AMD Demos Functional 2012 Trinity APU

Just a couple of weeks ago, at the Computex 2011 fair, AMD showed to the world its first APU designed using Bulldozer computing cores, code named Trinity, and now the Sunnyvale company made the next logical step and presented a notebook design that is based upon this yet-unreleased architecture.

The laptop was demonstrated during the AMD Developer Fusion Summit 2011 by Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of the company's products group.

No computing intensive applications or benchmarks run on the presentation notebook, but this was setup to loop an HD video, so we are talking about a functional Trinity APU.

As far as its performance goes, AMD expects Trinity to be 50% more powerful that the Llano chips that were launched just yesterday.

Much of its power will come from the inclusion of Bulldozer x86 CPU cores, which will be paired together with an updated DX11 GPU architecture.

The Bulldozer cores used in Trinity will go by the code name of Piledriver and, much like the current Llano processors, will lack any sort of Level 3 cache memory as AMD wanted to increase the die area available to the on-board GPU.

According to AMD, Piledriver based APUs will be divided into three main versions for specific price-points and markets.

Trinity will be the most powerful of these and will cover the performance segment of the APU line, which is now occupied by Llano A8 parts.

Right under Trinity will come Weatherford, which covers the upper-mainstream segment and replaces the Llano based A6-series, while the least powerful of the new Piledriver APUs will be called Richland.

This will target the lower-mainstream market segment and is meant to replace the current dual-core A4-series APUs.

AMD's Trinity accelerated processing units are scheduled to be launched in 2012, should include more than 2 billion transistors and use the same 32nm manufacturing process as the current A-Series APUs. (via Legit Reviews)