Look Out Bulldozer, Here Comes Trinity: AMD's 2012 Demo on Video at IDF
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 14, 2011 7:57 PM ESTAMD's Bulldozer CPU is on the verge of being released. Sever markets will see the CPU soon, while desktop customers will have to wait until Q4 (which is only a month away at this point). No one likes to ship a delayed part, but if you do your job right the part that follows should arrive in a timely fashion. The follow-on to Bulldozer is called Piledriver and it will make its debut with AMD's Trinity APU in 2012.
Trinity is a higher end successor to Llano. It will integrate 2 - 4 Piledriver cores and feature some sort of a Radeon GPU on-die. Performance across the board will be higher than Llano. Piledriver should offer better performance per clock vs. Bulldozer, but Trinity won't be targeted at the same high-end market that AMD's FX series based on Bulldozer will address. Presumably we'll see a Piledriver based FX CPU at some point down the road. AMD indicated that Trinity was a few months away, implying an early 2012 launch.
To show the health of Trinity silicon, AMD showed it running Deus Ex in a suite a block away from IDF. The Trinity demo was done in a generic notebook chassis. We weren't allowed to benchmark the APU unfortunately. You can check out the demo in the video below:
If AMD can deliver Trinity in early 2012 and continue to execute beyond it, we may finally see the end of AMD's CPU woes. The company needs to put out a solid design and improve on it regularly. With Trinity following Bulldozer so closely, AMD may be doing just that.
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LoneNinja - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link
If a new arch needs 4/5 years how does Intel have a new one every 2? Or how did AMD develop Bobcat, Bulldozer, and Llano simultaneously? Bulldozer tapped out a long time ago, just because it isn't on market yet doesn't mean they don't have working samples of a new core already.cfaalm - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
One FP unit? Look it up again. It's two 128 bit that can combine into one 256 bit/AVX or 2 x 128 bit if only one thread needs FP. Now I don't know about the Intel side on FP, but that's it for AMD Bulldozer.Gondalf - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
One module has two Integer units (with some things in common) and ONE fp unit 128b*2. Look at Amd slides.Intel has one 256b/AVX fp unit for every integer core. In short words a quad core Intel cpu has two times the fp resources of a similar Amd device (with four integer cores obviously). A Gulftown has six integer units and six fp uinits, Bulldozer has eight integer cores and four fp units.
Amd is focusing on integer performance in multithread scenario.
Zoomer - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Which is smart considering the server / HPC focus. Intensive FP calcs can be offloaded anyway.fic2 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
It is also smart since AMD is heading down the path of the gpu being the fp engine for the cpu - I think two gens after Trinity (?). Then AMD fp will blow every cpu out of the water. Right now AMDs fp just has to be good enough. It is there integer that is sorely lacking which hopefully BD will correct.bhima - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Not that the graphics power is revolutionary (normal settings at 1366x768) but it was definitely 2 to 3 times as powerful as intels 3000 graphics.FInd a way to shoehorn in the equivalent of a desktop 5770 onto an APU and then we'll see revolutionary.
fic2 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
I think revolutionary will be when the gpu is fully integrated into the cpu in such a way that the gpu is the fp engine of the cpu. Not sure which product this will be in but AMD has said it is coming.silverblue - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Fusion is literally that, but it takes time to go from two separate items to a completely merged entity. A bit like going from two halves of a photo to a jigsaw to the complete photo, I suppose.Zoomer - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Would it be possible to summarize the contents of the video everytime one is posted. It could be included in the article as a caption or something. Not everyone watches the video; they might not be able nor have the inclination to do so.Sabresiberian - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link
I'm not placing any bets until I see thorough tests from Anandtech and Tomshardware on these CPUs.I hope they blow Sandy Bridge and the Core series out of the water. I hope the on-die GPU technology allows for discreet cards to add some serious punch for those of us who have more than a 1920x1080 monitor and/or want to run more than 60 fps (or even 60 fps through an entire game at max settings). I have to admit though, I'm thinking a bit cynically these days, and am not really expecting more than an incremental increase in performance over what we have now.
;)