CES 2012: AMD Demos 17W Trinity Notebook APU

AMD doesn’t have a booth of its own at this year’s CES fair, but the chip maker did hold a few press-only demos at the show, one of which showcasing a next-generation Trinity notebook APU with a TDP of only 17W.

Destined to be used in ultra-thin notebooks, AMD’s take on Intel’s Ultrabook concept, the chip was running Dirt 3 live in DirectX 11, and converting videos using Arcsoft’s MediaConverter at the same time.

The demo was run on two different monitors and, in order to better balance loads, the conversion application had GPU acceleration turned off, making it run only on Trinity’s CPU cores, as Hot Hardware has revealed.

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 instructions 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 APUs are expected to make their debut in Q2 of 2012, on the desktop side frequencies topping at 3.8GHz.