Look Out Bulldozer, Here Comes Trinity: AMD's 2012 Demo on Video at IDF
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 14, 2011 7:57 PM ESTAMD's Bulldozer CPU is on the verge of being released. Sever markets will see the CPU soon, while desktop customers will have to wait until Q4 (which is only a month away at this point). No one likes to ship a delayed part, but if you do your job right the part that follows should arrive in a timely fashion. The follow-on to Bulldozer is called Piledriver and it will make its debut with AMD's Trinity APU in 2012.
Trinity is a higher end successor to Llano. It will integrate 2 - 4 Piledriver cores and feature some sort of a Radeon GPU on-die. Performance across the board will be higher than Llano. Piledriver should offer better performance per clock vs. Bulldozer, but Trinity won't be targeted at the same high-end market that AMD's FX series based on Bulldozer will address. Presumably we'll see a Piledriver based FX CPU at some point down the road. AMD indicated that Trinity was a few months away, implying an early 2012 launch.
To show the health of Trinity silicon, AMD showed it running Deus Ex in a suite a block away from IDF. The Trinity demo was done in a generic notebook chassis. We weren't allowed to benchmark the APU unfortunately. You can check out the demo in the video below:
If AMD can deliver Trinity in early 2012 and continue to execute beyond it, we may finally see the end of AMD's CPU woes. The company needs to put out a solid design and improve on it regularly. With Trinity following Bulldozer so closely, AMD may be doing just that.
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bupkus - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 - link
Sounds more like a wet dream.enterco - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
I assume that the intended text was 'server market' instead of 'sever market' on the first line.Pantsu - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Trinity looks like what Llano should have been. Hopefully Piledriver cores will match Intel cores, or at least come much closer than Llano did. Intel will also be upgrading their GPUs with Ivy Bridge, so there's a good amount of competition on both fronts. Personally though I'm not sure if I need a whole lot of GPU performance on my laptop, but then again I might not need all that much CPU either. It comes down to battery life and cost, and most of all AVAILABILITY. I'm afraid I've seen next to none Llano laptops here in Finland. I'm still waiting for that AMD version of 13" ultrabook that offer great GPU performance, great battery life and a decent price.fic2 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
"I'm still waiting for that AMD version of 13" ultrabook that offer great GPU performance, great battery life and a decent price. "The problem here in the U.S. is the "decent price" - at least as far as I am concerned. You can find i5 laptops for $500, but it seems the Llano laptops are around $650. At least as far as I have seen - not that I have been looking for Llano laptops that hard.
Iketh - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Why did you bother to make this post when you admit yourself you don't know what you're talking about?fic2 - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
I said - "not that I have been looking for Llano laptops that hard. " - that isn't the same as not knowing what I am talking about. It means I haven't been looking that much for a Llano laptop since it didn't take long to figure out that I can get a MUCH faster Intel i5 laptop for cheaper than a MUCH slower AMD Llano.Why did you make your useless post?
Gondalf - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Amd is too closed in it's announcements. Obviously it is not a new core, both Amd and Intel have not resources to develop two brand new cores in the same time frame, not a chance. Likely it will be a power optimized module good for laptops and consumer Pc's (not FX). I don't espect any gain in IPC but a lower power consumption, down to the 125W figure of FX line.I don't know what will be the advantage of a dual integer core cpu with only one fp unit......the lack of performance is pretty clear at the lower end of cpu line.
Anyway every Company makes its own destine :).
silverblue - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Yes they have. Intel is developing Haswell along with future Atom architectures and Itanium as far as I've heard. Intel, at least, certainly has the money to throw at developing whatever it likes, plus let's remember it has a graphics division looking well beyond Ivy Bridge.AMD is developing next-generation Bulldozer (Piledriver's successor) along with what would be Krishna's successor. It's worth pointing out that AMD's probably finished speccing out the 8000 series, just as NVIDIA will have with Kepler's successor.
Gondalf - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Ummm :), Haswell is over two years after Sandy Bridge, Ivy has not a new core it's only a shrink, the IPC will be the same (caches enhancements apart).Anyway Xbit labs is saying about little tweaks, likely Amd is lowering the L3 latency and increasing memory controller efficence.
The core (module) is fixed, the validation is too long for a new arc two quarters after BD shipment. A new arc needs 4/5 years and Amd does not possess two high performance cpu teams :).
About GPUs.....the job is more more easy. A Cpu is an hard work of fine tuning
in logic, layout, and process integration.
silverblue - Thursday, September 15, 2011 - link
Haswell may be more than two years after Sandy Bridge, but you can bet that Intel has at least partly designed its follow-up already.Piledriver's successor is due 2013. It will be a notable improvement on the Bulldozer line as you'd expect from AMD adopting an Intel-like tick-tock strategy.