Strongest AMD Trinity Will Cost As Much As a Low-End Intel Core i3

AMD did tell us that it intended to play to its strength, that being of offering hardware that was as or almost as good as Intel's but for half or a third of the price. We might have just seen a strong piece of evidence to support this claim.

During the meeting at IFA 2012, where we sat down with a couple of representatives and had a talk about Trinity, we were treated to a demonstration of two tablets running the same set of programs in concert. This is something we didn't touch on in our highlights article. One tablet was a Core i5-based model, while the other used an AMD C-60 design with a much lower price. They both performed pretty much the same, and the Core i5 took the lead only when a complicated data document was started, showing Intel's moderate superiority in terms of raw processing. The point AMD wanted to make was that, even at a much lower price, they could offer pretty much the same capabilities.

What we're going to talk of here isn't tablets, but it is related in the way that it shows just how serious AMD is about offering a better price-performance ratio. Everyone who knows even a bit about current goings-on, on the CPU segment, has heard about Intel's Core series at least in passing. They also know that Core i3 are the lowest-end and cheapest of the lot. Online stores usually list the latter, for example a dual-core with 3MB cache and HD2500 (two generations-old) graphics, for $130 / 130 Euro. AMD's Trinity will sell for just as much, and we don't mean the small and entry-level models (A4 and A6). We mean the high-end, quad-core A10.

Retailer BLT lists the A10-series BLK ED 100W FM2 4MB 3800MHz for $131.45, and the 65W FM2 4MB 3400MHz for the same. Below these two are a couple of A8-series ($109.38), an A6-series ($73.59) and the A4 ($59.60). Granted, Intel itself also reduced a few prices recently, pushing low-end chips to $117 / 93-117 Euro, but that's still above the mid-range Trinity. And since we know, for certain, that games like Battlefield 3 run perfectly fine on A10, and probably decently on A8, that's something that should benefit AMD greatly this year and the next.

AMD Trinity APU
Image credits to AMD

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