The AMD Trinity Review (A10-4600M): A New Hope
by Jarred Walton on May 15, 2012 12:00 AM ESTMobile Trinity Lineup
Trinity is of course coming in two flavors, just like Llano before it. On the desktop, we’ll have Virgo chips, but those are coming later this year (around Q3); right now, Trinity is only on laptops. On laptops the codename for Trinity is Comal. AMD has also dropped wattages on their mobile flavors, so where Llano saw 35W and 45W mobile parts, with Comal AMD will have 17W, 25W, and 35W parts. (The desktop Trinity chips will apparently retain their 65W and 100W targets.) There aren’t a ton of mobile Trinity chips launching today; instead, AMD has five different APUs and each one targets a distinct market segment. Here’s the quick rundown:
| AMD Trinity A-Series Fusion APUs for Notebooks | |||||
| APU Model | A10-4600M | A8-4500M | A6-4400M | A10-4655M | A6-4455M |
| “Piledriver” CPU Cores | 4 | 4 | 2 | 4 | 2 |
| CPU Clock (Base/Max) | 2.3/3.2GHz | 1.9/2.8GHz | 2.7/3.2GHz | 2.0/2.8GHz | 2.1/2.6GHz |
| L2 Cache (MB) | 4 | 4 | 1 | 4 | 2 |
| Radeon Model | HD 7660G | HD 7640G | HD 7520G | HD 7620G | HD 7500G |
| Radeon Cores | 384 | 256 | 192 | 384 | 256 |
| GPU Clock (Base/Max) | 497/686MHz | 497/655MHz | 497/686MHz | 360/497MHz | 327/424MHz |
| TDP | 35W | 35W | 35W | 25W | 17W |
| Package | FS1r2 | FS1r2 | FS1r2 | FP2 | FP2 |
| DDR3 Speeds |
DDR3-1600 DDR3L-1600 DDRU-1333 |
DDR3-1600 DDR3L-1600 DDRU-1333 |
DDR3-1600 DDR3L-1600 DDRU-1333 |
DDR3-1333 DDR3L-1333 DDRU-1066 |
DDR3-1333 DDR3L-1333 DDRU-1066 |
As a Bulldozer-derived architecture, Trinity uses CPU modules that each contain two Piledriver CPU cores with a shared FP/SSE (Floating Point) unit. From one perspective, that makes Trinity a quad-core or dual-core processor; others would argue that it’s not quite the same as a “true” quad-core setup. We’re not going to worry too much about the distinction here, though, as we’ll let the performance results tell that story. Compared to Llano’s K10-derived CPU core, clock speeds in Trinity are substantially higher—both the base and Turbo Core clocks. The top-end A10-4600M has a base clock that’s 53% higher than the 1.5GHz A8-3500M we reviewed when Llano launched, while maximum turbo speeds are up 33%. Unfortunately, while clock speeds might be substantially higher, Trinity’s Piledriver cores have substantially longer pipelines than Llano’s K10+ cores; we’ll see in the benchmarks what that means for typical performance.
The GPU side of the equation is are also substantially different from Llano. Llano used a Redwood GPU core (e.g. Radeon 5600 series) with a VLIW5 architecture (e.g. the Evergreen family of GPUs), and the various APUs had either 400, 320, or 240 Radeon cores. Trinity changes out the GPU core for a VLIW4 design (Northern Islands family of GPU cores), and this is the only time we’ve seen AMD use VLIW4 outside of the 6900 series desktop GPUs. The maximum number of Radeon cores is now 384, but we should see better efficiency out of the design, and clock speeds are substantially higher than on Llano—the mobile clocks are typically 55-60% higher. Again, how this plays out in terms of actual performance is something we’ll look at momentarily.
Looking at the complete lineup of Trinity APUs, it’s interesting to see AMD using a new A10 branding for the top models while overlapping the existing A8 and A6 brands on lower spec models. We only have the A10-4600M in for testing right now, but AMD provided some performance estimates for the various performance levels. The A10-4600M delivers 56% better graphics performance and 29% better “productivity” performance than the A8-3500M—note that we put productivity in quotes because it’s not clear if AMD is talking specifically about CPU performance or some other metric. The new A8-4500M delivers 32% faster graphics performance than the A8-3500M and 19% higher productivity, which appears to be why it gets the same “A8” classification. Finally, even the single-module/dual-core A6-4400M delivers 16% better graphics than the A8-3500M and 5% higher productivity. I suspect that the various percentages AMD lists are more of an “up to” statement as opposed to being typical performance improvements, as it seems unlikely that 192 VLIW4 cores at 686MHz could consistently outperform 400 VLIW5 cores at 444MHz.
If we consider target markets, the A10-4600M will be the fastest Trinity APU for now, and it should go into mainstream laptops that will provide a well rounded experience with the ability for moderate gaming along with any other tasks you might want to run. The A8-4500M takes a pretty major chunk out of the GPU (one third of the GPU cores are gone along with a slight drop in maximum clock speed) while maintaining roughly 80% of the CPU performance, so it can fit into slightly cheaper laptops but will likely drop gaming performance from “moderate” to “light”. The A6-4400M ends up as the extreme budget offering, with higher clocks on the CPU making up for the removal of two cores; the GPU likewise gets a slight trim relative to the A8-4500M, and we’re now down to half the graphics performance potential of the A10-4600M. All of the standard voltage parts support up to DDR3-1600 memory, with low voltage DDR3-1600 and ultra low voltage DDR3-1333 also supported.
The other two APUs are low voltage and ultra low voltage parts, which should work well in laptops like HP’s “sleekbooks”—basically, they’re for AMD-based alternatives to ultrabooks. The A10-4655M has about 87% of the CPU performance potential of the A10-4600M, with 70% of the GPU performance potential, and it can fit into a 25W TDP. The A6-4455M drops the TDP to 17W, matching Intel’s ULV parts, but again the CPU and GPU cores get cut. This time we get two Piledriver cores, 256 Radeon cores, and lowered base and maximum clock speeds. The low/ultra low voltage parts also drop support for DDR3-1600 memory, moving all RAM options down one step to DDR3-1333, low voltage DDR3-1333 and ultra low voltage DDR3-1066.
The final piece of the puzzle for any platform is the chipset. AMD is using their A70M (Hudson M3) chipset, which is the same chipset used for Llano. That’s not really a problem, though, as the chipset provides everything Trinity needs: it has support for up to six native SATA 6Gbps ports, four USB 3.0 ports (and 10 USB 2.0 ports), RAID 0/1 support, and basically everything else you need for a mainstream laptop. PCI Express support in Trinity remains at PCIe 2.0, but that’s not really a problem considering the target market. PCIe 3.0 has been shown to improve performance in some GPGPU workloads with HD 7970, but that’s a GPU that provides nearly an order of magnitude more compute power (over 7X more based on clock speeds and shader count alone).
That takes care of the overview of AMD’s Mobile Trinity lineup, and Anand has covered the architectural information, so now it’s time to meet our prototype AMD Trinity laptop.
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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!