AMD Trinity for desktops launched and benchmarked

AMD has officially launched the second generation APU of the A series, ”Trinity”, but will first be found in OEM systems. Benchmarks are already out and the graphics performance is 20 – 25 percent better than last generation, Llano.

AMD surprised the market when it launched Trinity for notebooks on May 15th and once again we are surprised when AMD decides to launch desktops for OEMs first. Trinity for desktops is shipping in OEM systems from Acer, ASUS, HP and Lenovo. As we have reported the enthusiasts will have to wait since Trinity is not expected to reach the retail market until September or even October.

Besides the quad-core models we have reported on earlier there will also be two models in the A6 and A4 series. We don’t have any exact specifications for A4-5300, besides that it will have one Piledriver module for a total of of two processor cores and 128 Radeon cores. A6-5400K will get the same number of processor cores and is unlocked for overclocking. This together with 192 Radeon cores where the clock frequencies are still unknown. The dual-core models are limited to 1 MB L2 cache and 65W TDP. We also assume that the official memory support is limited to 1600 MHz, down from 1866 MHz for the quad-core models.

Even though the retail will have to wait Trinity has already been tested in the form of A10-5800K, A8-5600K and A6-5400K.

Not surprisingly, the top model A10-5800K is strong in 3DMark 11 and gets big head start over last generation A8-3850. The processor performance is not far ahead of Llano despite the higher clock frequencies, this is due to the Piledriver architecture used in Trinity. It is noted that Trinity is slower than Llano in floating point calculations, something that should not be a big problem since the majority of consumer applications work with Integers.

This was not unexpected, but that it is overall better than last generation is a plus. But those who are interested in Trinity are most likely interested in its graphics performance more than the processor performance. In comparison with Bulldozer that is used in the FX series, performance at the same clock frequencies and the number of cores can be ”up to 15 percent” higher. On average it is 6 percent, which is not a major improvement. The big difference is in the lower leakage of the Piledriver architecture, which has enabled AMD to move up the clock frequencies quite a bit.

New A85 chipset detailed

Also the new chipset A85 has been detailed and it will not bring many news over the precursor A75, but is an incremental upgrade. A85 supports eight SATA 6.0 Gbps, which is two more than before, support for RAID 5 and the possibility to divide the PCI Express lanes from the APU to 2 x 8 – something that was not possible with Llano and A75/A55 since it was locked to a single PCI Express 2.0 x16. Support for PCI Express 3.0 will not come until next generation from AMD.

The overall platform does not bring many news, but it is mainly about small changes here and there. We were not surprised to learn that the processor performance was not much higher than Llano, but AMD continues to show how its done when it comes to integrated graphics circuits. Those who wants to get their hands on Trinity right away will have to get a system from OEM builders, otherwise you will have to wait until the Fall.