AMD launches Trinity A-Series APU

Before AMD launched its first-generation Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) last year the only real option you had for a small, low power PC was an Intel Atom solution. Unless you combined the Atom chip with Nvidia’s ION chipset (or a discrete card) it was rather lacking in the graphics department. That’s where the APU shone due to its inclusion of a Radeon GPU.

Today, AMD launched its second generation 32nm A-Series APU named Trinity, and it promises to give a major performance boost to HTPCs, nettops, desktop machines, and laptops.

AMD is claiming that the new Trinity APUs offer up double the performance of the previous generation while retaining the same power use. The new Piledriver CPU means higher clock speeds and performance gains of up to 29%. As for graphics, you should be able to enjoy smooth gaming and media playback due to the inclusion of a Radeon 7000 series GPU offering a 56% performance gain over Llano.

Although there are performance gains across the entire range of APUs, it looks as though laptops using Trinity will see the most gains. AMD has cut power use down to 17 watts for the dual core and 25 watts for quad-core chips. Llano used 35 watts and 45 watts respectively. AMD is claiming up to 12 hours of battery life in the equivalent of an Ultrabook running the new APU, but that’s clearly going to vary depending on the hardware.

In total, five Trinity APUs have been unveiled today, which are detailed in the tables below :

As well as updating the hardware, AMD has also introduced some new technology to the mix. The new APUs will support an Eyefinity multi-display setup without requiring a discrete graphics card. Another clever move is AMD Radeon dual graphics, meaning you can add a discrete graphics card to an APU system and benefit from enhanced performance through CrossFire using both GPUs.

We can expect to see both Trinity laptops and desktop machines appearing later this year. Hopefully we’ll also see a number of mini-ITX boards appearing allowing us to build our own nettops and HTPCs.

through http://www.geek.com/