AMD's Trinity launched yesterday, does reasonably well

[Wesley]

I say reasonably well because AMD's Llano and Bulldozer chips have been underwhelming performers thus far. The company decided to design a new architecture that focuses on conserving resources, improving power efficiency and reducing heat generation. Its a good idea on paper compared to Intel's approach of continuing the growth of Moore's law using 3D-layered transistors, but in reality it strangles single-thread performance and requires higher clock speeds to match anything from Intel's stable. In addition, there's not a lot to differentiate CPUs from the same family. In gaming benchmarks, AMD's FX-4100 performs similarly to the FX-8120, with some margin of improved frame rates in certain games thanks to the higher clock speeds of the quad-core chip.

Yes, despite that some people say AMD's FX-8120 is a octo-core chip, its really four Bulldozer modules with two single-core chips per module, squashed together and forced to share cache, floating point units and bandwidth. Likewise for the quad-core chip, which has two modules and really can't contend with even Intel's Sandy Bridge-based Pentiums. For laptops and desktops, AMD promised that Trinity would improve performance by 15% overall and prove a worthy upgrade from the Llano chips of old. Lets see how they've delivered

Linky

[Wesley]

OpenCL looks to give customers heterogeneous computing abilities no matter the platform, allowing applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration together with your CPU to make short work of things like video encoding, photo editing and animation, to name a few workloads and AMD's Bulldozer cores currently suck at. With Trinity, AMD has pushed forward their agenda to open the OpenCL standard to all applications that could use it and Anandtech showed the world how it could help Intel users, too.

Linky

[Wesley]

Trinity desktop chips in Tom's Hardware's lab, benchmarks

AMD's Trinity desktop processor is on the way for enthusiasts and desktop users looking for better performance over their Llano APUs and it's on track for a launch later this year with new socket FM2 boards. If you've been living under a rock, FM2 is pin-incompatible with socket FM1, necessitating a complete upgrade for those of you dissatisfied with current performance on their rig. But I have to warn those of you in that predicament right now - Trinity won't help your woes.

In fact, Trinity represents over a year of re-engineering Bulldozer modules into Piledriver, the next in the series of the revamped processor lineup that AMD has been pushing since they discontinued Athlon and Phenom chips. Its only a 15% performance increase but its an increase in the right direction. For now though, OEMs get to play and fiddle with the new chips while drivers, BIOSes and software gets sorted out. Hit the jump to find out more.

Linky

[Wesley]

AMD's Pildedriver on schedule for a Q3 2012 launch

Launching in Q3 2012 this year, AMD's four-module, eight-core FX-8350 promises higher clock speeds and more performance at the same 125w TDP. Currently the preceding FX-8150 maxes out at a clock speed of 3.6Ghz with a Turbo speed of 4.2Ghz for single or lightly-threaded applications. That chip retails somewhere in the region of R2600 and is still outclassed by the cheaper and faster Core i5-3450. While Bulldozer may not be the bargain chip we had hoped at launch, Piledriver may improve things a little bit. But what I'm more looking forward to is the family launch after this one - Steamroller.

Linky