Feature Articles

AMD Trinity APU - A Notebook Platform Performance Review

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

Testing the Reference Mobile AMD Trinity Platform

Testing the Reference Mobile AMD Trinity Platform

The new generation Trinity APUs will first populate the notebook segment this quarter, followed by the desktop variants which will likely be introduced sometime next quarter in Q3 2012. Using the mobile Trinity APUs, AMD hopes to spearhead the Ultrathin notebook market - a marketing term to compete against Intel's Ultrabook proposition. While this article is focused on the AMD Trinity APU's performance in the notebook platform, unfortunately what we've got is an AMD reference notebook platform based on the highest performing mobile APU launched today, the AMD A10-4600M. This is 35W TDP rated processor, which is very unlikely to make the grade for an Ultrathin notebook. We're fairly certain that only the low voltage and ultra low voltage variant based A10-4655M (25W) and A6-4455M (17W) would make the grade for these sleek class of notebooks.

Nevertheless, we figure that the high performance reference notebook platform would still be interesting to see if it can compete against Intel Ivy Bridge processor based multimedia notebooks and that's exactly what we're going to compare in this article. Not to forget, we're sure you'll be interested to know how much better the top mobile Trinity APU is ahead of the (almost non-existent) top mobile AMD Llano processor from last year that it supersedes - we've got that compared too. So read on as we pack these interesting comparisons over the next few pages.

It may not look like much but inside this notebook, lies a powerful top-of-the-line AMD A10-4600M APU which is integrated with a rather capable Radeon HD7660G mobile graphics engine - all within the main processor die.With a powerful AMD APU on board, this reference notebook should be capable of running modern games at acceptable framerates at low settings. We'll show you how capable it is over the next few pages. 

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