Feature Articles

AMD Trinity APU - A Notebook Platform Performance Review

By Vijay Anand, Leo Boon Yeow & James Lu - 15 May 2012

Performance Benchmarking: Powermark and Power Consumption

Performance and Benchmarking

Battery life has thus far been the bane of AMD's notebooks as they've been trying hard to match Intel's fairly impressive notebook up-time figures. From our testing with Llano and now the Trinity APU, we think that AMD has made sufficient efforts to be able to compete well with the competition. However, because both the AMD notebook systems in our hands are reference platforms, it doesn't quite paint an accurate picture, nor do we have appropriate comparisons at this point of time. We'll have to make-do with the results we've now, but it won't be long before we get actual retail notebooks to paint you an accurate representation of Trinity's battery performance.

Perhaps the most interesting battery life comparison is when we get AMD's 17W TDP Trinity processor based Ultrathin notebooks to compare against Intel's Ultrabooks. This is perhaps the most important battleground that AMD has to compete against Intel, but we guess we'll have to save that showdown for another day.  For now, we'll have to compare against a mixed variety of notebooks that we have at hand.

 

PowerMark

To test the battery life of each platform, we used a new Powermark benchmark to determine just how the Trinity platform stacks up against Intel's top-tier Ivy Bridge processor. We ran the test in "balanced" mode, which basically ran a series of programs ranging from internet browsing, multimedia encoding, movie playback and more which simulate typical notebook usage. Here, you can see that the AMD platforms have more staying power, but however do bear in mind that the dv6 has a much better screen, more powerful speakers and most importantly a far more powerful processor.

We're not exactly content with this outcome because AMD claimed that the Trinity APU system is able to provide an hour more battery life than the previous generation. In our practical testing, that was totally proven incorrect from their own reference platforms.

We're still gathering results from this rather new benchmark, but the balanced mode that we use to run the test seems to produce results that are very similar to our usual video looping test. As such, you might want to also refer to the results on the Acer Timeline Ultra M3 machine's review where we compared a wider variety of Intel notebook systems - from Ultrabooks to multimedia machines.

The results so far seem to indicate that the AMD Trinity and Llano platforms are managing pretty decently (despite the disappointment noted earlier) and can compete on battery life aspects, though not setting new records. One interesting note to consider here is that AMD graphics engine's various video enhancement technologies like utilizing the UVD 3.0 and Video Codec Engine (VCE), to supporting features like AMD Steady Video technology and more do come into play during these tests where applicable. This means that some extra processing does take place unless otherwise these features are disabled in the drivers. Perhaps by doing so, the AMD platforms can pull in even better battery life and compete better against Intel platforms that don't perform these extra processing tasks and are software dependent. We'll also be taking a closer look at these aspects in a dedicated article.

 

Power Consumption

As highlighted above, the HP dv6 is running a much more powerful platform and hardware specs that consume more power and the outcome below is not surprising. However, if you were to compare with the Acer M3 Ultrabook running a GeForce GT 640M GPU and more comparable specs overall, you can see that the AMD platforms are almost evenly matched with it and that's a great sign. We'll find out if it these nice numbers reproduce themselves when we tackle actual retail notebooks featuring AMD's Trinity APUs.

 

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