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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Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
Ha! :Dmedi01 - Friday, May 18, 2012 - link
"Moderately better graphics" - referring to a 2 times (3D Vantage) faster GPU sounds very biased.On top of it, Intel's "HD" has rendering quality problems:
http://media.bestofmicro.com/Trinity-A10-4600M-Rev...
medi01 - Friday, May 18, 2012 - link
PSThings that are important for most users, and I think many users in this thread agree:
1) Screen quality
2) Battery life
On top of it, user is much likely to play games, than do video/audio encoding _in_which_he_would_care_about_performance_.
medi01 - Friday, May 18, 2012 - link
"Trinity is 10-20% faster than Llano on CPU"Uhm, I beg to differ (from tom's review).
Handbreak: +23%
iTunes: +37%
Abby Fine Reader: +24%
WinRar: +38%
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-4600m-trin...
potatochobit - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Hold on, just to be clear all you tested was the IGP?this laptop is not running dual graphics correct?
because I think that would make a large difference
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
To test dual graphics you need to have a laptop with dual graphics, and the prototype does not have that. You can't test what doesn't exist. And frankly, after the fiasco that was dual graphics on Llano (at least on the prototype system), AMD made the right decision to skip that element this time. Besides, dual graphics just puts more of a load on the CPU -- the weakest link in Trinity.e36Jeff - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
Is there any way to play with the bios to lower clock speeds/disable cores to simulate what the low power parts(specifically the A10-4655M and A6-4455M) will behave like? I know the power levels will be wrong as this isnt a LV/ULV part, but I (and im betting quite a few other people) would be very interested in seeing what kind of performance they can get out of the parts aimed at the ultrathins.JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
No, the BIOS on this laptop is very basic and has no options for adjusting anything really useful.Beenthere - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
I replied to your knee-jerk reaction back a few comments Jarred.I hope tomorrow is a better day than today for U. ;)
bji - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 - link
You are not important enough to demand responses like you are doing. Trying to redirect Jarred's attention to that other pointless thread? Lame and off-topic in this thread.