AMD has launched its Trinity processors, the second generation of its “accelerated processing units” aimed at notebooks, desktops and embedded hardware.
According to AMD, the processors deliver twice the power per watt compared to the previous incarnations, and could see manufacturers deliver laptops with up to 12 hours’ battery life.
The Trinity range is aimed squarely at Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors. We’ve already seen the AMD chips touted as an option in HP’s Sleekbooks, but the details revealed at launch boast of improved graphics performance and lower power consumption, with the company focussing on video, gaming and entertainment.
The 2nd-Generation AMD A-Series APU gives users superior web-based video experience thanks to plug-ins for Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 9
“The latest OEM notebooks, ultrathins, all-in-ones and desktops based on the new AMD A-Series APU enable the best video and gaming experiences, highly responsive performance with AMD Turbo CORE, and accelerate an ever-increasing range of productivity and multimedia applications,” said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Client Business Unit.
The Trinity chips update the company’s Llano A-Series processors and focus on graphic performance, with AMD claiming the Radeon graphics core – which is supported by four CPU cores – meant that Trinity based computers would perform graphics tasks 56% more efficiently than its previous processors.
The AMD HD Media Accelerator would also optimise video quality and speed video file conversion, the company said.
For general computing tasks, AMD said Trinity would provide a 29% performance boost using its “Piledriver” CPU cores and core switching technology to shift processing between CPU and GPU cores depending on the task, with CPU frequencies running up to 3.2GHz.
Optimised applications
According to AMD, the performance has also been enhanced by getting developers to ensure applications are capable of using its acceleration, with 100 applications and games already on board.
“The 2nd-Generation AMD A-Series APU gives users superior web-based video experience thanks to plug-ins for Google Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 that make it easy for consumers to turn on AMD Steady Video technology,” the company said. “Recent applications that have been optimised for AMD A-Series APUs include Adobe Photoshop CS6, WinZip 16.5 and VLC Media Player.”
AMD said the processors would be available to OEM partners from today, with the company claiming “a record number of design wins with companies like Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba”.
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