As someone whose job is to drive awareness, I like to think that everyone keeps tabs on what HP's longtime technology partner AMD is doing. However, I’ll try not to assume too much here today and quickly summarize what we've been up to recently:
Those last two points are really about one thing: Heterogeneous computing. That was a major theme at AMD’s Fusion Development Summit. The first point is really the initial steps in how we enable heterogeneous computing, through our APUs - one of which is “Trinity.”
"Trinity" is AMD’s Second Generation AMD A-Series APU for notebooks and desktops but for now, I will focus primarily on notebooks along with ultrathin notebooks. “Trinity” delivers twice the performance-per-watt[i] and 56 percent better graphics performance over the previous generation APUi, which was formerly codenamed "Llano." You’ve probably seen “Llano” at work in a number of HP computers including last year’s Pavilion dv6.
Taking a look at the CPU, “Trinity” uses our new “Piledriver” architecture, which is the next step-up from AMD’s “Bulldozer” architecture. What’s important to note is that “Piledriver” brings in new power-saving technologies and is based on a more mature manufacturing process. This drops down the thermal design points (TDPs) from 35-watts to 17-watts while designed to keep CPU performance levels consistent. The 17-watt TDP makes “Trinity” a good choice for the emerging class of thinner and sleeker notebooks, such as the HP ENVY 6 Sleekbook which can deliver up to 9 hours of battery life[ii]. We also offer “Trinity” in higher performance notebook APUs , which scale up to a base frequency of 2.3 GHz but can go as high as 3.2 GHz thanks to AMD Turbo Core.
“Trinity” APUs include AMDRadeon™ HD 7000 Series discrete-level graphics and in this generation APU, we have added the AMD HD Media Accelerator which is a unique set of technologies designed to optimize the video viewing experience. A couple of features I like to highlight within AMD HD Media Accelerator are:
Finally, there's the computing performance AMD is now delivering as a result of the combination of CPU and GPU cores. “Llano” APUs offered a little more than 500 GFLOPs of computing. “Trinity” jumps to more than 700 GFLOPs at the high end.[iv] This is a ton of computing horsepower that some of the latest OpenCL ™applications, such as WinZip 16.5, VLC media player, Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Handbrake can leverage.
To sum up, “Trinity” delivers great gaming, video and battery life performance. Needless to say, we are in the age of parallel computing acceleration and we can’t wait to show you what’s next.
If you have any questions or comments, we would love to hear more from you in the comments below, at @AMD_Unprocessed or www.amd.com/facebook. You can also stay up on the latest from AMD at blogs.amd.com.
Phil Hughes is a Senior PR Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions.
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