SAN JOSE -- Advanced Micro Devices officially launched its32-nm Trinity processors, going head-to-head in notebooks and desktops withIntel's 22-nm Ivy Bridge CPUs. The AMD parts sport upgraded x86 and graphicscores that keep it competitive in performance with some parts consuming aslittle as 17W, geared for ultrathin notebooks.
AMD claims it has already shipped more than a millionTrinity chips to PC makers, overcoming difficulties it had delivering lastgeneration chips. "AMD has put yield issues with GlobalFoundries way behindthem from everything I have heard," said Nathan Brookwood, principal of marketwatcher Insight65 (Saratoga, Calif).
"Six months ago, I would have been shocked if someone said[Intel and AMD] would be ramping [their latest CPUs] in parallel, but that'swhat we are seeing," Brookwood said.
Thin and light notebooks are one of the sweet spots in thematuring PC market for both companies.
Intel defined the Ultrabook, a variant of the Apple MacBookAir, as its target, defining a detailed specification and supporting it with a$300 million venture capital fund. AMD aims to enable similar kinds of systemswithout requiring adherence to a detailed spec, aiming to enable lower pricepoints.
Trinity parts bring advantages both in higher performanceand lower power consumption that will keep AMD competitive in the latest round."AMD can now claim battery life and thermal characteristics at least comparableto Intel, but they have a huge challenge to educate sellers and users that theyhave turned [past power consumption issues] around," said Brookwood.
Specifically, the 246-mm-sq Trinity packs 1.303 billiontransistors. That compares to 1.178 transistors in 228-mm-sq for AMD's previousLlano CPU.
Trinity includes two or four new Piledriver x86 cores and anew Radeon 6000 series graphics core aka Northern Islands. They give the partperformance boosts of 50% in graphics and 25% in x86 performance over theprevious Llano chip, AMD claims.
"With the exception of a few structures everything is new inTrinity," said John Taylor, global product marketing manager at AMD.
The Piledriver core is a follow on to the Bulldozer corewhich itself was an advance over the 45-nm Stars core used in the previousLlano client CPU. Llano sports improved branch prediction and scheduling forboth its two integer units and a shared floating point block. The core runs at2 to 3.8 GHz with less power leakage than Bulldozer.
The new Radeon 6000 series graphics core runs at 424 to 800MHz to deliver 736 Gflops and P1361 on the 3DMark 11 benchmark, AMD reported.
The Radeon 6000 series GPU core takes up about half the die(right side) of the AMD Trinity CPU.
To Trinity and beyondTrinity is AMD's first chip to use a unified memorycontroller for both graphics and x86 cores. It sports a new acceleration blockfor video encoding, and it is AMD's first chip to use PCI Express rather thanHyperTransport for I/O connections.
The next step on AMD's road map, starting in 2013, is tointegrate the traditional south bridge I/O functions into future processors,making them full PC SoCs.
In terms of power, the Trinity family has members that spanthe range of 17, 35, 65, and 100W. Previous Brazos chips are still shipping andinclude members at 9 and 18W, but they use lower performance Bobcat x86 andRadeon 5000 series graphics cores.
To slip into ultrathin notebooks, AMD will offer in a BGApackage dual-core 17W Trinity chips. AMD claims at least 10 of its more than100 Trinity designs are for such ultrathin notebooks.
"The ambitious goals are the ultrathins could be 30 to 40% ofthe market this year," said Taylor. "We don't see it tracking to that, but we'dlike to see it take off because we have a strong proposition there," he said.
Later this year, AMD will roll out Hondo a sub-5W integratedx86 and graphics CPU based on Brazos. It is aimed at consumer and businessWindows 8 tablets and notebooks that can be converted into tablets.
Next year, AMD will roll out Temash, targeting about 3W. Thechip will include the I/O controller, further reducing system powerconsumption.
The low-end device as well as other Trinity follow-ons willface off with Haswell, Intel's first new micro-architecture optimized for its22-nm process and geared for lower power consumption.
This story was originally published on EETimes.
