AMD announces Trinity, talks Llano, launches Z series at Computex

[nsane.forums]

In a surprise announcement at Computex in Taiwan, AMD unveiled its plans to produce a Bulldozer-based APU, codenamed Trinity. The company also launched its Z series chips, aimed at Windows tablets, and announced the official branding for its Llano APUs. ("APU" is AMD-speak for a processor that combines CPU and GPU cores on a single die.)

Not much was revealed about the 32nm Trinity chip apart from the codename, the fact that it combines Bulldozer cores with a GPU, and the fact that the GPU supports DX11. There has been some speculation that the "Trinity" name is somehow significant, but this seems doubtful. Of course, a single-core version of the new chip would combine a large floating-point unit, a pair of integer units, and a GPU on a single die—that's three main number-crunching blocks—but the same could realistically be said of all of AMD's APUs, so it's unlikely that the name is connected to the chip's design.

Given the strength of the floating-point block in Bulldozer and AMD's prowess at GPU design, it's a fairly safe bet that Trinity will be a gaming and media beast. Whether it beats what Intel will have out at the time is another story, though.

Z series takes aim at "tablets"

AMD also formally launched its Z series of APUs, which the company claims is aimed at "tablets." We put "tablets" in quotes, because the Bobcat-based Z series parts will have a 6W TDP, which is much higher than Intel's Moorestown (which is in the 1W range, depending on what you're doing), and certainly not even close to being in the same league as the sub-1W ARM competition. So with all of that performance and the high power draw, the Z series is good for one thing and one thing only: running a full Windows install on a portable. This much hardware and power would be overkill for Android or any kind of real tablet OS. So ultimately, the Z series only works as a "tablet" chip if you believe that Windows 7 is a "tablet" OS.

Regardless of whether Windows 7 is a real tablet OS or not (it isn't), AMD is definitely going straight after any Windows tablet market that manages to develop. Note that Intel barely even mentioned Windows as a tablet OS at their recent event, so AMD will have whatever market that develops all to itself.

We're not optimistic about Windows' near-term tablet prospects, and it doesn't look like Intel is, either, but there could be enough of a market there to for a small player like AMD to pursue. This is especially true if AMD keeps its positioning as a low-cost alternative and manages to really bring the performance. And given the strength of their GPUs and the dependence of tablet interfaces on GPU processing, it's not unreasonable to expect that they'll be able to deliver a very solid performer for Windows tablets.

Realistically, though, the Z series is really much more interesting as a notebook or netbook part than as a tablet part. AMD doesn't yet have a real tablet chip, and won't have one until at least the launch of the 28nm, Bobcast-based Krishna, which is sub-1W. (Krishna was the other religiously-themed codename that AMD unveiled today, but the company didn't give much in the way of detail.)

Llano on deck

While Trinity is a ways out, and the Z series is here today, the Llano launch is what's immediately on deck for AMD in the next quarter. This 32nm chip pairs an older, weaker, K10-based core with an up-to-date GPU, so it will rise or fall based on GPU performance.

AMD announced the official VISION branding for Llano today, dubbing it the A series of APUs. The three tiers in the Llano family are A4, A6, and A8, which means that the recently leaked slides showing these codenames were legit. As was shown in the leaked presentation, AMD will be aiming Llano squarely at Intel's current Sandy Bridge lineup.

Again, the Sandy Bridge CPU core will probably spank Llano's CPU core, but the Llano's GPU will in turn crush Sandy Bridge's GPU. So which part you'll prefer will depend on your budget and intended usage. Gamers could well end up shifting to Llano, especially for budget builds. The only party that's certain to lose in all this is NVIDIA, because Llano will compete directly with some of the company's lower end discrete parts.

View: Original Article