Wednesday, January 11th 2012
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AMD Demonstrates Trinity APU, Its Own Thunderbolt-Alternative
AMD's next-generation accelerated processing unit (APU), codenamed "Trinity", was demonstrated at CES. Trinity will make up AMD's 2012 A-Series APU lineup, and will be designed for mainstream-thru-performance notebooks, and mainstream desktops (different standards for different form-factors). Pictured below is what its notebook-specific BGA package looks like. The package has an exposed rectangular die, with a stabilizer frame around it (like with GPUs). Notebooks' cooling assembly heat pipes make direct contact with the die. Trinity packs two Piledriver modules (an evolution of Bulldozer), and DirectX 11.1 AMD Radeon HD 7000M graphics (notebook APU) or HD 7000D (desktop APU).
Shown to the CES crowd was a mind-boggling demo. The public were first shown what appeared to be an ATX desktop connected to two monitors, one monitor running a DIRT 3 DirectX 11 game demo at high-quality settings, and another screeen revealing the APU to be running GPU-accelerated video transcoding. No discrete graphics was used, it's just the embedded HD 7000 at play/work. If that alone didn't raise a few eyebrows, the AMD representative removed the lid of the ATX desktop case to which those two monitors were connected, to reveal a 14-inch laptop inside doing all the work. And there's more - the laptop's main screen wasn't idle, it was running a high-definition video playback. Whatever synthetic benchmarks end up telling about Trinity, its real world performance does impress!You have got to watch the video after the break!
At a discrete meeting with select journalists at a backroom, AMD also talked about its competitive technology to Intel's Thunderbolt, which it's referring to as "Lightning Bolt" (+1 for originality). This interface will use the same mini-DP port design as Thunderbolt. It will have the bandwidth to drive up to four HD displays, and multiple USB 3.0 devices, and will have a hub cost of under $40.
Source:
HotHardware
Shown to the CES crowd was a mind-boggling demo. The public were first shown what appeared to be an ATX desktop connected to two monitors, one monitor running a DIRT 3 DirectX 11 game demo at high-quality settings, and another screeen revealing the APU to be running GPU-accelerated video transcoding. No discrete graphics was used, it's just the embedded HD 7000 at play/work. If that alone didn't raise a few eyebrows, the AMD representative removed the lid of the ATX desktop case to which those two monitors were connected, to reveal a 14-inch laptop inside doing all the work. And there's more - the laptop's main screen wasn't idle, it was running a high-definition video playback. Whatever synthetic benchmarks end up telling about Trinity, its real world performance does impress!You have got to watch the video after the break!
At a discrete meeting with select journalists at a backroom, AMD also talked about its competitive technology to Intel's Thunderbolt, which it's referring to as "Lightning Bolt" (+1 for originality). This interface will use the same mini-DP port design as Thunderbolt. It will have the bandwidth to drive up to four HD displays, and multiple USB 3.0 devices, and will have a hub cost of under $40.
77 Comments on AMD Demonstrates Trinity APU, Its Own Thunderbolt-Alternative
This demonstration is right in Intel's face with their crappy Ivy Bridge graphics that are such fail that they had to play pre-recorded video in VLC instead. Lol. AMD APU's are indeed impressive, can tell that with my much weaker E-450. At least something where Intel can't touch AMD...
love the moment when he took of the sidepanel to reveal a laptop. lol wtf.
i never thought intel had a lead in the mobile segment. all intel mobile CPUs scuk.
wtf? how i hate marketing people...
impressive performance though...
What's left is for OEMs to actually put this thing into quality notebook shells (that can in turn fit into ATX shells). I hope OEMs make great products around this. That made me "o_O" as well. . ....
If they keep power consumption low AND find the right OEMs that will create ultrabook-like laptops, this will be epic.
J/king
I kid, obviously they needed low-rez displays to demo all three things and still have them all work well. A concession to show proof of concept to all their feature strengths simultaneously when in reality you'll be doing one at likely higher performance/resolution. At least the
cakegame isnt alievideo.Pretty amazing what a single simple PC/laptop can do these days...Trinity is going to be great for AMD and us. I hope piledriver is BD efficiently trimmed up/optimized and does the gpu justice, although irregardless on paper the ratio of gpu/cpu just seems perfect for casual use. Even if PD isnt as impressive from a power/performance perspective as Intels cpus or their own gpus, it should still be a very good product.
On a side note...did I read dx 11.1? That implies that if this isnt a GCN gpu, it will at least have an enhanced feature set over Cayman (6900) even if still vliw4. I wonder if that includes the VCE or whatever it is called (AMD version of quicksync). I bet it does, and that peeps, is pretty nifty.
Kinda wish they could have jumped straight to 1/4 of Tahiti over 1/4 of Cayman...but I guess that will be next year and/or whenever the A-series transitions to sub-32nm.
Llano K10.6 is quite good. I would be surprised if AMD can beat it with the bulldozer arch.
Anyone know of the improvements to the GPU? 480sp instead of 400sp?