14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has recently unveiled some new information about the company’s upcoming ultra-low voltage APUs, based on the Trinity architecture, which were specially designed to be used in ultra-thin laptops.
This is the first time the Sunnyvale-based chip maker will introduce ULV accelerated processing units based on a high-performance architecture.
As some of you may know from the company’s CES presentation, these ULV Trinity APUs will have a TDP of just 17 Watts, but according to the company they will deliver all the performance of last year's 35W Llano parts.
Furthermore the 17W chips will also include some new technologies that weren’t available in the Llano architecture, such as the AVX and AES-NI instruction sets.
Sadly, details regarding the specifications of these APUs are scarce right now, but an AMD slide published by Tom's hardware confirmed that they would pack two Piledriver modules for a total of four processing cores.
The only other bits and pieces of info we have about these low-voltage chips also come from AMD, which at the beginning of February released a series of performance projections for its upcoming chips.
According to these projections that focused on the speed of the APU’s built in graphics core, an A6-Series Trinity APU with a 17 Watt TDP scored 2355 points in the 3DMark Vantage benchmark.
AMD’s slides released at that time said that their APU was twice as fast as a Sandy Bridge Core i5 2537M CPU (1158 3D Marks), which is one of the most popular processors to be used in today’s Ultrabooks.
Furthermore, even after taking into account the assumed 30% graphics improvement brought by Ivy Bridge, the A6 ULV accelerated processing unit is still expected to come out 56% faster.
AMD’s first APUs based on the Trinity architecture are rumored to launch in June or July this year, but we don’t know if this initial chip batch will also include the company’s 17 Watt CPU models.
