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Trinity is AMD’s processor for tablets
AMD is clearly a few steps behind Intel, but the company is constantly working on improving its products. The latest series of processors, called Trinity, was showcased at Computex, and it’s the chip meant for ultra-slim portables, including tablets.
The working prototype was using a tablet made by Compal, and featured a docking keyboard (like pretty much any Windows 8 tablet announced this week), but it was one big and roomy keyboard, something I’ve always appreciated, since 10 inch keyboards tend to be too small for my taste, and fingers. AMD managed this achievement by using an 11.6 inch form factor tablet with 1366 x 768 px resolution screen, a form factor which looks very popular with Windows 8. A nice kickstand is provided to allow for a comfortable typing angle (when not docked), something we haven’t seen on the competition.
No benchmarks were run on Compal’s prototype tablet, but those who managed to play with it said things looked pretty smooth. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this thing fares in more demanding tasks, not just swiping tiles left and right. AMD said when docked the Trinity A6 CPU will operate at a higher frequency, an interesting approach if you ask me. We’ll just have to wait a few more months and see if it measures up to Intel’s own chips.
Acer was also displaying an AMD Trinity tablet, a very similar design with last year’s Acer Iconia TAB W500, which also used an AMD based CPU. So we know AMD has some support when it comes to these mobile chips.
John (Ionut Popa in Romanian) is the Editor in Chief at AllTouchTablet.com. He studied Computer Science and worked in IT press since 2002. He’s now involved in his own projects. My Google+ Profile, Twitter
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Performance and TDP scaling is something both Intel and AMD are doing. While docking to enable is just one way of practically applying this feature.
Trinity isn’t really meant as a Tablet solution, any more than Intel’s Core i-Series is suppose to be. It’s just AMD’s evolutionary update to their Llano series and fills their mid range offerings.
So this better fits the description of a PC Tablet like Samsung Series 7 or Asus Eee Pad Slate, but with a keyboard dock that officially makes it a hybrid.
Both Intel and AMD are actually producing low power consuming solutions that will specifically attempt to start competing with ARM tablets. It’s just for now that AMD is a little behind with their solution and Intel is delving deeper into the mobile market than AMD is likely to try any time soon.
Right now AMD has the Desna Z-01, which is basically a optimized version of the C-50 AMD Fusion chip but max TDP only was lowered to 5.9W from the normal 9W for the C-50.
Next up will be Hondo, which will try to get the max TDP down to 4.5W for a more competitive solution but Intel will be coming out with the even more power efficient Clover Trail in time for Windows 8 release.
Then there’s next year when Intel will update their ATOM series to 22nm, presumably putting the whole lineup into SoC and finally updating the architecture. While AMD will be coming out with their 28nm updates and Tamesh will be the next one up for the tablet space, along with being their first SoC, and may finally get the max TDP down to be competitive with both ARM and Intel solutions.
I’m impressed with how much of a power diet AMD has gone on they are on equal footing with Intels i5 mobile processors. Trading blows when it comes to productivity vs graphics performance.
ARMs power consumption remains it’s selling point but it’s performance isn’t competitive with the high powered processors.
Intel has pushed it’s ATOM line into the phone space I have no information on this move.
AMD makes for an interesting high end tablet/budget gaming notebook processor and is power conscious.
Intel makes a great productivity notebook or high end notebook when paired with appropriate graphics card from AMD or Nvidia.
ARM still seems to be the only choice that makes sense for phone and small tablets.
“Intel has pushed it’s ATOM line into the phone space I have no information on this move.”
Anandtech has a good article…
anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones
Basically they started with Moorestown to establish proof of concept and with Medfield they’ve reached the point that it’s good enough to actually be sold as a viable Smart Phone product.
You’re right that ARM still holds dominance in both phones and small tablets but it’s the next year’s updates that should determine whether Intel can be considered a serious contender in the mobile space… You can look up Merrifield and Silvermont for more details…
How software develops for either platform will be the other important factor as most people don’t really care what’s running the device as long as it does what they want and software is a big part of effecting the ability of the hardware to provide those functions.
This is even true for AMD… considering their main advantage is superior graphical performance but there’s still a lack of applications that take full advantage of that kind of performance instead of traditional CPU performance.
Even video editing is still mostly a CPU affair for most editors and even those applications that now take advantage of features like hardware acceleration only do so for certain functions, but the rest of the application still only works with the CPU.
Both Nvidia and AMD have been trying to change this for years but maybe it’s finally going to pay off but we may still be another year or two before it’s really noticeable.
Regardless, AMD Trinity may not be a game changer but it is a step in the right direction for AMD. While hopefully they can do better next year, especially since Intel’s Haswell update stands to be a much better improvement than Ivy Bridge was over Sandy Bridge.