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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."
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.
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They should do that the other way round.
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'.
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.
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.
That is pretty much the exact opposite of a good plan for AMD(as much as I would like cheap compute...) Since Intel has a process advantage, and presently has a superior x86 compute core architecture, they can almost certainly beat AMD on production cost for chips of a given level of punch. Trying to compete on price with somebody kicking out chips a process node ahead of you just isn't a good plan. Unless they really fuck it up, or their yields tank horribly or similar, they'll be able to beat you on production cost every time. 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 #1 for the indefinite future...); but there isn't any architectural barrier to their doing so.
Since Intel has comparatively worthless GPU designs, tacking GPUs onto CPU dice is a way for AMD to offer something that Intel cannot(and at a price lower than a discrete CPU + discrete GPU without totally cutting their own throat), and also happens to go well with today's enthusiasm for laptops and all-in-ones. They have a second niche, much more directly focused on price, in compute-light, memory-heavy server applications(since you can populate your sockets with AMD CPUs for less and the number of DIMMs you get is roughly proportional to the number of sockets you have active); but competing on price isn't good for your margins.
With an inferior process and a weaker x86 design, gunning directly for the compute performance crown would just be asking for a whupping from Intel.
> Ivy Bridge and Llano actually ended up 'tied
Yes, but Llano is the *old* AMD processor ;-) Check the reviews for performance of a HD 4000 vs a Trinity.
Built myself a PC to play WoW 3 months ago. Went with the high-end Llano, no discrete graphics required. An Intel setup would have required a graphics card, larger base (mini-itx MB), and more money. For most users that are also *casual* gamers (not hard-core), AMD's CPU/GPU balance saves a graphics cards while providing sufficient CPU power.
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Speaking of all-in-ones, an all-in-one AMD chip would be a dandy basis for a games console. If not one from Microsoft (who has no particular need for x86) then it would perhaps be a good match for Valve. Public distaste for Sony is at an all-time high, but is it enough to unseat them? etc etc.
if I could have a 16 core phenom ii, though, that would be pretty awesome. I could drop it right into my current machine. I'd pay $100 for even eight cores, though, let alone sixteen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Exactly. These articles and benchmarks are a joke. The Intel CPUs are so far ahead, in performance and value, that I can't help but feel embarrassed for AMD.
Without AMD you clueless retard would have to pay 5 times the price for an Intel CPU. You should thank them for providing competition instead of dissing their products.
So, AMD has the lead on average FPS, but it's now small enough that Intel wins in a few cases. AMD's integrated GPU is still a little better normally, but it's not a slam dunk any more.
AMD's integrated GPU advantage is gone.
That's also compared to the more expensive i7 part. There was no i5 or i3 comparison.
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Appreciating competition is not mutually exclusive with being critical of the competitions quality.
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.
> So, AMD has the lead on average FPS, but it's now small enough that Intel wins in a few cases. AMD's integrated GPU is still a little better normally, but it's not a slam dunk any more.
It's curious, that this is the case for mobile, but on the desktop the HD4000 is beaten by the Llano by a large margin:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core-i7-3770k-review/15
Log the fuck in so I can be sure I'm talking to the same moron who posted "Since ivy bridge intels GPU now equals anything from AMD."
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
> AMD has the lead on average FPS, but it's now small enough that Intel wins in a few cases
Not really, Intel does win on a couple cases and is close for some cases.. Most of those are older CPU bound games. For Civ 5, AMD is close to 100% faster. A lot of the games that I looked at were ~ 40% faster (e.g. starcraft 2). e.g.
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Mobile/AMD-Trinity-Mobile-Review-Trying-Cut-Ivy/Performance-Synthetic-3D-Real-World-Gaming
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/5831/trinity-vs-ivybridge-gaming-new.png
So better gaming perf at a cheaper price.. AMD has a better single chip solution for games. If you want a discrete graphics card for games, better to go with Intel.
> The Intel CPUs are so far ahead, in performance and value, that I can't help but feel embarrassed for AMD.
Not so. The Intel traditional CPU is faster, but the AMD integrated GPU is faster.
For AMD's pure-CPU parts, they seem competitively priced to me (ie: cheap).
IPC is instructions per clock and is highly relevant to the discussion at hand.
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.
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They aren't competitive though. You keep missing the point. Intel's Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge integrated GPUs basically do video playback on laptops at a suitable level. They cannot play any sort of games made within the last 2-3 years at any level beyond the most base settings. the A-series processors by comparison can play the newest games at relatively low settings and the new Trinity based models can do it at reasonable settings. With the newest A10 laptops starting prices around $600 for 17' laptop that's quite competitive since the first Nvidia/AMD dedicated laptops that can hold a candle to them start around $800-900. The small ultrabooks are going to be harder to justify using intel when the A10 will do it all faster and just as thin. In other words AMD has a serious contender in the mobile market for gaming and cost-effectiveness.
The problem remains that Intel holds the cards on mainstream OEMs and will continue to keep the A-series processors out of the big seller's hands because mobile is becoming their bread and butter.
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.
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.
They have a second niche, much more directly focused on price, in compute-light, memory-heavy server applications(since you can populate your sockets with AMD CPUs for less and the number of DIMMs you get is roughly proportional to the number of sockets you have active)
I haven't tried AMD's latest server machines, but if they are even 1/2 as good as the old, ones they are a _MUCH_ better deal. My 6 !! year old DL585G2 is actually faster on every single thing it gets used for than the much newer westmere machines we have been buying. The problem is that intel is charging an absolute fortune for chips clocked fast, so we end up with 1.8 or 2.2Ghz westmere machines, and their single thread performance is abysmal compared to the much older 3.2Ghz AMD machine. Our application scales nicely, but quickly becomes IO bound, so both machines basically get the same throughput, but the AMD machine has much lower overall latency. This results in it actually getting much better benchmarks in our tests.
So, in theory we could get an intel that kicks the crap out of the AMD machine, but its going to cost us 5x as much (from ~$5k to ~$25k). So we buy the cheap ones, and they get their ass handed to them by a 6 year old machine that cost $5k when it was new.
Well, the benchmarks disagree with you. The HD4000 IGP in the Ivy Bridge processors are DX11 that can run recent games at low to medium settings quite well. The Anandtech review for example shows that on some games like Batman Arkham City, Dirt 3 and Skyrim, the HD4000 even outperforms this new AMD APU. It loses on the other 4 games tested but it's still competitive. I'm only talking about gaming performance here, not video decoding where Intel wins by a large margin. Since Sandy Bridge, Intel GPUs have stopped sucking as bad as they used to IMO. They're at least now comparable to the integrated AMD GPUs.
Mada mada dane.
Even with IGP's intels stuff gets obliterated. No need to take anyones word for it on here though, just go and look at the benchmarks on places like tomshardware. Intel still has the better CPU but AMD are really leveraging their one strong point here and that is superior graphics chip performance. Still don't think it will be enough to give AMd the overall edge though.
Since Intel has comparatively worthless GPU designs...
Lets not forget what powerhogs Intel's little heat factories are, and how anemic their low power chips are compared to AMD's energy efficient offerings.
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Don't forget that a CPU with HD4000 graphics is in a different price class, at least $100 more.
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