14 DAY TRIAL // AMD hasn’t settled with just showcasing the capabilities of the next-gen Trinity APUs at this year’s CES fair, but also brought with it three CPU samples, using different packaging options, destined to be used in ultra-thin laptops, notebooks, and desktops.
Going from left to right, the first of the three APUs is the 17W ultra-low power Trinity APU that AMD has demoed running Dirt 3 at the beginning of this week.
As Tech Power Up reports, the chip uses a compact FP2 BGA (ball-grid array) package and is AMD’s alternative to the Intel’s ULV processors found inside Ultrabooks .
In the middle of the picture stands a Trinity APU featuring FS1r2 uPGA packaging, designed for mainstream notebooks with slightly relaxed space and board footprint constraints, while the third CPU is an FM2 chip for desktop computers.
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 leaked in the second half of 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.
