but again Quick Sync (25 seconds on SNB, 12 seconds on IVB) remains the fastest way to transcode. Considering both of these tools are apparently using VCE, I have to state that I’m disappointed; with VCE I was expecting performance similar to what Intel is getting with Quick Sync—four or five times faster than CPU-based encoding for the same APU. That Trinity isn't quite twice as fast with VCE is unfortunate; even though there's a decent improvement, Intel is in a completely different category of performance. We’ll have to wait and see if anything more develops with VCE.
Handbrake— Yep, this popular open source video transcoding app is getting an OpenCL facelift. Check out our separate post on it here.
WinZip 16.5—This final application is one that I can see being very useful, assuming we see similar advancements in other compression utilities. WinZip 16.5 now supports OpenCL to improve compression times. We tested by compressing the entire Cinebench 11.5 directory with and without OpenCL enabled, and we also compared the results with 7-Zip. On Trinity, performance improved by about 20%, which is decent; Llano sees an even larger 28% improvement. Meanwhile, Sandy Bridge using CPU-based compression is about as fast as Trinity with OpenCL, and Ivy Bridge is still faster, but the 20% increase for “free” is nothing to scoff at. Unfortunately for WinZip, 7-Zip compressed the same directory to 95MB vs. 108MB in roughly the same time as the non-OpenCL WinZip, and 7-Zip is completely free and doesn't nag you and tell you to buy it. Where WinZip 16.5 is a good proof of concept, what will really help AMD is if all the other compression utilities (7-Zip, WinRAR, etc.) all start using OpenCL or other tools to improve performance.
The majority of the applications continue to focus on video and image manipulation, likely because those are areas where the parallel nature of GPUs can be readily utilized. WinZip on the other hand is an application showing other potential uses for GPGPU and heterogeneous compute. We’d love to see even more adoption of OpenCL and similar tools, but the stark reality is that coming up with new and useful ways of doing this is difficult—if it were easy, everyone would do it! The good news is that giving the creative people of the world more tools with which to work can only help, and we’ll just have to wait and see what else comes out.
There’s another interesting sidebar worth mentioning here. OpenCL is an open standard, and the latest Intel drivers actually install an OpenCL driver on Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge. Not surprisingly, not all implementations are created equal, so even with Intel’s drivers we couldn’t enable OpenCL in Photoshop or WinZip; GIMP on the other hand apparently worked okay with OpenCL on Intel—we measured a 5X performance improvement of the Noise Reduction filter with Ivy Bridge. Trinity also came in slightly faster with both leveraging OpenCL, while Intel was nearly twice as fast without.
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Burticus - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I wonder if they will release standalone mobile chips and if they are the same socket as the current Llano? Currently my laptop has an A8-3500 and I wouldn't mind upping to an A10.They did this in the past with the S1 socket, I wonder if it will be an option nowadays...
For the most part I've been pretty impressed with the A8 for a $500 laptop (especially with some overclocking). Games are playable at moderate settings. Civ 5 still kicks it in the teeth though, and I see that the A10 got a 10fps jump which would be nice.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
The sockets are different: FS1r2 this time. I don't know precisely what changed, but apparently it's enough that AMD isn't making them backwards compatible.Fallen Kell - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
The biggest problem with the design is that the OS doesn't know how to work with the CPU. Take the case where you have 2 of these piledrivers, with 1 floating point intensive job and 1 non-floating point intensive job already running, in which case the OS will place the first job, on one piledriver, and the next on the other piledriver. Then a user starts a new floating point intensive job, and the OS simply puts it on the next free core, which happens to be the one already running a floating point intensive application, and thus, you just bottlenecked both of those processes. The OS doesn't know if a process is floating-point heavy or not, and thus, can not properly schedule it to a core which has a floating point unit not in heavy use. That is why bulldozer failed. It is also why my work will never purchase it, as they do floating point intensive applications.Beenthere - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Most every reviewer has indicated that Trinity is a significant jump in performance in both CPU and GPU with extended battery performance yet some reviewers seem hard pressed to admit that for 90% of the laptop market Trinity is superior to Intel's best offerings.Some reviewers are trying to pretend that Intel's faster CPU performance some how is of importance to the majority of the laptop market when in fact it is not unless all you do is crunch numbers. I think Trinity sales just like llano and brazos will drive the point home who is leading the laptop market segment with what consumers actually desire.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Beenthere, you have to be the biggest AMD fanatic I've seen around here. EVERY article where AMD comes up, you're there making things up to justify your worldview. As I indicate in the article, Trinity is 10-20% faster than Llano on CPU and 20% faster on GPU, which is a decent improvement. Unfortunately, a lot of places are quoting AMD's "up to 29% faster CPU and 56% faster GPU" and calling it a day. Those are results that just didn't show up in any testing that I conducted.Oh, wait, I've got one: using OpenCL in GIMP, Trinity is 72% faster than Llano! There, we now have one statistic you can point to where Trinity is better. For the 0.1% of the population that uses GIMP, and not even them really -- it's the 0.1% of people that use GIMP and will some day benefit when the next major release comes out and incorporates OpenCL. If you can't see the problem with that statement, I can't help you.
For 90% of the market, Trinity might be enough, but to say it's "better than Intel's best" is pure fanaticism and nothing more. You are more biased than AMD's own marketing department. To pretend that moderately faster graphics with substantially less CPU performance is somehow more important than any other metric is insane. Sandy Bridge with GT 540M can be had for $600 right now, and it will beat Trinity in pretty much every single metric. Lucky for AMD, a lot of people like you will blindly purchase anything with AMD on it without regard for reality.
bji - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
While I agree with your points overall, I think there is a fine detail you need to consider:Benchmarks are only an approximation of the performance results that would be achieved on a whole variety of processor tasks. You can rightly point out that only a small fraction of tested programs benefitted greatly from improved OpenCL performance, but you can't claim that this only benefits the 0.1% of people that use GIMP and care about OpenCL, because there may be other programs available now, or in the future, that would see similar performance increases. What your benchmarking shows is that *most* programs don't see a huge OpenCL performance benefit, but that *some* do. This is likely to lead to a more significant performance benefit than would be enjoyed by 0.1% of the users of a particular application.
However, I think that CPU reviewers are kind of in a hard place these days, since we're arguing over how big of an overkill one given processor is than another when considered for a wide variety of tasks, which starts to make any benchmarking about trying to find benchmarks where the performance difference would really matter. And that invites all kinds of debate about which kinds of performance actually matter to the average user, which is not a very fun or interesting argument.
CPU performance can still matter for targeted tasks, but that kind of analysis requires a very different approach and is very user-specific, when compared to standard benchmarking.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
You're correct, and the real difficulty is first in finding anything where OpenCL is clearly faster, and then seeing similar techniques used in other software. Office for example isn't going to really get any faster because of you GPU or OpenCL -- and it doesn't need to be. Office spends its time waiting for user input. So what we really need are technologies that make the slow parts of using a computer faster. SSDs are a perfect example, because they make the initial boot and application load times all faster. OpenCL isn't doing that for the vast majority of applications, and neither is Quick Sync or DirectX or whatever other GPU related task you want to throw out there. They make graphics faster, but in my experience that's mostly important to gamers, or for high-end workstation stuff where you want OpenGL support.For many people, Core 2 Duo is fast enough, and Llano is fast enough, and Trinity is fast enough, etc. So for those users, it's about delivering the lowest cost. Trinity is twice the size of quad-core Ivy Bridge, so Intel could easily start a price war if they wanted, but they'd rather keep higher margins. Sandy Bridge laptops at $600 are still faster for general use than Llano and Trinity, particularly if they have an Optimus GPU around. Unless something is significantly faster in some important metric -- and I really don't see any single area where that's the case for Trinity -- then you just get whichever is the best price.
Beenthere - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Wow, Jarred is having an unhappy day! :(Obviously AMD's testing is different than your's as is other websites. My comments were NOT in regards to your article, which I though was pretty balanced. The website I was referring to is listed below.
Your knee-jerk reaction to my comment however shows you're loosing it. If you really believe that Intel's platform provides as good a result for mainstream consumers, you'd be in error especially when Trinty Ultrathins will be hundreds cheaper.
It's pretty obvious you can't deal with differing POVs and you get upset when you're opinion is not shared by others. Losing your objectivety makes it difficult for anyone to take your articles seriously - even though this one was pretty balanced. You should consider a CHILL PILL before over-reacting.
You really should THINK before you react. In this case my comment had NOTHING to do with your story. If your article has merit then you should not need to go POSTAL even if my comment was about your story. Being a reactionary and calling people names for having a different POV than you shows immaturity. The really funny part about your knee-jerk reaction was my comment was in regard to another story on Trinity on a different website. (see below).
You must have a guilty conscience? Below is the story I commented on. Oops, I'm sure you are embarrassed now, but it's OK? I don't hold grudges. <LOL>
Maybe the Intel fanbois are just beating you up too much because Trinity is a far better choice for laptops than anything Intel has at the moment? they'll get over it.
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Mobile/AMD-A10-4600M-...
Cheer up Jarred. You can look forward to Piledriver/Vishera in a few months and more hate from the Intel fanbois.
bji - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Sorry, but when you start a paragraph with "Some reviewers are trying to pretend" you are VERY CLEARLY implicating that the reviewer is being dishonest by trying to mislead people reading the review by stating intentionally false commentary.If you start with that kind of premise, then you deserve a response that, in kind, accuses you of doing the same, which is exactly what you got.
Trying to then pretend that you're innocent and didn't deserve that response is just more lameness.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Beenthere is your typical passive aggressive anonymous Internet poster. I called him on his post, and now he backpedals. You know what's hilarious, Beenthere? That article you link. Let me give you a quote from the conclusion to show what I'm talking about:"I can’t find a way to look at Trinity that paints a favorable picture. Though certainly an improvement over Llano, it’s not enough. AMD is way behind Intel in processor performance, and the graphics performance does not offer redemption. The only way systems based off Trinity will be made competitive is by slashing and burning the prices."
Okay, that's pretty much what I said as well. Perhaps they're even more negative than I am. And yet... that paragraph is followed by a Silver Award? WTF is up with that? They're awarding something that they can't find a way to describe in a positive fashion? And then you suggest that "Some reviewers are trying to pretend that Intel's faster CPU performance some how is of importance to the majority of the laptop market when in fact it is not unless all you do is crunch numbers." I'd say the opposite: some reviewers are trying to kiss up to AMD with an award or backhanded praise when everything else they say is negative at best.
But hey, let's not forget how open and unbiased Beenthere is. Here's a quote from page three of the comments that shows his amazing analytical skills and not-at-all-anti-Intel mindset:
Subject: Excellent by Beenthere on Tuesday, May 15, 2012
As expected Trinity delivers in all areas and should meet most people's needs quite well. Good job AMD. You get my money!
Wow. Yup, Trinity is a far better choice for laptop than anything Intel has at the moment. Because Acer's AS4830TG with GT 540M and i5-2410M at $600 offers better CPU performance and better GPU performance. Yup. Far better. I like to pay more for less!