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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Beenthere - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
For those who haven't been paying close attention, AMD has been laying the ground work for waves of new CPUs across all X86 market segments over the next three years. While they were sorting out production issues with Bulldozer they were concurently developing the next several generations of CPUs to follow Bulldozer. Consumers are going to have all the CPU options they could possibly desire and more very soon.saneblane - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
it wasn't a smart move using that game as a demonstration, one of the worst console ports that has ever been done.shiznit - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
How many bad console ports let you adjust FOV right there in the menu? I could name many high-profile games with much worse consolitis.LondonBurning - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
What the hell are you smoking? Bad console port?? The game looked, controlled, and ran fantastic (at least on a Radeon 6970), and gave you all the settings you could want...sjael - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Gotta agree. Easily the best performing cross-platform game I've played on PC in years.Not to mention the fact the PC version was developed alongside the console one, by a totally different studio, so it's not really even a port.
smitty3268 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Maybe the OP was talking about the old 2nd game, Invisible War, instead of the recent 3rd one?B3an - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Maybe the OP is just a moron.Arnulf - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Why would that matter ? This was a hardware demo, not a game demo so it doesn't really matter what software they used for comparison (althrough admittedly I'd love to see more than a single title used). - what matters is that the notebook on the left was clearly stuttering all the time, making the game unplayable, nevermind the crappy visuals. The notebook on the right performed allright.yankeeDDL - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Saneblane,I think using an extremely demanding game, which falthers on hardware which was considered high-end only 6 months ago, seems to me the best way to demostrate the power of a budget APU.
shiznit - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Macbook air running on Arm for daily tasks with switching to Trinity when plugged in.