14 DAY TRIAL // More than a week after CeBIT 2012 closed its gates, a video from AMD’s booth at this show made its appearance online, starring the company’s upcoming Trinity APUs, in both its mobile and desktop versions, running DiRT 3.
The video, which was shot by Tom’s Hardware, is split into two parts, the first showcasing a 35W Trinity mobile APU, while the latter shows an Eyefinity setup running on a desktop Trinity chip.
The resolution of the first platform is set at 1366x768 with 4xAA and quality set to “High Details.” For the 3-monitor setup the resolution was increased to 5040x1050 pixels, but AA was off this time.
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 that was leaked 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 instruction 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.
The first Trinity processors are expected to make their debut in late Q2 2012, on the desktop side frequencies topping at 3.8GHz.
