14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has recently announced that is preparing a special version of the Trinity APU, the company's next-generation processor based on the Fusion concept, that will be optimized to fit inside a 17.5W TDP.
The announcement was made by AMD's Interim Chief Executive Officer, Thomas Seifert, during the company's latest conference call with financial analysts.
“We plan to introduce a version of Trinity that will consume less than 50% the power of today's lowest power, 35W Llano APU, bringing performance computing to the ultra-thin notebooks,” said Mr. Seifert.
Trinity is the code name used for AMD's next-generation accelerated processing units based on the Bulldozer architecture, which are expected to arrive in 2012.
Information about these chips is scarce at this moment, but AMD previously stated that Trinity would be 50% more powerful than the company's current APUs based on the Llano architecture.
Much of its power will come from the inclusion of the Bulldozer x86 CPU cores, which will be paired with an updated DX11 GPU that is based on a VLIW4 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.
All of AMD's Trinity chips will be manufactured using Globalfoundries' 32nm production node and are expected to include more than 2 billion transistors, according to some early estimates. (via Xbit Labs)