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AMD Trinity A10-4600M Processor Launched, Tested
MojoKid writes "AMD lifted the veil on their new Trinity A-Series mobile processor architecture today. Trinity has been reported as offering much-needed CPU performance enhancements in IPC (Instructions Per Cycle) but also more of AMD's strength in gaming and multimedia horsepower, with an enhanced second generation integrated Radeon HD graphics engine. AMD's A10-4600M quad-core chip is comprised of 1.3B transistors with a CPU base core clock of 2.3GHz and Turbo Core speeds of up to 3.2GHz. The on-board Radeon HD 7660G graphics core is comprised of 384 Radeon Stream Processor cores clocked at 497MHz base and 686Mhz Turbo. In the benchmarks, AMD's new Trinity A10 chip outpaces Intel's Ivy Bridge for gaming but can't hold a candle to it for standard compute workloads or video transcoding."
Where's the FX-8170? I can't buy it if it's not produced.
They used to be able to beat Intel in the Athlon days. Now they are hopelessly far behind and dumping huge hot graphics cores into their chips putting them further and further behind.
Focus on cheap compute with unlocking cores AMD. Not stupid graphics cores which do nothing for the CPU. A 16 core phenom ii at $100 will sell much better than this insane graphics + cpu crap.
It's 4600 graphics cores, via ten pipelines. Generally most graphic engines (OpenGL, ActiveX) are easily parallizable, and this will have a noticable affect on many computer games.
That's really all that matters. I've always been and AMD fan but If they can't pull out the same performance for less or equal price, they're done.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
384 graphics cores
4216 x86-64 CPU "cores" (actually hyperthreading across 10 "true" cores)
That's still pretty impressive in my book, whether they're half cores or not. Still, it's going to be a PITA to try to use that power.
Not exactly:
* There are ten ix86 64-bit cores.
* There are 96 GPU cores
* Hyperthreading is used to make the ix86 cores look like a little over 4200 regular cores.
* Something similar to hyperthreading is being used to make the GPU look like 384 cores.
They should do that the other way round.
Reminds me of the AMD Tombstone, a weird ass 48 bit CPU they got all ready to make and then ditched at the last minute in the late nineties. AMD has a habit of making some very strange CPUs. Hopefully this one will see some success.
You mean AMD TwoStone, right?
Tombstone was the "joke" name people in AMD management gave it, for obvious reasons.
I've seen a lot of reviews of various laptops that have missed the most important metric in this competition - Price!
What's been common in all reviews is that the only the very top end Intel "integrated" (No separate, discreet GPU) solutions have been competitive to the new fusion products. We're talking mobile i7s. I don't know if you've priced laptops lately, but the i7's are only found in expensive, high end systems.
The fusion APUs are nowhere near that expensive. Price wise, they should be compared to i3s or "pentium" mobile cpus.. Where they will win quite handily!
It turns out that AMD's 'APU' solutions have been very popular with low end device makers and AMD sells them by the boat load. What's impressed me, however, is how much intel has improved their GPU in ivy bridge. It's always been garbage before, but now it's starting to be something you could call 'low end'.
I don't transcode and my Excel sheets aren't that complicated. I suspect that most people are like me, we do basic work and play a game or two. I play TF2 on my laptop, it's 3 year old laptop with a new SSD. Plays fine. I can't think of the last time that I was truly CPU limited. I've been GPU limited since Crysis. I can't play that beyond low detail level.
where the hell are you getting 4216 from ? its got TWO "true" x86 cores and TWO threads.
From what I've read, on CPU tasks it's between an i3 and an i5. An i3 is "fast enough" for most general use, so I think that's pretty good. On GPU tasks, it's significantly faster than Intel's integrated chipsets, knocking on the door of respectable gaming performance if not walking into the room.
If you're doing CPU tasks, you really want the i7. If you're doing hard core gaming, you're also going to want the latest generation video card, even if it's an entry model. If your budget is less than $700 and you still want to play video games, Trinity is a good compromise. I think it's perfect for college students.
This time AMD can finally say they have better battery life than the equivalently power rated intel processor.
No it doesn't. The summary says it does, then links to an article that says this:
AMD's integrated GPU advantage is gone.
Please stop. You don't understand, and it would appear you're not going to.
Oh, I see where I went wrong, I completely pulled it out of my ass.
Hey! I did not, what are you talking about!
Yes you did, you dirty little harlot?
What did you just call me?!!
A dirty little harlot.
Ok, but you are still stupid.
What the fuck are you talking about and who are you?
I'm Anonymous Coward, who the hell are you?
You can't be Anonymous Coward cause I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
No you aren't.
Yes I am.
APK, is that you?
Did AMD triple-check the transistor count this time before announcing this CPU?
Are the claimed 1.3B transistors in this CPU a number from AMD Marketing or are they really there and used in the CPU die?
You'll never know.
Or wait, does that mean I'll never know?
Hold on now, what the fuck is going on?
Hell if I know.
Who the fuck are you?
I already told you that, I'm Anonymous Coward.
And I already told you that you aren't, I'm Anonymous Coward.
Bullshit, there is no way you are Anonymous Coward because I am.
Wait, what?
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
ROFL!!!! oops.
Anyway, it's really annoying reading a thread of just AC's replying to each other. We have no idea who is who and who is making which argument. Just create a damn account already.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
* Something similar to hyperthreading is being used to make the GPU look like 384 cores.
The AC morons are out in force this evening! Hyperthreading my bottom. The word you are looking for is SIMD.
An employer that provides a tower can go Intel. Most of the time, an Intel GMA (Graphics My Ass) is OK because the employer doesn't want the user playing 3D games on company time. In other cases, the employer provides a discrete card because it anticipates use for CAD, 3D graphic design, or video game development and testing.
What I find most impressive of AMD's APUs is that they made basic gaming on sub-$400 laptops possible.
The Only tasks you can really accomPlish with a 5 year old notebook is email and (light) web surfing. Like most peecee users, you don't really DO anything with the machine (ie photos, slideshows, movie creation). If you did, you'd realize how outdated and underpowered it really is.
So far I have seen no mention of it, but would this not make a great HTPC platform?
Very low powered CPU but a tank of a GPU sounds great to me... Especially when your box is idling.
Any thoughts from someone more knowlegable? I'm still like 5 generations behind running an AMD X2 5200+.
IPC is instructions per clock and is highly relevant to the discussion at hand.
He clearly never attended a lecture about hardware architecture.
You have piqued my curiosity. When was this and are there any articles you know of out there? Googling shows essentially no mention of AMD TwoStone on the web, aside from this very thread.
I'm a professional software developer. I have an i5 laptop with built-in graphics, 8GB of memory, a couple of external displays, and a gigabit link to 2TB of NAS. Why would I need a tower?
I don't game much anymore, and when I do most of it is on my tablet anyway. My laptop is perfectly respectable for doing office work, compiling large amounts of code, doing photography work, and hobbyist CAD work in sketchup. It decodes high def video mostly in hardware with minimal overhead.
I have no desire for gaming-grade graphics in my laptop--I'd rather have an extra hour of battery life, thanks.
8 years ago (that's right shithead, EIGHT mutha fucking years) Electronic Musician did a test with a laptop to see how it could handle a real world recording session. The laptop was able to record 6 players that were miced (including a full drum set), provide custom monitor feeds to each musician, and drive a couple of VSTi with usable latency at CD quality bit rates.
That's with an 8 year old laptop. Your post shows how full of shit you are, and you have NO IDEA how to utilize technology. My now defunct Athlon 900mHz system that I assembled in 2000 still would have handled HEAVY web surfing today quite easily.
posts like your beg the fact that we we need some additional ones, like idiot, clueless, moron, etc.
if by "Gamers' we mean those who shoot at virtual soldiers. And really, we all know that most Linux are not "Gamers" by that definition. The majority of Linux use cases is for so-called "casual" games or the desktop bling (Unity, Gnome Shell). And this is where AMD/ATI spanks nVidia which require a separate driver install since most distros don't ship the binary drivers along with the install CD. AMD is the best choice for most Linux users.
246 mm die size! That sucker's big! Ivy bridge was big already at 166mm.... Wonder what the pricing will be....
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
"they need to do things like Render 3d GFX for static images or movies, high end photography, video production. even the CAD/CAM geeks have a tower."
Yeh the world is filled with 30 year old movie producers and skyscraper designers. R-i-g-h-t. I haven't met a young person yet who wants a computer, they all want iPads or Tablets due to the transportability.
I think you have a case of wishful thinking.
IPC is interprocess communication. Using IPC for an architecture metric will simply confuse any discussions about operating systems.
Dumbass.
We're talking about hardware, not software, context is important in language.
"Intel has little to gain by cutting its own margins in order to chase AMD down a hole(since lower margins are bad, and killing AMD would mean becoming antitrust scrutiny case..."
This. Look at the history of Intel and AMD, and it become absolutely apparent that Intel is aware of the danger of landing in the government's anti-trust sights. They have always left just enough room at the bottom end for AMD to barely survive. When AMD gets uppity (like in the Athlon days), Intel pulls out the stops for a couple of years and squashes AMD back into (near) irrelevance.
Interesting times ahead with mobile devices, where Intel is far from dominant. Who knows, Intel may finally decide to kill off AMD, so they can concentrate on new areas...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
There wouldn't be many articles on it, it was killed in 1999, and until then was strictly an internal project, no press releases or anything like that.
TwoStone had some very innovative design features, such as an internal bank of 96k of fast RAM used to create 16 banks of 1024 48-bit registers. Task switching with a 48-bit aware OS was thus immensely fast, and applications could store massive amounts of data in fast registers rather than having to load/save to RAM all the time.
Another feature I rather liked was that the majority of 32 bit OSes could host 48 bit applications without even knowing it. I believe a particular combination of status bits, combined with 1:1 machine code compatibility with the kind of instructions you'd find in a pre-emptive task switching implementation, was the secret. Whatever it was, we found it worked great with Windows NT 4, Windows 95/98, Linux, and Mach.
A major impetus for the construction of the Dresden plant was the belief TwoStone was going require a massive increase in production capacity. However, the project was cancelled, largely because that 96k of register RAM turned out to be a huge bottleneck. The prototype TwoStone design was clocked at 300MHz at the time, but it proved to be immensely difficult to increase the clock speed beyond that in a way that lead to anything close to a proportionate increase in performance. Development resources started to move to the Hammer project, a parallel 64 bit design that was much more conventional, and TwoStone was eventually cancelled.
I just built a 3.3 ghz (slightly overclocked) quad core AMD system with 16 GB. Got the motherboard, cpu, graphics card (MSI GTX570 2GB, also overclocked), and memory for $600. The damn thing can compile practically anything from scratch in no time flat. I play all the latest games at the max detail settings. The system is fast as hell all around; if I had an SSD it would just be ridiculous. Why the hell would I want an Intel chip again?
Thanks for the info. As soon as you mentioned this:
TwoStone had some very innovative design features, such as an internal bank of 96k of fast RAM used to create 16 banks of 1024 48-bit registers. Task switching with a 48-bit aware OS was thus immensely fast, and applications could store massive amounts of data in fast registers rather than having to load/save to RAM all the time.
I was thinking "uh oh, they optimized for the wrong thing, register files generally need to be relatively small to keep the core clock fast, huge register files generally have diminishing theoretical returns even absent the clock implications, and when you run out of banks context switches suddenly become PAINFUL". And then you mentioned the clock speed problems, confirming some of that.
Also, a 48-bit machine word as an extension to x86 is just plain weird and awkward. That can't have been a very clean machine model, especially with whatever nifty hacks they invented to make 48-bit binaries semi-transparent to a 32-bit OS (!). At some point they must've started privately discussing the architecture with Microsoft and other major OS/application vendors. I can't help but think that their probably-negative reactions must've played a role in the cancellation.
(It's an even weirder choice given that it was an open secret that going straight from a 32-bit to a 64-bit machine word wasn't expensive or clock limiting. MIPS proved that as far back as ~1993 or 1994, with the R4K series, which was cheap enough to get a variant selected as the Nintendo 64 CPU.)
Very interesting stuff. I never would have guessed that such a project had existed!