AMD Trinity A-Series APUs Almost Here, First Reviews Unleashed

Over the past months, the rumor mill has been droning on about when Advanced Micro Devices will release its Trinity-based A-Series accelerated processing unit. October 1 and, more recently, October 2, 2012, were the ETAs.

The speculations may still prove true, but it's more likely by the day that AMD will release its new products sooner.

In fact, though shipments may take a few more days to start, and AMD has yet to make the press release, the company is allowing the stream of official data to flow, showing once and for all just what it meant by saying that the Trinity launch was officially on schedule.

At least the other information previously leaked to the press is holding up. The specifications we have provided have been confirmed, and the prices are closer to the first report, not the second.

For those who want specifics, the prices range from the $70 / 55-70 Euro (dual-core A4-5000) to $140 / 109-140 Euro (quad-core A10-5000).

We suppose we could go ahead and list the specs like we did before, but we are sure you readers will be more interested in how the chips compare to systems equipped with add-in video boards.

Reviewers seem to be mostly in agreement here. Trinity is much faster than Intel's HD 2500/4000 (the IGPs of Sandy/Ivy Bridge), fast enough to play any contemporary 3D game at Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels), even at the highest quality settings in some cases.

That means the integrated graphics processors are better than add-in video cards priced at $60-$70 / 60-70 Euro (Radeon HD 6570 and GeForce GT 630).

Coupled with the high CPU performance, which doesn't match Intel's high-end offerings but does outdo the units in the same price range mentioned above, this means that many low end and mainstream video boards will reach the end of their lives right after Trinity starts shipping.

Only the cards equipped with GDDR5, rather than DDR3, will continue to offer more than the AMD A-Series IGPs. Quite an achievement considering that Llano, though warmly received by notebook makers, saw very little adoption on the desktop front.

Keep in mind that these are all graphics benchmarks though. We'll be back with comparisons between the x86 core performance of A-Series APUs and Intel CPUs soon enough.