AMD Trinity A-Series APUs to Pack Radeon 7000 Series Graphics

[btarunr]

An internal presentation slide leaked to the press reveals some details of AMD's next generation "Trinity" APUs that succeed current generation A-Series "Llano" Fusion series. The presentation was run by AMD's principal foundry partner, Global Foundries, outlining upcoming products built on the 32 nm High-K metal gate transistor (HKMG) process. With Trinity, AMD is expecting a 50% improvement in gigaFLOP performance over the present generation, which doesn't sound far-fetched considering it will use next-generation Piledriver CPU core architecture and Radeon HD 7000 series graphics, which uses VLIW4 stream processor architecture.

Piledriver is an evolved x86 architecture that uses the modular shared resource design of Bulldozer, with much higher IPC compared to Stars architecture. VLIW4 stream processors ensure higher performance per square millimeter die area. Trinity will be available for notebooks as "Comal" and "Virgo" for desktops. They will be branded in the A-Series. AMD expects a 2012 market entry for the two.



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[Lionheart]

Hmmm I like that sound of that, AMD gimme some APU's YEAH!

 

[lashton]

16 days left!

bulldozer in 16 days if they stay on time

 

[Thrackan]

Wooptydoo... Nowadays, a series number doesn't say that much anymore. 7000-series could be a ton better than the 6000-series, or just a tiny refresh.

 

[RejZoR]

Tiny refresh was already done. HD6000 series are a refresh of HD5000 series. I don't think they'll be doing a refresh of a refresh, maybe just for the lowest end budget cards.

 

[Jstn7477]

I'd like to see a successor to the E series as well because my E-350 is a nice little APU that could be so much better with a dual channel DDR3 controller (hopefully with even higher speeds than 1066) and some next generation cores. I think the 6310 beats out my GeForce 7300 LE that I have laying around.

 

[Steevo]

I thought 7xxx series was moving away from VLIW, they mention using the shared resources to get more jiggawatts, so perhaps a mix of tech in 7000 series GPU's?

 

[HalfAHertz]

Alright! Now i can finally resell my radeon 7500, which I've been saving for 15 years! $.$

 

[bear jesus]

I thought 7xxx series was moving away from VLIW, they mention using the shared resources to get more jiggawatts, so perhaps a mix of tech in 7000 series GPU's?

I was under the impression the low end parts would still be VLIW4 and the high end would be the new compute architecture, although i don't think anything has been confirmed by AMD.

 

[theubersmurf]

Getting that AMD apus will be on the same pcb as their discrete gpus from that slide seems like a stretch. No less, I find fudzilla to be a questionable source at times. "Trinity" makes it sound more like optimization for apu/discrete amd gpu combinations.

 

[MrAlex]

Getting that AMD apus will be on the same pcb as their discrete gpus from that slide seems like a stretch. No less, I find fudzilla to be a questionable source at times. "Trinity" makes it sound more like optimization for apu/discrete amd gpu combinations.

Say what now? There is no PCB. The CPU/GPU/IMC/Northbridge (and maybe some other stuff) are all on the die of the processor.

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

So does this mean that the 7 series will be like the Nvidia 3 series only to be seen in mobile and lower end systems?

 

[TheMailMan78]

Alright! Now i can finally resell my radeon 7500, which I've been saving for 15 years! $.$

This sir is WIN.

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

This sir is WIN.

Indeed

 

[seronx]

Alright! Now i can finally resell my radeon 7500, which I've been saving for 15 years! $.$

The ATI R7500
can't be sold as the AMD HD7500

Sorry to bare such bad news

 

[erocker]

I was under the impression the low end parts would still be VLIW4 and the high end would be the new compute architecture, although i don't think anything has been confirmed by AMD.

I've seen this posted at other sites, but I found the info below here: http://videocardz.com/28922/radeon-hd-7000-series-gpu-architecture-detailed

VLIW4 to SIMD – This change allows for better GPGPU performance. VLIW5 and VLIW4 were efficient for graphics calculations, but not for general purpose (varying) CPU computations. SIMD brings the best of both worlds. In fact, Nvidia has been using this for quite some time within their Fermi architecture.

Unified Memory – Both CPU and GPU can utilize the same address spaces. The GPU now has built in address translation hardware just for this specific design implementation.

Improved C++ GPGPU programming and debugging support – Previously developers had to utilize assembly and some C to achieve the desired implementation. Now programmers can take full advantage of a high level language with AMD GPUs.

Compute Units – Instead of the traditional steam processor, AMD will utilized its new SIMD architecute (which is comprised of multiple ALUs making up a 16 bit wide vector SIMD block). Each compute unit has 4 SIMD blocks with an L1 cache. Overall, each CU with have its own L1 cache and all CU’s will share a L2 cache (which all Nvidia and AMD GPU’s currently employ).

Partially Resident Textures (PRT) – As with John Carmack’s MegaTexture technology, textures can now be partially loaded in memory for quicker access. This allows for the use of larger textures to be more efficiently used on a much larger scale than previous implementations. The main differnece is of course that insead of being implemented via software (id tech 5) it will now be implemented via hardware.

 

[NC37]

The ATI R7500
can't be sold as the AMD HD7500

Sorry to bare such bad news

^fails at getting the joke :shadedshu

And here I was gonna add a bit about my old Radeon 7000 Mac Edition and finding a gullible Mac user to buy it as an AMD Mac .

 

[[H]@RD5TUFF]

^fails at getting the joke :shadedshu

And here I was gonna add a bit about my old Radeon 7000 Mac Edition and finding a gullible Mac user to buy it as an AMD Mac .

Such a person would be easy to find.

 

[xBruce88x]

makes sense considering the 7xxx series will probably be out as stand alone cards by the time the new APUs come out.

and Seronx, haha good one that was the gpu i had back in the days of Halo CE on PC.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Say what now? There is no PCB. The CPU/GPU/IMC/Northbridge (and maybe some other stuff) are all on the die of the processor.

Something that intel still can't do