AMD demonstrates Trinity apu in laptop

AMD gave a preview of Trinity, the successor to the Llano processors that the company introduced last year, at its booth at the Consumer Electronics Show. In a demonstration, the emphasis was mainly on the graphics performance.

With a Trinity laptop, AMD showed what the company’s new apu has to offer. Although no hard performance figures have been given yet, a spokesperson underlined that the CPU in Trinity performs about 25 percent better than Llano, while the GPU should even deliver up to 50 percent better performance.

Like the Llano APUs, the Trinity APUs are produced at 32nm, but the new APU features a number of improvements. The CPU cores in Trinity are based on the Piledriver architecture, the successor to Bulldozer, and the APU got a TDP of only 17W. The GPU in Trinity is based on the 7000 series GPUs.

For the demonstration, a notebook APU had to drive three screens simultaneously. Dirt 3 was played in DirectX 11 mode on one screen, video was converted on a second screen, and a video was played on the laptop screen. The laptop apparently had little trouble with this heavy load, with which AMD seems to be on the right track with Trinity. More details will no doubt emerge before the introduction, which is expected in the middle of this year.