Trinity review

[Schmide]

A meaningless metric, really, as like I said before almost no one cares about gaming on laptops. The point of "lower GPU performance for the same price" has already been debunked, notwithstanding the fact most people don't game on their laptops.

Dude. A lot of people care about gaming on laptops? (we wouldn't have 14+ pages here if it was all about excel) Do you really have to make a sweeping generalization just to thread crap?

In case you forgot to read: you'll be able to get Ivy Bridge Core i3 laptops in the $500 range easily, which is also the range A8 laptops will be at. Core i3 laptops will come with HD 4000 graphics, which will be very comparable to the HD 7640G in the A8 laptops. For $600, you can already pick up Sandy Bridge Core i3 and i5 laptops with a HD7670M switchable dGPU. Nothing to stop manufacturers from doing the same thing with the Ivy Bridge Core i3 given volume pricing for parts is the same. This is the price range A10 laptops will be at.

Very comparable? Why make such a big stink about every little thread if all things are very comparable? You make a big stink about the littlest distinction of threaded vs non-threaded then marginalize it down to very comparable. Enough.

And no, Bulldozer isn't "good enough" if you're looking for the best CPU performance and power consumption at any given price point. BTW, that's what people look for in CPUs=how fast and efficient they are for how much they're willing to pay. Incredibly funny that you'd allude that IGP performance is the thing that matters the most in laptops when that couldn't be farther from the truth.

No! original Bulldozer was broken; however, the little tweaks seem to be heading in the right direction. The long and short of it, if it wins the series of performance metrics you're looking for. It's good enough!!!

BTW, that's the whole set of pictures from the games that were benchmarked. Funny how you say it's "cherry picking" when everything that they posted I posted here. The fact is, single-threaded performance is still what matters most to games.

I declare a thread crap.

 

[Olikan]

As I said, AF quality is better than VLIW4/5 GPUs from AMD which includes Trinity. This is what he wrote in the rest of the text and you can see it in the video samples as well.

ivy AF is not better, is slight worser....you can see in the AF test there is more red....anyway the diference is impossible to see dodging bullets

....but, that's not the point..... it was in shadow problems, there is shadow on the car, but not in the montain\house....
...there is light problems in the montain and the roof in skyrim...

Ivy still have driver problems, comparing trinity to Ivy at gaming, just become ridiculous

....hehe...like this bug....crysis

 

[-Slacker-]

Yeah, I'm done with you. You've already been arguing with god knows how many people for the last 10 pages, I'm not gonna waste my time shouting at walls for then next 20 pages.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I said "being good enough at something is not a metric of comparison", not that the 7660G is anything but "good enough" too.

20% faster is 20% faster, and it IS a metric of comparison. Why would you buy something that is singnificantly slower for a similar price just because it too is good enough.

Wow, you just de-bunked the classic arguement of AMD fans for buying an AMD cpu.

 

[sm625]

In case you forgot to read: you'll be able to get Ivy Bridge Core i3 laptops in the $500 range easily, which is also the range A8 laptops will be at.

I hope this is true. But unfortunately there is nothing to stop intel from simply delaying the i3. Why should they release it? It will only cut into the sales of more expensive high margin notebooks. Because their only competitor cannot release a capable cpu, they are left to do as they please. Until Apple comes along and completely obliterates them with gigantic cheaply produced A6,A7,A8 chips...

Intel has already proven they are willing to throw away tens of billions in profits by their idiotic refusal to release a low cost low power chip like an atom with sb level graphics and an integrated ssd controller. The ipad only happened because netbooks run like such trash. If every netbook from day one had a decent youtube/netflix/farmville capable gpu and an SSD, then their chips would be in every ipad today i guarantee it. Intel has already proven they can do it with their 10 watt 807UE. But no one uses it because it is so damned expensive.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Dude. A lot of people care about gaming on laptops? (we wouldn't have 14+ pages here if it was all about excel) Do you really have to make a sweeping generalization just to thread crap?



Very comparable? Why make such a big stink about every little thread if all things are very comparable? You make a big stink about the littlest distinction of threaded vs non-threaded then marginalize it down to very comparable. Enough.



No! original Bulldozer was broken; however, the little tweaks seem to be heading in the right direction. The long and short of it, if it wins the series of performance metrics you're looking for. It's good enough!!!



I declare a thread crap.

No, they don't. This is a hardware enthusiast website, and if you didn't know us hardware enthusiasts make anywhere from 1-5% of the market, which is largely meaningless. You can continue making these claims as much as you want, but it doesn't hold up in the real world. Llano laptops were touted here for their "gaming on the cheap" mantra, and Sandy Bridge laptops sold by a huge amount more even though Llano was widely available in retail stores. Sorry, but having a faster IGP isn't what appeals the most to the masses, regardless of what people on a hardware enthusiast website would have you think. This is directly corroborated in sales.

Bulldozer is a broken architecture from the get-go and nothing will salvage it. Not Piledriver, not Steamroller. As we already saw with Netburst, it can be improved, but you need a solid architecture to build upon if that's what you're hoping to use in the future. In the end, Netburst had to be disbanded. K8 was solid, as were all architectures succeeding it with perhaps an exception being K10. No, Bulldozer is not good enough; not when Intel has twice the performance/watt and 50%+ more single-threaded performance.

I declare you don't have any decent counter-arguments and that's why the only thing you can do is make one-liners like saying "thread crap". The benchmarks posted were in reply to someone saying "this isn't 2008; most games are multi-threaded" when that's clearly false. But you haven't been paying attention to the thread discussion, so you wouldn't know that.

 

[hans030390]

No, they don't.

Enough care that it makes Trinity worthwhile, assuming the price is right (and Intel usually doesn't beat out AMD's APUs when it comes to budget gaming performance, despite what you're claiming).

If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Otherwise, go away. No one cares.

 

[sm625]

Llano laptops were touted here for their "gaming on the cheap" mantra, and Sandy Bridge laptops sold by a huge amount more even though Llano was widely available in retail stores.

Even if llano put in a 7 second super pi time and blew away i7 in all of the PCMark scores by 20-30%, it still would not have sold very well. Maybe twice as many A8's total would have sold, but no more. That's just how it goes.

 

[lOl_lol_lOl]

No, they don't. This is a hardware enthusiast website, and if you didn't know us hardware enthusiasts make anywhere from 1-5% of the market, which is largely meaningless. You can continue making these claims as much as you want, but it doesn't hold up in the real world. Llano laptops were touted here for their "gaming on the cheap" mantra, and Sandy Bridge laptops sold by a huge amount more even though Llano was widely available in retail stores. Sorry, but having a faster IGP isn't what appeals the most to the masses, regardless of what people on a hardware enthusiast website would have you think. This is directly corroborated in sales.

Bulldozer is a broken architecture from the get-go and nothing will salvage it. Not Piledriver, not Steamroller. As we already saw with Netburst, it can be improved, but you need a solid architecture to build upon if that's what you're hoping to use in the future. In the end, Netburst had to be disbanded. K8 was solid, as were all architectures succeeding it with perhaps an exception being K10. No, Bulldozer is not good enough; not when Intel has twice the performance/watt and 50%+ more single-threaded performance.

I declare you don't have any decent counter-arguments and that's why the only thing you can do is make one-liners like saying "thread crap". The benchmarks posted were in reply to someone saying "this isn't 2008; most games are multi-threaded" when that's clearly false. But you haven't been paying attention to the thread discussion, so you wouldn't know that.

Enthusiast's spending represent 40% of the major tech companies income, which is quite significant if you ask me.

You've been constantly complaining about the poor performance of Llano/trinity by imposing ridiculous standards, well beyond the original context of 'budget gaming'. Yet you come back and berate it for its failure as a budget gaming option.

Also, no one is disputing your precious Intel's dominance in CPU performance. Forgive us sir for even pondering the benefit's of AMDs sub $200 APUs.

 

[Schmide]

No, they don't. This is a hardware enthusiast website, and if you didn't know us hardware enthusiasts make anywhere from 1-5% of the market, which is largely meaningless. You can continue making these claims as much as you want, but it doesn't hold up in the real world. Llano laptops were touted here for their "gaming on the cheap" mantra, and Sandy Bridge laptops sold by a huge amount more even though Llano was widely available in retail stores. Sorry, but having a faster IGP isn't what appeals the most to the masses, regardless of what people on a hardware enthusiast website would have you think. This is directly corroborated in sales.

Intel is always going to outsell AMD, the real point comes when AMD actually sells something in more than just mediocre quantities.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5026

Unsurprisingly the breadwinner for the quarter was Llano, which launched just before the start of the quarter. Overall AMD’s mobile business revenue increased 35% over Q2, and at this point AMD is selling Llano as fast as they can produce it. This is why the continuing status of GloFo’s 32nm process is so important to AMD, as at this point AMD’s mobile growth is limited only by supply constraints. And where are all of those Llanos going? While AMD doesn’t break down shipments of individual CPU families by region, AMD has cited China and India as major growth markets for the quarter, where they saw double digit growth in both markets.

Bulldozer is a broken architecture from the get-go and nothing will salvage it. Not Piledriver, not Steamroller. As we already saw with Netburst, it can be improved, but you need a solid architecture to build upon if that's what you're hoping to use in the future. In the end, Netburst had to be disbanded. K8 was solid, as were all architectures succeeding it with perhaps an exception being K10. No, Bulldozer is not good enough; not when Intel has twice the performance/watt and 50%+ more single-threaded performance.

Ehh, you can be quick to declare something dead. Yes it's behind. Now there is something to be said for the lacking in process over design. AMD will never be equal to Intel in that category. As we can see in this release there were some bugs fixed in the branch and cache fetch which showed fair gains. Now a lot of us will say that AMD is still running on a crap cache and memory interface. Maybe that is too much for AMD to fix in this one iteration and we will have to wait for the next one. Regardless AMD is committed to the arch and only time will tell.

I declare you don't have any decent counter-arguments and that's why the only thing you can do is make one-liners like saying "thread crap". The benchmarks posted were in reply to someone saying "this isn't 2008; most games are multi-threaded" when that's clearly false. But you haven't been paying attention to the thread discussion, so you wouldn't know that.

I don't really have to counter argue it? You're the one putting fancy comparisons and generalizations to desktops, discrete graphics, and future Ivy releases. If your sole purpose is to muddy the waters of the gaming benchmarks, which do favor AMD, I'll call thread crap any time.

 

[turn_pike]

While things might be different in wherever it is that LolWutAlex lives, I do know for sure that a lot of college students in the United States only own laptops and they sure as hell play games on them.

PS
Now that I've read his previous posts in this thread, I now conclude that he lives in an alternate universe ^_^

 

[ShintaiDK]

Enthusiast's spending represent 40% of the major tech companies income, which is quite significant if you ask me.

You've been constantly complaining about the poor performance of Llano/trinity by imposing ridiculous standards, well beyond the original context of 'budget gaming'. Yet you come back and berate it for its failure as a budget gaming option.

Also, no one is disputing your precious Intel's dominance in CPU performance. Forgive us sir for even pondering the benefit's of AMDs sub $200 APUs.

Enthusiasts accounts for pennies in the overall revenues and profit. However the segment provides a PR value.

Mainstream and value is where the money is. Always been so.

 

[Cerb]

Ignoring the trollfest (been a fun read, at least), I think it looks pretty good. If Zambezi had been close to this, it would have at least not been a desktop lead balloon. More often than not, performance is actually up over prior generation CPUs, by a fairly substantial margin, both single- and multi-threaded, and both idle and load power consumption are good. It's not going to beat the 8000000lb gorilla that is Intel, but it's a good step forward, at least as much so as Nehalem->SB was for Intel, and more inline with what we had hoped from BD. Whether IPC is actually up or not I'm not sure of, as it hasn't been delved into enough from what I've seen, but since BD was primarily TDP-limited, if the desktop version isn't a dynamic power hog, I think it will do alright.

Again, expecting them to beat Intel is expecting too much. They had one chance, with Ruiz at the helm, who completely blew it. But, if they can at least keep selling decent numbers, put enough revenues into R&D to keep improvements up, and if RR turns out to know what he's doing, they could come back from bleeding on everything but GPUs, and provide more competition than just what desperation forces upon them.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Enough care that it makes Trinity worthwhile, assuming the price is right (and Intel usually doesn't beat out AMD's APUs when it comes to budget gaming performance, despite what you're claiming).

If you don't like the product, don't buy it. Otherwise, go away. No one cares.

Interesting "argument".

It was people here saying that Trinity would be very popular because of the IGP. We already know how that turned out with Llano vs Sandy Bridge, and Intel has narrowed their gap to AMD when it comes to the IGP with Ivy Bridge.


Intel already has a massive CPU advantage, and now AMD's IGP advantage is dwindling and will be completely gone next year. Given most consumers would go with Intel 9/10 times, especially since they're competitive in pricing and all other areas, what's AMD gonna do to attract people? People that want to game on their laptops on the cheap makes a tiny sector of the market; a small niche. If all AMD is gonna target is a niche segment then you won't see their market share increase by any significant number in comparison to Intel. Llano targeted that small niche, and we all know how that ended out.

 

[pelov]

A meaningless metric, really, as like I said before almost no one cares about gaming on laptops. The point of "lower GPU performance for the same price" has already been debunked, notwithstanding the fact most people don't game on their laptops.

Again, if you've got the data to back this up please do so. I've already showed that Llano is outselling Intel laptops and has been outselling them consistently since Llano was released last year. If this were true, which it isn't, it would be Intel gaining the market share and not the other way around.

 

[Skurge]

Ask me. Games are definitely multi-threaded. My CPU has higher IPC than my friends i7-870, but he gets better performance im almost every game with a much slower video card.

 

[Olikan]

Intel already has a massive CPU advantage, and now AMD's IGP advantage is dwindling and will be completely gone next year. Given most consumers would go with Intel 9/10 times, especially since they're competitive in pricing and all other areas, what's AMD gonna do to attract people? People that want to game on their laptops on the cheap makes a tiny sector of the market; a small niche. If all AMD is gonna target is a niche segment then you won't see their market share increase by any significant number in comparison to Intel. Llano targeted that small niche, and we all know how that ended out.

IGP...

while performance is near... Intel is still very behind in drivers... They did a good improve at AF, but....there were only 2 sites that did a deep IQ comparison, intel failed hard in both

AMD will still be a good choise even if they haswell destroys kavery (and probably will)...just because of drivers

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Enthusiast's spending represent 40% of the major tech companies income, which is quite significant if you ask me.

You've been constantly complaining about the poor performance of Llano/trinity by imposing ridiculous standards, well beyond the original context of 'budget gaming'. Yet you come back and berate it for its failure as a budget gaming option.

Also, no one is disputing your precious Intel's dominance in CPU performance. Forgive us sir for even pondering the benefit's of AMDs sub $200 APUs.

It's insignificant in comparison to the whole market. This has been explained to many of you several times, yet it seems for some reason you can't understand it.

Because it's not even a great option for "budget gaming", however small that market is. As has been mentioned previously, the Ivy Bridge Core i3 will also feature HD 4000 graphics, albeit at lower Turbo Boost frequencies than the model in the i7 (i7 is 1250MHz; i3 will be 1100-1150MHz). However, with Intel's graphics the core configuration/EUs matter more than clock speed, which you can confirm if you look at the top-tier HD 3000 (12EU/1250MHz) and HD 4000 (16EU/1250MHz). The HD 4000 has around 35-40% higher performance than HD 3000, with a corresponding 33% higher number of EUs. However, if you look at benchmarks, there's only a 5-10% performance difference between the top-tier HD 3000 in the i7 and the lower-tier HD 3000. The exact same thing will be in play here, and given there will be about a 20% performance difference between the HD 7660G and 7640G and the HD 7660G is 20% faster than HD 4000, the HD 4000 graphics in the Ivy Bridge Core i3 will deliver almost the exact same performance as the HD 7640G.

You'll be able to find $500 Ivy Core i3 laptops, just like you were able to find $500 range Sandy Core i3 laptops. Since AMD is still attacking a more budget-oriented segment, you'll find A10 laptops in the $600 range and A8 laptops in the $500 range. So for the same price, you'll get comparable IGP performance from Intel (though very few consumers care about that) and a huge difference in CPU performance (which more consumers care about, though not a big amount). Other factors between both will be comparable including battery life, chassis size, weight, etc. Given that Intel will be faster overall and have comparable pricing and most consumers would go with Intel rather than an AMD, Intel will win by default. If AMD wants to slap Intel in market share, they need to make something that's noticeably better than what Intel has for most of the market and not a small niche.

As far as the desktop market goes, for average Joe you still have the same situation as the laptop market, and for budget-oriented enthusiasts AMD has the problem that a Sandy/Ivy Bridge Pentium and a dedicated graphics card is faster than an APU in gaming.

 

[ElFenix]

tons of people game on their laptops. i dunno where wut axel is getting the notion that people don't. MMOs in particular.

 

[pelov]

So for the same price, you'll get comparable IGP performance from Intel (though very few consumers care about that)

You keep saying this as if it were true.

Customers also opted for lower-priced laptops, many of which had AMD's chips. Supplies of AMD's A-series chips code-named Llano were restored after manufacturing issues were resolved, McCarron said.

Mercury attributed AMD’s success to affordable laptops and Llano APUs. AMD will introduce new Trinity and Brazos 2.0 APUs in a matter of weeks, both of which should cover the low end and mainstream segments nicely. Intel on the other hand launched Ivy Bridge this week, but it will take some time before we see cheap Intel parts based on the new 22nm architecture.

They've stayed steady in desktop (oddly enough) while gaining in mobile. The figures are year-to-year estimates and represent total market share and not just products sold, so they're counting Pre-Pentiums all the way to Ivy Bridge which is why the gains look so low. The sales numbers in comparison are much better.

I know you've got experience in retail work (as a janitor, most likely) but just because you repeat something over and over again doesn't make it true.

 

[Riek]

It's insignificant in comparison to the whole market. This has been explained to many of you several times, yet it seems for some reason you can't understand it.

Because it's not even a great option for "budget gaming", however small that market is. As has been mentioned previously, the Ivy Bridge Core i3 will also feature HD 4000 graphics, albeit at lower Turbo Boost frequencies than the model in the i7 (i7 is 1250MHz; i3 will be 1100-1150MHz). However, with Intel's graphics the core configuration/EUs matter more than clock speed, which you can confirm if you look at the top-tier HD 3000 (12EU/1250MHz) and HD 4000 (16EU/1250MHz). The HD 4000 has around 35-40% higher performance than HD 3000, with a corresponding 33% higher number of EUs. However, if you look at benchmarks, there's only a 5-10% performance difference between the top-tier HD 3000 in the i7 and the lower-tier HD 3000. The exact same thing will be in play here, and given there will be about a 20% performance difference between the HD 7660G and 7640G and the HD 7660G is 20% faster than HD 4000, the HD 4000 graphics in the Ivy Bridge Core i3 will deliver almost the exact same performance as the HD 7640G.
.

I was to lazy to look for a proper review but:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/6

there is a difference between those HD3000 models up to >50%.

 

[Schmide]

The LOL_Wut_Axel argument decision tree.

Trinity IGP better than Intel - Talk about discrete graphics.

Price point for the average laptop - People don't game on laptops.

CPU/Thread performance of Trinity - Talk about desktop high end CPU.

Intel Driver bugs - Still waiting.

 

[georgec84]

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/05/17/is-amds-trinity-much-better-than-it-appears/

In short, AMD is the clear winner on performance/watt, and that should be the selling point.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

tons of people game on their laptops. i dunno where wut axel is getting the notion that people don't. MMOs in particular.

If this statement were true Sandy Bridge wouldn't have left Llano in the dust when it came to sales.

Again, in the enthusiast community it's somewhat common, but the enthusiast community is a very, very small part of the computer market.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

I was to lazy to look for a proper review but:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/amd-trinity-review-a10-4600m-a-new-hope/6

there is a difference between those HD3000 models up to >50%.

You do know that 38 is 19% more than 32, right? That's nowhere near close to 50%.

BTW, the difference is probably because of the drivers. The Dell V131 was reviewed in October 2011. The Compal notebook with the i7-2820QM was reviewed in January 2011.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/05/17/is-amds-trinity-much-better-than-it-appears/

In short, AMD is the clear winner on performance/watt, and that should be the selling point.

LOL, SA.