News AMD unveils its Trinity A10, A8, A6 and A4 desktop chips

Love that, such a wonderful way with words the Finns!

Yes I suppose not, essentially I want my HTPC system to be efficient, quiet and tidy, less components help me achieve this, the lower TDP (RIP baby panda) is a part of this but I should have stated my main goal more clearly!

 

Who really cares for onboard graphics, if playing games Is your primary concern any old amd intel quad will do the job paired with a modern graphics card. AMD I'd imagin are beating intel in onboard Gpu stakes but loosing in x86 performance.

And why are they pushing clock speeds again, thought we had finished the ghz race.

If all you care for is games you can build a gaming rig that will play all modern games for less than £500 as long as your willing to buy second hand. 580 is avaiable for about £130 on eBay / this forum the amd black x4 CPUs are not expensive some cheap mobo and you in business.

If you actually need pure performance, intel is likely still dominating.

 

For the latest htpc I made I used an atom chip paired with a 520nvidia card plays all blue rays at 1080 which is max Rez or televisions. ( cost peanuts £150 give or take) and its silent to boot.

 

What are you smoking and can I have some?

kthxbye

Edit: To be honest that goes for a couple of others here today. If you're looking at this chip as anything other than an APU then you've got it all very, very wrong. It's not a gaming CPU, it's not a productivity CPU and it's not a dedicated GPU. It's one chip to perform all tasks 'adequately' that costs relatively very little. If you can't fathom that concept then you can have a little pat on the head, have "run along now you little scamp" said to you and go off and play in your sandpit.

 

Tf2, minecraft, alien swarm along with coding and home purpose into a 4L case ....no need of a 580 or a 500w rig.

an i7 with hd4000 can't even play minecraft @1080 with decent fps

edit : with other word, try to fit an intel rig that can do home and devel purpose, while being able to play wow @ 1080 with good setting into a streacom f1c ..... good luck

 

The A10-5700 looks like a winner to me 65w is very reasonable.

Am i the only person who thinks its pretty dam good that you can get playable frame rates @ 1920×1080 with an all in one solution that draws 65watts?

I'm just thinking of the brand new Dell Core i3's based systems at work that Ive had to fit dedicated GPU's' to as they have failed to perform in Photoshop and Video editing tasks.

Sure your not going to compete with an i5 for specific tasks but then again it is very situational.

Looking forward to some more benchmarks and pricing to come out.

 

I'll copy/paste the conclusion I posted.

"AMD can't survive as a going concern if all they sell is HTPC processors. They need to compete in the desktop space as well, which means they need to overhaul their architecture (again) and not try building off the failure that was Bulldozer."


So, AMD aren't selling a gaming CPU, or a productivity CPU, or a dedicated GPU. What exactly are they selling, apart from a HTPC APU? Okay, so maybe we agree this is basically a HTPC APU, but then that means AMD have precisely nothing to offer anybody who wants a CPU for any other higher performance task.

Can AMD really survive with such a narrow set of target customers? Compare Intel and AMD's finances and you might see the beginning of the answer.

I want to see thorough reviews of this, but in my opinion, AMD need to take the fight to Intel on actual CPU terms, not just relying on a superior in-built GPU to compensate for what is effectively a poor architecture that needs to be clocked to 4Ghz+ to compete with Intel's offerings down at 3-3.4Ghz. A lot depends on exactly which i5 CPU AMD are pitching themselves against as well.

 

About the productivity APU, the trinity A300 and A320 (with built-in FirePro) are intended for November. Maybe not aimed at rendering, but more than enough for modeling non-animated stuff.

And again, regarding to the benches I saw about the A10 ... it's a more than capable chip for development (including OGL). I'd like to have something like that when I what a student in 3D development.

 

No. I find it quite astounding what this chip can do in gaming.

They're selling a laptop chip as a desktop chip. The clue is in it being on sale for months already. In laptops.

No

It's an all-in-one solution in it's 2nd incarnation.

The growth in the market is for things at Trinity's price point and below. Then you are into the realm of Bobcat. Both Llano and Bobcat have sold tens of millions

With Trinity and Bobcat they targeted almost everyone.

In a sense there's alot of truth in that, in another sense that's a total straw man attack. The poor dirty man has no talents, the well dressed rich man has lots and lots?

Maybe not.

The proof in this pudding is that Intel is moving away from 'good enough' graphics too. Integrated GPUs from BOTH companies are on a steep upwards curve. The iGPUs in both Haswell and Kaverei look set to make the current generation look silly. Both companies are integrating the CPU, GPU and connecting logic blocks into an ever more coherent whole.

In effect BOTH Intel and AMD offer APUs of all shapes and sizes. What you as the consumer have is a straightforward 50/50 choice. Do you want a 'media' laptop? A gaming HTPC? or do you want a 'productivity' laptop? a non-gaming HTPC?

When you blur the lines and start talking about adding discreet GPUs then you really are not in the market for an APU.

Yes and yes.

Also Intel should offer HD4000 graphics on more than just a handful of pricey models. There's a good reason Trinity is tested against 3770Ks, because so few other Ivy Bridge models (If any??) have the top-end iGPUs in them.

Also Intel should put more than bare minimum effort into it's driver software. A few profiles for a few big-name titles of the day, everything else crashes, glitches or runs awfully.

 

EDIT: Never mind

 

Why should it anyway ? It's priced to compete with Intel i3 chips. It sacrifices some single-threaded performance for better GPU (which also works as OpenCL accelerator). Those who don't need GPU performance can go the Intel route, others can go with AMD.

 

Yep, I'm not arguing that. I'm just spelling it out to the 'My i5 wipes the floor with that' crowd that it's not trying to compete.

It's marketed entirely different and I think it's going to fill the gap in the market nicely.

 

Aside from when playing Shogun II, I can't tell the difference between my new 3570k and my old X3 720, for what it's worth. The total war games are pretty rare in their high CPU performance requirements, I guess because they're PC exclusives. I never felt restricted by my old AMD chip playing anything else.

 

Just to derail the thread a little, I see Shogun runs like arse on AMD cards, you must have played with the settings a bit, are there some graphics options that really kill the framerate or is it just generally very tough?? Thx

 

A pretty interesting comparison of an A10-5800K side by side with an i3-3220. It is both about gaming and productivity

 

Well the AMD would probably be cheaper, in which case I go for that one.

100tdp isnt hard to dissipate.

No, not every man and his dog have a discrete GPU. I picked up an APU toshiba laptop for my girlfriend. She mostly plays a lot of indie titles so she didn't need a powerful gpu, but at least a usable one. It's be great so far and it's impressive to watch Bad Company 2 run on integrated graphics.

 

nice 1 AMD!! I don't think a few extra watts power use by a overclocked gamers pc is really going to bother any enthusiast.

 

I'll just say my small bit here. Don't make this in to a Intel vs AMD thing again. It is an APU and as stated by a couple of people is cheap and should do a lot of things with ok speeds. Now the general public does not give a rashers about high powered gaming etc. They just want a PC that will do their surfing, video etc. Here is where the cost comes in. The high-end market is not really where things are anymore. The only thing that keeps Intel releasing these very high end processors is the fact it looks good in the press. Then again they have a few dollars in the marketing budged.

 

Good god, people. If you want to know, go check Tom's or Anand. If not, it's like this - the graphics in Trinity crush HD4000 in a decent number of cases, and never fall behind. At the low end, we're talking 10-15%. At the upper end, 40% or better.

They're using higher clocks to mitigate their lower IPC - Piledriver is a bit better than Bulldozer, but that only puts them roughly on par with the Stars cores of Phenom (remember that Llano used Stars cores, while Trinity is using Piledriver cores.) That's a bit of speculation on my part until the rest of AMD's NDA is lifted.

Keep in mind that a lot of us are going to be seeing this from a skewed perspective - this here is a crowd that in a lot of cases, will drop several thousand dollars building machines with top-end everything - highest-end i7 proc (or even the workstation-aimed Xeon), highest discrete GPU (sometimes more than one), SSDs in RAID-0 arrays, etc. AMD has already said they're not aiming at that market anymore.

Maybe that's smart, though - are you going to make more money selling one system to one neckbeard that wants ZOMG fast gfx, or half a dozen systems to your mom, your uncle, etc, for $300 per?

So here there's only arguments over if this will make a decent HTPC. 99% of the rest of the world couldn't tell you what an HTPC even is. But they did just pick up a shiny Dell all-in-one that's got something decent under the hood that wasn't heinously expensive.

For me, I'm taking a long, hard look at these to replace my wife's Athlon 64 X2 - the lower-end quad-core would be about right. But I really, really want to make it ITX, and last I looked, FM1 ITX boards were nearly non-existent. I hope FM2 is different.

 

I'm a gamer and as well as my i7 Intel with GTX 670, I have a A8 3870K which is used solely to play TF2 @ 1680x1050 which it does very well and was very cheap. So well i'll be getting one of these for a HTPC so I can game on my 1080 TV a bit. For hi performance gaming with additional graphics these are tosh granted but as a cheap, low (lower than intel and decent gfx) power light gaming or HTPC or a PC for the general public these chips look to be awesome.