AMD Trinity Confirmed for May

Today it was confirmed that the official AMD Trinity architecture launch is pending this month. The Texas-based CPU maker is reportedly only planning to launch its thin & light laptop mobile APUs, with the desktop versions of Trinity following in August.

Wondering about why is AMD only launching the laptop versions and not the higher clocked desktop versions, we could only come up with the deduction that AMD is expecting great sales and wants to capitalize on Intel’s overpriced UltraBooks.

All Trinity APUs will be able to work and function in the same space-restricted, thin notebooks, similarly to the mobile Ivy Bridge processors, and they’ll also be able to offer the same considerable battery life.

The main differences are the fact that AMD’s Trinity APU won’t probably score that much better in the x86 benchmarks, like their Intel counterparts, and that the price of Trinity-based platforms will be considerably lower than any Intel UltraBook.

Add this to the fact that Trinity is going to trounce the Ivy Bridge in anything 3D related and you’ll a have a very fast selling product.

AMD is already dealing with supply problems now, when they took over 43% of the desktop market using Llano. They most likely don’t want to mess up the higher margins of mobile APU shipments by also having to supply desktop CPUs.

Mobile APUs bring more profits and, generally, SOI manufactured chips show most improvements in power consumption at very low voltages. To better explain this, we’ll give a hypothetical example of a SOI CPU that at 1 V and 2.5 GHz consumes 20 watts, but at 1.4V it consumes 38 watts, while being able to run at 3 GHz.

38 watts is quite decent even for a mobile APU, but the extra heat will require a different cooling system and the extra power consumption will destroy any battery life expectations.

In SOI technologies, the best advantages are revealed at very low voltages. That same APU that requires 20 watts at 1V with a 2.5 GHz frequency will work great at 1.6 GHz with just 0.4 V and a power consumption of just 6 watts. 

And you then add the improved battery life and you have a very successful product.

Therefore, desktop CPUs will have to wait. If we’re lucky, AMD might even have a 4 GHz APU surprise for us, if in the next four months they gather up enough cherry-picked Trinity processors able to run at such a high frequency.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview