The AMD Trinity Review (A10-4600M): A New Hope
by Jarred Walton on May 15, 2012 12:00 AM ESTAMD Trinity: Battery Life Also Improved
With all of the changes going into Trinity, one thing that hasn’t changed since Llano is the process technology. Trinity is once again coming on a 32nm process from GlobalFoundries. If we were talking about Intel, Trinity would represent a “Tock” on the roadmap—a new architecture on an existing process. We’ve looked at CPU and GPU performance, and this is a part that’s pretty much universally faster than its predecessor. Given the lengthier pipeline and Bulldozer-derived architecture, I admit that I was concerned Trinity might actually be a step back for battery life; it appears that my fears were unfounded, largely due to the improvements in Piledriver. As usual, we tested with all laptops set to 100 nits brightness in our idle, Internet, and H.264 playback tests. I also ran some additional tests which we’ll discuss in a moment. First, here are the standard battery life results:
With a similar capacity battery to the original Llano laptop, and the same size 14” panel, Trinity comes out of the gates and posts two clear wins: idle battery life and Internet battery life are both up substantially relative to Llano. In fact, looking at the normalized charts, the only laptops that can consistently beat Trinity are found in Sandy Bridge ultrabooks—we won’t even bother discussing Atom or Brazos netbooks, as they’re competing in a completely different performance bracket. In something of a surprise, H.264 battery life doesn’t see the same benefit unfortunately, and it’s the one discipline where Llano still holds on to a slight lead over Trinity. Sandy Bridge meanwhile has always done very well in H.264 battery tests, and we see that with the Vostro V131 posting a normalized score that’s 30% better than Trinity and Llano. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum we have Ivy Bridge; we’ve only looked at one Ivy Bridge laptop so far, but if the pattern holds than Ivy Bridge will generally be a moderate step back in battery life relative to Sandy Bridge, giving AMD an even larger lead in this area.
We also performed a few other tests that we won’t present in graph form. One set of tests we alluded to earlier: the charts show Trinity with a Samsung 830 SSD, but we also ran tests with an Intel 520 SSD. Idle battery life dropped to 476 minutes (an 8% decrease), Internet battery life checked in at 371 minutes (down 8% again), and H.264 battery life stayed nearly the same at 217 minutes (down less than 3%). If battery life is one of your primary concerns, remember: all SSDs are not created equal!
Another test that we ran is simulated gaming; we looped the four graphics tests in 3DMark06 at 1366x768 until the battery ran out. We’ve run this same test on quite a few other laptops, and Llano initially looked to be far and away the best solution. Later, we discovered that when we tested Llano we were letting the GPU run in power saving mode—basically half the performance you’d get compared to being plugged in. We retested and measured 98 minutes, so the extra graphics performance comes with a heavy cost. We only tested Trinity (and Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge) using higher performance graphics settings, and this is one more area where it scores worse than Llano: Trinity managed just 77 minutes. That’s about the same as Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge (79 and 73 minutes, respectively), so if you’re after better gaming performance while running off the mains, you might need to keep looking.
Before getting too carried away with the above results, you still need to consider how important battery life is for your usage model. Some people travel a lot and like to go all day without plugging in; others will go from place to place and plug in whenever they’re not on the go. If you fall in the latter category, battery life isn’t usually a problem with any decent laptop, while those looking for all-day computing will definitely want as much mobility as possible. Ultimately, battery life is a factor of battery capacity as well as power optimizations done by the OEMs. We’ve seen battery life improve by as much as 50% when comparing two otherwise similar notebooks, but at least AMD’s reference platform for Trinity delivers a great starting point.
Temperatures and Acoustics
One other item we wanted to quickly touch on is system temperatures. We typically use HWMonitor and check temperatures of laptops under idle and load conditions. We did this with Trinity as well, but unfortunately the current version of HWMonitor doesn’t give us a lot of information. The only temperatures it reports are from the SSD and the HD 7660G graphics—there’s nothing about CPU core temperatures. That means we can’t provide much detail, other than to say that load temperature on the GPU topped out at 71C during extended testing, while the idle temperature was 39C. As usual, temperatures and noise levels go hand in hand, and the low 71C maximum GPU temperature matches up nicely with noise levels that never got above 37dB. It’s not the quietest laptop we’ve ever tested, and surface temperatures can get a little warm, but overall Trinity looks to be a good balance of performance and power requirements, which means quiet laptops are definitely possible.
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scope54 - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
I'd like to see how much faster Piledriver is compared to a Bulldozer CPU with roughly the same specs (like an FX-4100 under-clocked to match speeds), to get an idea of what we can expect when the desktop variant releases.Arbie - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 - link
I would really have liked to have seen this! Of course none of these chips will run the game at high settings, but what will they do at lower res??? Contrary to all the nonsense printed especially on its release, Crysis was a great game even at low res AND was incredibly scalable both up and down. It remains a great yardstick for comparisions because (a) it is still challenging and (b) we have so much history with it.
Can you please at least add some average and minimum framerates, if in fact any settings were playable?
MySchizoBuddy - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
Is it still PCI-e 2?JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 - link
Yes. PCIe 3.0 is not needed for lower performance parts, and Trinity laptops aren't going to be paired with high-end GPUs I don't think. I feel like it's already hitting CPU bottlenecks in some games even with the HD 7660G!ArteTetra - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
"What’s Makes a Trinity?"What's this? A citation, or a kind of slang? I really don't understand the usage of two verbs (my native language is not English).
Drewdog343 - Sunday, May 20, 2012 - link
A typo =PTargon - Saturday, July 7, 2012 - link
I suspect it is a play on words. Trinity is the code name for this new generation of AMD APUs, so there has been the question about why AMD gave it this code name.silverblue - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
Then don't read them. Really, if you don't value what he has to say, then you're just doing yourself a disservice by adding comments.There really isn't any need to become all aggressive over your disdain for Jarred.
silverblue - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
If you've seen it in the article, then it's hardly "buried". He has also reiterated this point in the comments.In any case, Jarred is spot on - an SB laptop with dGPU wouldn't be much more expensive (if at all) and would perform better, however Trinity would excel in terms of power consumption. For a lot of people, its CPU performance would be more than enough, and it has easily the strongest IGP.
edge929 - Thursday, May 17, 2012 - link
WTB Trinity A10 for a new HTPC, ETA?