14 DAY TRIAL // We've covered the official launch of the five Trinity accelerated processing units (APUs) from Advanced Micro Devices, but that doesn't really tell us everything we need to know.
It ultimately falls to reviewers to figure out if a new product is all it's cracked up to be and if it is in any way better than the competition.
Needless to say, AMD's 32nm-based Trinity chips are no different, especially after all the praise the company brought to the graphics prowess.
After checking with some of the reviews posted online, we've reached the conclusion that the results leave some room for disappointment after all.
Not to say that the graphics performance was low, because it wasn't. Overall, compared to the HD 4000 graphics in Intel's Ivy Bridge CPUs, the 2.3GHz quad-core A10-4600M was 30 to 50 percent better (HotHardware).
The area where the AMD chip lost was that of x86 performance, where both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge mobile chips are better. Hexus' review placed the APU 40% behind the Dell XPS 15z, which was launched last year, so things could have gone better there.
Then again, Advanced Micro Devices never promised to best Intel's CPU performance. It mostly lauded gaming capabilities instead, where the integrated GPU matters more.
AnandTech's graph in that picture up there shows that the Radeon HD 7660G (built into the A10-4600M) was overall better across 15 titles. Unfortunately, while it led in some titles, by massive margins even (Civilizations V, StarCraft 2 and Shogun 2 Total War most of all), it actually lost to HD 4000 in others (Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City especially).
We're surprised the GPU lost to Intel's at all to be honest. It goes to show that the latter has really been pushing its graphics development. The one extenuating circumstance in all this is that AMD's DirectX 11 drivers aren't at the point they could be, so the underwhelming showings can be blamed on them somewhat. Hopefully, the software will come around quickly.
Now we're off to see if every other tester felt as ambivalent.
