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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."
All of AMD's A-series processors make a great HTPC platform. Its been over a year now with Intel not offering any real competition at all in this segment once price is factored in. You can trivially get a full 65W A-series HTPC box up and running for under $150 with lots of headroom (thats the price I would quote to friends/coworkers and pocket the difference as labor costs.) The higher end A-series (100W) are only necessary if you are gaming.
' Some might say that Intel Atom solutions are price competitive with the A-series but the Atom solutions, just like AMD's low powered E-series lineup, really only works well for HTPC as long as 100% of your needed video codecs use GPU acceleration. If the Atom is good enough, then an E-series of the same price will be a bit better as well. Its hard to guarantee that all the codecs that you will be using will be GPU accelerated, especially so if you are stacked up on a Linux distro, so the E-series and Atoms are not really a solution that I recommend.
"His name was James Damore."
So the "any" is clearly restricted to the GPUs embedded in the CPUs not discrete GPUs in huge cards.
Okay - So talking about AMD having 384 stream processors per die in the 7660, vs... 16 for Intel in the HD4000. Not even the same game, never mind the same ballpark.
Sorry, but AMD wins this round. And although the average Joe hasn't yet realized it, the "number of cores" war has turned a corner, in that the CPU has already started serving merely as an "overseer" of massive numbers of GPU SPs/CUs. If you do, specifically and exclusively, transaction processing - The CPU still wins. In scientific computing, cryptography, signal analysis, physical simulations, CAD, and yes, even gaming - No one cares if you have a 12-way Xeon or an AMD Geode, it matters that you have an AMD 59/69/79xx (and yes, I do mean AMD - despite their overall gaming performance, for GPU computing, even NVidia doesn't even come close, though the uber-expensive Tesla does at least get to share the playing field).
/ Note that the recent Slashdot article on media transcoding dealt specifically with mass-market solutions using hacked-up shader routines, not optimized OpenCL kernels.