14 DAY TRIAL // AMD’s upcoming A10 and A8 Trinity APUs have just been spotted in the specifications sheet of a recently announced Arctic HTPC system dubbed the MC101, that is said to become available right after the chip maker will launch these next-gen processors.
Arctic’s HTPC solution will be available in three different versions. Two of them come as completely configured systems, while the third is a barebone desktop that requires users to add their own memory and storage drives.
Despite this difference, all three of the MC101 home theater PCs are powered by AMD Trinity APUs running on a A70M-powered motherboard.
According to the associated slide, the AMD Trinity A8 accelerated processing unit installed comes with a Radeon HD 7640G integrated graphics core, while the Trinity A10 chip will include a Radeon HD 7660G GPU.
Judging by the designation used by AMD, both of these on-board “video cards” should be faster than the integrated graphics cores found in today’s Llano APUs, which top out with the Radeon HD 6x00G series.
AMD's next-generation APU combines either two or four processing cores based on the Bulldozer architecture, with a VLIW4 GPU derived from the Cayman graphics used inside the Radeon HD 6900 series.
The computing cores will go by the name of Piledriver and, much like the current Llano APUs, lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory, as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU.
According to an AMD document leaked in the second half of last year, in terms of computing power, Trinity is expected to be about 20% more powerful than the current Llano APUs.
In addition, the chip will also bring support for a series of new instructions sets introduced with the Bulldozer architecture, such as AVX and AES-NI, as well as support for DDR3-2133 memory.
On the graphics side, the new Radeon HD graphics core is expected to deliver 30% better performance than Llano, while also coming with a new Video Compression Engine and support for AMD's EyeFinity technology.
According to Arctic, the MC101 will be released when AMD decides to launch its Trinity-based APUs, which VR-Zone reports it could happen during CeBIT 2012, or Computex Taipei 2012.
