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AMD Confirms Trinity’s New Specs
AMD has confirmed the specifications of its Trinity accelerated processor units (APUs), with the majority being quad-core units with 4MB cache.
AMD launched its mobile Trinity APUs earlier this year in a bid to cash in on “back to school” sales and now it has detailed the specification of Trinity processors that will slot into desktop systems. The firm confirmed that Trinity has moved from Socket FM1 to Socket FM2 and save for two A4 and A6 SKUs the chips will all be quad-core parts with base frequencies over 3GHz.
AMD stuck with its A4, A6, A8 and A10 branding with the dual-core A4-5300, base clocked at 3.4GHz with turbo mode pushing that up to 3.6GHz and 128 graphics cores clocked at 723MHz at the foot of AMD’s APU line-up. Next up the firm has the unlocked dual-core A6-5400K, which not only bumps the CPU clock speed by 200MHz to 3.6GHz and 3.8GHz for base and turbo modes, respectively, but increases the number of graphics cores to 192 and their frequency to 760GHz.
While AMD’s A4 and A6 Trinity processors are dual-core, the four other chips in the range are all quad-core parts, with the A8-5500 and A8-5600K sporting base clock speeds of 3.2GHz and 3.6GHz, respectively, with turbo mode boosting those to 3.7GHz and 3.9GHz, respectively. The firm has kept the number of graphics cores on both chips the same at 356 and clocked them at 760MHz, however the higher frequency on the A8-5600K means that the firm bumped up the TDP to 100W, though given it is unlocked, the factory TDP is largely academic.
AMD’s A10 chips follow in the same vein as the A8 parts, with the 65W A10-5700 part clocked at 3.4GHz, boosted to 4GHz while the 100W A10-5800K part has its clocks set at 3.8GHz and boosted to 4.2GHz. AMD has given both processors 384 graphics cores clocked at 800MHz.
AMD Details Vishera
AMD will launch three eight-core processors led by the AMD FX 8350 but it also plans to launch two six-core processors for people who like to spend a bit less.
The AMD FX6350 is a 125W six-core with a 3.9GHz base clock and 4.2 maximum turbo core clock. It comes with 14MB of cache, supports DDR 3 1866 and comes in AM3+. Naturally this is a 32nm SOI product just as its predecessor as AMD is not ready for 22nm fun yet.
The runner up is a 3.5GHz clocked six core that turbos to 4.1GHz, all that while staying in 95W TDP envelope. The name is FX 6300 and these two boys should launch together. The rest of the specification is the same as with faster brother. These two processors will replace the Zambezi based FX 6120 and FX 6100. These parts as well as FX 6200 that is also a part of Zambezi legacy are all selling between $190 and $250 which is definitely not a lot of money for quite powerful processors.
AMD Officially Launches Trinity Mobile
AMD has finally and officially lifted an NDA veil off its mobile Trinity A-series APU lineup based on the 2nd-gen Bulldozer CPU core, aka Piledriver, and VLIW4 Northern Islands GPU squeezed together on a 32nm SOI die.
Architecture-wise, AMD’s Trinity combines two to four Piledriver x86 cores combined with up to 384 VLIW4 Radeon cores on a 32nm die which ends up as a 246mm2 chip with 1.303B transistors, slightly more than Llano’s 228mm2/1.178B. Since it is made in the same 32nm manufacturing process as Llano, the greatest win for Trinity are actual CPU and GPU performance improvements as well as impressive power consumption improvements when compared to Llano APUs.
Same as the FX-series desktop parts based on the Bulldozer architecture, AMD’s Trinity CPU part has a 2+1 integer/floating point design where you get two integer cores that share a single floating point scheduler. Although it appears to the OS as two cores, each Piledriver module actually has less resources than traditional core design. But with Piledriver, those Bulldozer kinks got ironed out as much as possible, improving IPC (instruction per cycle), reducing leakage, reducing CAC and giving it a slight frequency uplift.
As far as the GPU is concerned, we are looking at quite familiar Northern Islands VLIW4 part, a same one that was behind Cayman Radeon HD 6970 graphics card. Of course, the GPU has been cut down to up to 384 stream processors (organized in 6 SIMDs) with 24 texture units and 8 ROPs. The clocks have also gone down to 497MHz base clock that can “turbo” up to 686MHz.
Trinity Launching On Desktops This Summer
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AMD is expected to introduce its new mobile Trinity APU in a week or so and now we are hearing some timeframes for desktop parts as well.
According to Digitimes, desktop Trinity parts are coming in August, while Brazos 2.0 chips are expected in June. There is no word on Trinity ULV parts yet and we believe they will be the most interesting of the lot.
AMD’s Trinity To Have Fewer Cores
AMD’s soon to launch A10 5800K is a 100W quad-core Trinity 32nm CPU with 3.8 GHz base clock and 4.2GHz maximal clock possible with AMD turbo core dynamic overclocking technology.
The A10 5800K has 4MB of L2 cache, supports DDR3 1866, dual graphics configurations as well as AMD’s new FM2 socket. The fun part is new HD 7660D GPU that works at 800MHz and comes with 384 shader units. The current APU market leader A8 3870K that works at 3GHz has HD 6550 graphics with 400 cores running at 600MHz.
AMD claims that new Radeon cores from Trinity CPU including A10 5800K are more efficient and this is the main reason why you have fewer cores that can deliver superior performance. The other reason is that with 800MHz core clock they can probably process more data, meaning that HD 7660D of A10 5800K should end up quite a bit faster than the Llano A8 3870K.
All these Radeon cores are a key feature of the Vision Engine that accelerates GPU enabled applications. AMD also tells the world that Trinity is DirectX 11 compatible, supports Direct compute and the new A series of processors, including the A10 5800K all the way to dual-core A4 5300, should not have any issues playing Blu-ray 3D. The GPU part of Trinity supports AMD V, UVD3 as well as Open CL acceleration.
Will AMD’s HD 7950 Debut Next Month?
AMD has decided to delay the launch of its HD 7950 graphics card to early February.
This comes after news that the HD 7970, which AMD ‘launched’ on 22 December, will not be available until 9 January. This wasn’t received too well by the media and customers as it does help to have some stock to sell on launch day.
To avoid another bashing for a ‘paper launch’ the firm will launch the HD 7950 in February when it will actually be available. Guru 3D had confirmed this but the article has since been taken down.
AMD has told us that it won’t comment on rumour, speculation or any unannounced products.
The upcoming HD 7950 graphics card will use the same 28nm Southern Islands Tahiti GPU as the HD 7970, with the latter the first to do so. According to AMD it has 4.3bn transistors, more on-chip cache and greater overclocking potential than previous cards.
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AMD Debuts GPU
AMD has just unveiled their smallest 6-series graphics card to date. The HD 6450 is based on the Caicos GPU, with a die of only 75mm square, 160 shaders and a 64-bit memory bus.
The graphics card comes in two models one with 1GB of DDR3 memory clocked up to 800MHz or 512MB of GDDR5 up to 900MHz. Furthermore, the GPU runs at different clock speeds, 625MHz on DDR3 cards and 750MHz on the GDDR5 variant. Realistically, AMD should have used two different SKU with different clocks and memory to make life easier.
Intel Outs New Processors
Intel is not letting their Sandy Bridge design go to waste. They will soon release a series of Xeon server chips based on the 32nm Sandy Bridge core.The new chips have a maximum capacity of 10 cores, with hyper-threading and they are expected to deliver a 40 percent performance increase over the previous Xeon 7500 series.
Intel’s Next CPU Faster Than Sandy Bridge
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We hear that Intel is already in discussion with its partners about the 22nm Ivy Bridge CPU, and the talks cover the chips performance. The 22nm processor supposedly offers more performance with a similar thermal design.
Intel is informing its buddies to expect a 20 percent performance increase over Sandy Bridge, which is about the same gain that Sandy Bridge had over Nehalem based CPUs. Keep in mind this is an optical shrink of the existing 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture. Intel traditionally takes a very safe process when it moves from one manufacturing process to another. The 22nm Ivy Bridge comes with the new architecture and will debut in time to take on Bulldozer and Llano from AMD.
Motherboard Prices Expected To Rise
Analyst in the tech industry are claiming that PC motherboard prices may shoot up in April as a result of the earthquake in Japan that unfortunately damaged the buildings of several component suppliers. With the nuclear power issues in Japan which is causing brown outs the matter is expected to get worse. As a result is being said that the supply chain is expected to suffer from a serious shortages, which will cause the industry to face rising component prices and in turn cause the manufactures to pass that expense along to consumers with a price increase.