The desktop Trinity set off
Guy GPU, medium CPU. This is how Trinity can be described very briefly.
AMD's second-generation A-series desktop APU has officially launched. All points of the news shortage expired yesterday, so now it is possible to present the parameters of products with impunity.
The series continues to be based on 32nm SOI manufacturing technology. Probably due to this, the physical extent of the chip has increased compared to Llano, but the difference is far from skyrocketing (226 square millimeters instead of 248 square millimeters). Along with the size, the number of transistors also increased, but there was no significant change at this point either. The latter is due to the fact that the engineers have implemented a number of optimizations. Accordingly, Trinity is based on two Piledriver modules - from AMD's point of view, this corresponds to four cores - which is essentially an improvement on the Bulldozer. The principle is still to connect the two integer cores, which have their own first-level cache, but already need to share the second-level cache and the floating-point unit. As expected, the Trinity memory controller supports DDR3-1866 MHz modules and also handles low voltage (1,25V) memories.
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The graphics department has also moved on. Here, the previous 5-way superscalar processors (VLIW5) have been replaced by 4-way processors (VLIW4). This change was also made to make more efficient use of the silicon area. The architecture includes 384 stream processors, but that alone is enough to fix Llano’s graphics processor by about 20 percent. This number only lives on A10 chips, we have 8 processors in the A256, 6 in the A192, and 4 processors in the A128 models. Other new features include DisplayPort 1.2 and Eyefinity support. With the latter, it is possible to drive up to four displays - which is not a bad thing for an APU at all - and it is also possible to handle it with multi-band audio. The official name of the procedure is Discrete Digital Multi-Point (DDM) Audio. In addition to the UVD 3 engine, the VCE (Intel's Quick Sync Video AMD equivalent) is also featured on the multimedia front to accelerate the transcoding of H.264 videos.
Overdriving is a well-proven way to increase performance. AMD Turbo Core 3.0 is designed to accomplish this as long as the product's operating temperature is within safe limits and consumption does not exceed the factory TDP level. The main novelty at this point is that the system can now not only increase the CPU clock, but occasionally the GPU speed as well.
Test recommendation:
- Trinity vs. Ivy Bridge in CPU Test [ComputerBase]
- Trinity vs. Ivy Bridge in GPU Test [ComputerBase]
- AMD Trinity in Test: Schnellste integrierte Grafikeinheit trifft guten CPU-Part [PC Games Hardware]
- AMD A10-5800K APU - Piledriver im Blickpunkt [Technical3D]
- AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2 [AnandTech]
- AMD A10 5800K Review [Guru3D]
- AMD A10-5800K APU Performance Review [Hardware Heaven]
- AMD A10 and A8 Trinity APU: Virgo CPU Performance [Hot Hardware]
- AMD A10-5800K Trinity Desktop APU Review [Legit Reviews]
- AMD Trinity A10-5800K APU Review [Overclockers]
- AMD Trinity Review: The A10-5800K and A8-5600K break cover [PC Perspective]
- AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted and Overclocked [Tom's Hardware]
Source: HOC, newsletter
