Advanced Micro Devices on Tuesday introduced its second generation of accelerated processing units (APUs) for mainstream and ultrathin laptops, mainstream desktops, all-in-one PCs, home theater systems, and embedded designs code. Dubbed Trinity, the new parts deliver up to 12 hours of battery life and provide double the performance-per-watt of the previous generation of A-Series APUs known as Llano, AMD said.
"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 in sleek, stylish designs at price points that make sense," Chris Cloran, general manager of AMD's Client Business Unit, said in a statement.
"Our second-Generation AMD A-Series APU is a major step forward in every performance and power dimension, allowing users to enjoy a stunning experience without having to give up the things that matter to them most," he continued. "This experience doesn't stop at mainstream notebooks. It carries over into affordable ultrathin form factors featuring the latest in AMD Radeon graphics."
AMD is reporting pretty hefty increases in APU performance over the Llano generation with Trinity, to the tune of a 29 percent hike in CPU performance and a 56 percent jump in GPU performance.
The new APUs are built around AMD's latest Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and its new "Bulldozer" CPU core architecture, which sports the company's third-generation Turbo Core technology to dynamically shift power between CPU and GPU depending upon application needs.
"Combined, the CPU and GPU cores deliver more than 700 gigaflops of computing performance—several times more than the fastest x86 CPUs—to boost performance of hundreds of applications," the company said.
Technology integrated in the new A-Series processor family includes AMD's Eyefinity for multi-display support, which is available for the first time without a discrete graphics card, DirectX 11 support, and dual-graphics support.
Trinity also includes the new AMD HD Media Accelerator, which includes an automated image and video adjustment technology called Perfect Picture HD, a tool for fixing jittery video called Steady Video Technology, a new tool called Quick Stream that prioritizes video streaming when it's running, a video chat capability, and a video compression engine.
The first wave of Trinity products includes three new APUs for mainstream laptops and a pair of chips for ultrathin laptops that will be showing up in products from Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, and other OEMs.
The new A-Series mainstream notebook parts are:
- The A10-4600M with Radeon HD 7660G graphics (quad-core CPU, 2.3GHz base CPU clock and 3.2GHz maximum CPU clock, 384 Radeon cores with a 497MHz base GPU clock and 686MHz maximum GPU clock, 4MB of L2 cache, 35W).
- The A8-4500M with Radeon HD 7640G graphics (quad-core CPU, 1.9GHz base CPU clock and 2.8GHz maximum CPU clock, 256 Radeon cores with a 497MHz base GPU clock and 655MHz maximum GPU clock, 4MB of L2 cache, 35W).
- The A6-4400M with Radeon HD 7520G graphics (dual-core CPU, 2.7GHz base CPU clock and 3.2GHz maximum CPU clock, 192 Radeon cores with a 497MHz base GPU clock and 686MHz maximum GPU clock, 1MB of L2 cache, 35W).
The new Trinity chips for ultrathin notebooks are:
- The A10-4655M with Radeon HD 7620G graphics (quad-core CPU, 2.0GHz base CPU clock and 2.8GHz maximum CPU clock, 384 Radeon cores with a 360MHz base GPU clock and 497 maximum GPU clock, 4MB of L2 cache, 25W).
- The A6-4455M with Radeon HD 7500G graphics (dual-core CPU, 2.1GHz base CPU clock and 2.6GHz maximum CPU clock, 256 Radeon cores with a 327MHz base GPU clock and 424 maximum GPU clock, 2MB of L2 cache, 17W).
Specs for the desktop-targeted A-Series chips will be released later, AMD said.
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