AMD Desktop Trinity Update: Now With Core i3 And A8-3870K

[TheKurrgan]

If the objective is get the best possible integrated graphics, clearly trinity wins. However, as a CPU....not so much.. They are what AMD considers to be 4 core CPU's, yet a dual core with HT is running with them pretty hard even in threaded benchmarks.. That speaks volumes frankly. I've not been impressed with AMD's inability to come up with a design to rival intel since Conroe, and at this point its just a little sad. The price is what it is, which is all that keeps the CPU division alive.
They do seem to be doing quite well in the graphics department though, in both integrated and discrete-- Undisputed champion of integrated graphics i'd say, and a continuing contender to challenge nvidia...
Now to get some of that muster into the CPU design team....

 

[triny]

Why is the I3 chip on sale for 27$-47$ in China ,yet in America it is so much more?

 

[triny]

[citation][nom]Yuka[/nom]N
[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]T[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Thing is... in truth, Piledriver is more than good enough for todays needs. But if I am going to spend close to $200 for a CPU... i5-3570K without blinking.When I look at $100 CPUs for a budget user, I have to think: Is this an office/typical work or a low-cost gaming PC. If they are getting a dedicated card, the GPU part of the AMD CPU becomes useless. .[/citation]

( Snif ) no the gpu part of the apu couples to a dedicated gpu card ( combining both ) only on AMD (snif)

 

[triny]

[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]Thing is... in truth, Piledriver is more than good enough for todays needs. But if I am going to spend close to $200 for a CPU... i5-3570K without blinking.When I look at $100 CPUs for a budget user, I have to think: Is this an office/typical work or a low-cost gaming PC. If they are getting a dedicated card, the GPU part of the AMD CPU becomes useless. [/citation]

Unlike Intel (snif)
The gpu part of AMD APU actually couples with a dedicated gpu and is not lost (snif)

why are I3 chips selling for such a high price in USA they are 27-47 dollars in China
what a rip off

 

[triny]

Looks to me like AMD cracked Intel's brass monkey massively
will they do the same with Vishera remains to be seen

Haswell best have hd 8000 anything less won't cut it

 

[silverblue]

[citation][nom]youssef 2010[/nom]If you're thinking about running demanding apps on your platform. Then, from my personal experience, you're torturing yourself by sticking with AMD. I've used my phenom II for the past 3 years but, eventually, I switched to Intel. Turns out that my AMD CPU was one bad bottleneck.Don't get me wrong, I really like AMD and what they're trying to do. But they just can't beat Intel's latest i7 CPUs[/citation]
I don't think anybody has a real idea how Vishera will perform, though it's very likely to be easily faster than its predecessor, which isn't exactly difficult in itself. Who knows, with four modules, we might have a decent CPU on our hands. Regardless, it probably won't be much faster in single-threaded apps than your Phenom II, but I'd wager that it will still make a bit of a difference.

Those who are rocking an i7-2600K, even if they're focused on productivity, shouldn't really be worried unless AMD have actually done their homework; a 15% improvement over Zambezi might be nice but software really isn't taking advantage of it right now. As for gaming, I can't see the FX-x3xx series devouring all the gap between FX-x1xx and SB, so we'll probably have to wait for the next generation for AMD to finally uncork whatever it is that's nerfing performance. It's unacceptable that AMD aren't producing CPUs that cannot outgame an i3.

 

[billybobser]

This review is pretty useless for gaming benchmarks, when the components compared don't include HD4000 and a small selection of discrete GPU's.

We all know the i3 igp is rubbish, but I want to compare trinity to a discreet gpu and ascertain which gives me best value at acceptable performance levels.

Instead I'll have to dig out over reviews to find out how llano matched up to discrete gpu's and tally that against trinity.

 

[amkronos]

Honestly if the built in GPU is the selling factor on a CPU you've already lost. Even a cheap $50 dedicated card will be leaps and bounds better than these built in GPU's. No one who could call themselves a "gamer" would be caught dead building a gaming pc around the built in GPU on a chip be it Intel or Amd.

The true target audience for these would be office desktop users who will be using word processors and office applications that would be doing a lot of integer work. Would like to see some benchmarks for opening up a large Word Document, PDF, or running a complex spreadsheet or report. That would be a better indication of what these chips would be ideally suited for.

 

[RedJaron]

This review is pretty useless for gaming benchmarks, when the components compared don't include HD4000 and a small selection of discrete GPU's.

We all know the i3 igp is rubbish, but I want to compare trinity to a discreet gpu and ascertain which gives me best value at acceptable performance levels.

*sigh* Including HD 4000 in this comparison would be useless. If it hasn't already been explained enough, this review is comparing chips at a similar price point. The lowest end Intel CPU that has HD 4000 is an Ivy Bridge i5 ( at least right now. ) So why compare a $120 A8 against a $220 i5? We already know the A8 will score huge in the graphics department despite the $100 deficit. And we know the i5 will completely decimate the A8 in any kind of computational comparison. With such drastically different performance strengths and weaknesses, how would you draw any useful comparisons between them? So, one last time, these chips are not positioned or marketed against each other! They're meant for two very different markets of computers. Only businesses and the computer unsavvy wouldn't pair an i5 or above with a discrete card, and neither of those crowds are likely to care about these reviews and benchmarks.

The only useful comparison would put a Trinity APU against a mobile based Ivy Bridge with HD 4000 since then you're talking about laptops where the lack of a discrete card is expected.

 

[army_ant7]

The CPU is not that weak. Besides, they A8s are probably significantly better gaming CPUs than any Pentium that's out right now, especially when overclocking and a manual fix for the scheduling problem (which is kinda easy to implement, I might add) for Trinity.

Considering that all this takes is a decent 1600MHz kit and a little overclocking, that's a good proposition for AMD, especially since the $50 Intel CPU plus $70 Radeon 6670 DDR3 is already $30 more expensive, so you might as well fit in native 1866MHz memory and overclock it to 2133MHz for the APU machine and that would pretty much level off the playing field in both performance and cost. Using a Trinity A8 with a scheduling fix would be even better, especially in the CPU, but I don't know how well they would fit into such a budget yet.

When you say "scheduling fix," you are referring to setting your program to tax one, and only one, core on each module right? Are you referring to just setting a program's core affinity in the Task Manager, as to why it's "kinda easy to implement"?

Would that really benefit the Trinity line-up which have only up to 2 modules (thus 2 threads after this fix) as much as it does a Bulldozer chip with 4 modules, in let's say, gaming in particular? I'm thinking maybe two-threaded games, but not four.

When memory modules are really rated/labeled as, let's say, 1866MHz, can you really overclock them past that?

Thanks, and it's nice to see you around this forum thread. :-D

 

[eddieroolz]

Excellent review.

This cements my hope for AMD's return to competitiveness with the Piledriver design. The gains are quite significant and it just can take back the low-to-mid performance category. High performance may still be a year or two off, but if the team at AMD can keep this pace up, the high-performance category can become competitive too.

 

[Guest]

Had to watch the video twice...didn't pay attention to what was being said the first time.

 

[jdwii]

Think of it as a back-handed compliment from AT. They've only reviewed the mobile variant to the best of my knowledge, and in most gaming tests it still matches up well against an HD4000-equipped mobile i7. I think what you're forgetting is that, in this review, the HD4000 is nowhere to be seen; Chris does point out the lack of an HD4000-equipped i3 which would be the perfect reference point. It probably wouldn't be very fair to compare to the desktop i7 but it would certainly be interesting to see how much those CPU cores hide the deficiencies of the iGPU (and likewise, the opposite can be said for Trinity).

That's because their is no 4000HD graphics on a I3 which this product will be priced at. People don't forget that this thing overclocks to 4.6Ghz with no problem that makes this a WAY better deal then a I3!

If the objective is get the best possible integrated graphics, clearly trinity wins. However, as a CPU....not so much.. They are what AMD considers to be 4 core CPU's, yet a dual core with HT is running with them pretty hard even in threaded benchmarks.. That speaks volumes frankly. I've not been impressed with AMD's inability to come up with a design to rival intel since Conroe, and at this point its just a little sad. The price is what it is, which is all that keeps the CPU division alive.
They do seem to be doing quite well in the graphics department though, in both integrated and discrete-- Undisputed champion of integrated graphics i'd say, and a continuing contender to challenge nvidia...
Now to get some of that muster into the CPU design team....

Its Not a Actual Quad core people its CMT 80% scaling at best. This is truly a great feet for Amd and also remember this is made at global foundries not Intel manufacturing of course its not going to be better on Performance/ per watt and to let you know a Heat-sink will only cost you 30$ and you can overclock this guy to 4.6Ghz and get some pretty darn good performance.

Honestly if the built in GPU is the selling factor on a CPU you've already lost. Even a cheap $50 dedicated card will be leaps and bounds better than these built in GPU's. No one who could call themselves a "gamer" would be caught dead building a gaming pc around the built in GPU on a chip be it Intel or Amd.

The true target audience for these would be office desktop users who will be using word processors and office applications that would be doing a lot of integer work. Would like to see some benchmarks for opening up a large Word Document, PDF, or running a complex spreadsheet or report. That would be a better indication of what these chips would be ideally suited for.

Wrong This video card is about as powerful as a 6670 which is 70$ and this CPU is as powerful or very very close to a I3 sandy which is 120$ Combine that with the fact that Amd has cheaper boards then Intel does and you can easily save around 60$ on the build for the same performance. That 60$ can go towards the fastest ram or help you get a SSD, If priced right Trinity is going to be amazing i would of died for one of these 3 years ago when building my PC i only had 200$ for a CPU and a board and i could of gotten this for that now. Wow.

so according to you a person needs a quad core for desktop publication? web design? internet browsing and emailing? c'mon get off of it. just because you didn't get away with buying an economical dual core to stress/benchmark components that makes it a bad/limited cpu?

there is no way around the need for a discrete cpu if someone is going to game. i have had to break the bad news to people on more than one occasion what the deal was when they complained about the performance their "budget" amd rig had when gaming. they ended up having to sell it and start over.

the only thing that gets accomplished by amd or it's fan base by trying to promote a gloried HTPC rig as a budget gaming rig is reinforcing the stereotype that amd puts out inferior products. and when the latter feels the need to slag on intel also, not very good form at all.

They must of did something wrong since even a 4170fx and a 7850 is enough to play any game at 1080P, Maybe they went to low Also a Phenom II 980 and a 7850 will play anything at 1080P with a average frame rate of 60.

Trinity/Llano: Budget gaming

i3: Office, movies, internet surfing, and other light stuff

Uh why can't we do office/ movies/ web / other light stuff on Trinity?

 

[azraa]

My opinion is that you gotta keep your mind on the ground with what you need.

Be honest guys, MOST of people use their PC for light workloads, and rarely do any serious encoding or numbermunching with their PCs and notebooks. For almost everyone, casual users, (facebook, twitter, youtube HD, mainstream games like SC2, WOW, D3, small size compressions, encoding songs for smartphones, etc) a Trinity A10 with a dedicated HD7650 (or its mobile version) would work wonders in almost every aspect, for an AMAZING price. This is true for notebooks as well, they compete really well against the similarly priced last gen Sandy Bridge Core i5s. What I mean is that you can choose AMD and be right to do so for a entertainment PC/Ntbk. Not seeing that is merely just blindly following the massive advertisement budget that Intel has

Sure, some of us do actually heavy work sometimes, some people edit hi-res video or load large schematics on Autocad or 3D rendering, compile code, etc, but for those kinds of task, Intel is the best way to go, they offer the fastest option. Period. (Now, it would be fanboyism to defend the FX cpus as 'enthusiast grade' cpus, they suck, its proven)

For workstations, and hardcore gamers, AMD really lacks the power, we all know that. I suppose that many of you wish for amd to release better FX cpus, so competition drops Intel's pricing on higher power cpus


Bottomline:
Competition is good.
AMD is an amazing choice for the average user, and yet Intel absorbs market share through propaganda (not meaning they produce bad mid range cpus, of course, just catches uninformed buyers).
Be sure about what you need a system for, so you dont pay extra for nothing

Cheers!

PD: With all due respect, I never saw her announcing here in Tom's Hardware (and i am a frequent reader), but I've got to say, she is absolutely beautiful. Cute, slim, well spoken and non-distractively hot. Liked her c:

 

[RedJaron]

Bottomline:
Competition is good.
AMD is an amazing choice for the average user, and yet Intel absorbs market share through propaganda (not meaning they produce bad mid range cpus, of course, just catches uninformed buyers).
Be sure about what you need a system for, so you dont pay extra for nothing

Quite true. Since the average user that frequents the forums isn't an average casual computer user, a lot of the arguments come up that the low-end components suck. But many posters forget that their needs far outstrip the needs of the masses.

I have no problem recommending a Llano or Trinity build for basic use laptops for my family ( though I'd hesitate to call them adequate for any gaming without an additional discrete card. ) On a desktop though, I really have a hard time putting a Trinity over an i3 in all but the very stingiest of budgets.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]youssef 2010[/nom]If you're thinking about running demanding apps on your platform. Then, from my personal experience, you're torturing yourself by sticking with AMD. I've used my phenom II for the past 3 years but, eventually, I switched to Intel. Turns out that my AMD CPU was one bad bottleneck.Don't get me wrong, I really like AMD and what they're trying to do. But they just can't beat Intel's latest i7 CPUs[/citation]

That a three year old CPU doesn't beat today's best performance from a higher price range is not because it is an AMD CPU. The same would happen if it was a three year old Core 2 Quad.

[citation][nom]amkronos[/nom]Honestly if the built in GPU is the selling factor on a CPU you've already lost. Even a cheap $50 dedicated card will be leaps and bounds better than these built in GPU's. No one who could call themselves a "gamer" would be caught dead building a gaming pc around the built in GPU on a chip be it Intel or Amd.The true target audience for these would be office desktop users who will be using word processors and office applications that would be doing a lot of integer work. Would like to see some benchmarks for opening up a large Word Document, PDF, or running a complex spreadsheet or report. That would be a better indication of what these chips would be ideally suited for.[/citation]

What $50 card will beat an A8 or A10? A Radeon 6570 could beat a Llano A8 that only has DDR3-1600, but that's not much of a win and can be lost if you simply overclock the memory on the A8 system to 1866MT/s.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]army_ant7[/nom]When you say "scheduling fix," you are referring to setting your program to tax one, and only one, core on each module right? Are you referring to just setting a program's core affinity in the Task Manager, as to why it's "kinda easy to implement"?Would that really benefit the Trinity line-up which have only up to 2 modules (thus 2 threads after this fix) as much as it does a Bulldozer chip with 4 modules, in let's say, gaming in particular? I'm thinking maybe two-threaded games, but not four.When memory modules are really rated/labeled as, let's say, 1866MHz, can you really overclock them past that?Thanks, and it's nice to see you around this forum thread. :-D[/citation]

Several 1866MHz memory kits are known to hit 2133MHz without even needing a voltage boost. Pretty much any 1866MHz kit could hit 2133MHz with a voltage boost and some can go farther without needing unsafe voltages. They can also often drop timings a little, although it's raw bandwidth that APUs really care about in graphics performance, not latency too much. You can overclock your memory as far as they can handle it with whatever voltage setting you decide to use just like how you can do it with a CPU or a video card.

What I mean by scheduling here would be making Windows prioritize using one core per module and not switching threads between cores too much like it usually does. It's not as good as completely disabling the second core, but with only two modules, it's better to keep all cores and simply prioritize the first core of each module rather than disable the second core because four good cores, even if they don't have perfect scaling with this fix implemented, are still better than two only somewhat faster cores.

 

[SessouXFX]

[citation][nom]Vmem[/nom]Agreed, but she is also now completely covered up do to people "complaining". Would a low v-neck really be too much? She is overly covered compared to news anchors[/citation]
Are we here to see T&A or to hear about our favorite tech gadgets and upcoming wares? She looks good regardless, but covering up makes her more desirable compared to making her look like a cheap fling as you and others would suggest her to be. I applaud the move here.

Back on topic....

I'm glad AMD is focusing more of their attention on the APUs and it appears the move is really paying off for them. However, Vishera is coming soon, and Tom's Hardware hasn't said a peep about it yet. I would like some more info about Vishera and I certainly would like to know if Vishera is going to be the last actual CPU made by AMD or not? It seems to be that AMD is pointing their sights towards the APUs from here onward....

 

[army_ant7]

Several 1866MHz memory kits are known to hit 2133MHz without even needing a voltage boost. Pretty much any 1866MHz kit could hit 2133MHz with a voltage boost and some can go farther without needing unsafe voltages. They can also often drop timings a little, although it's raw bandwidth that APUs really care about in graphics performance, not latency too much. You can overclock your memory as far as they can handle it with whatever voltage setting you decide to use just like how you can do it with a CPU or a video card.

What I mean by scheduling here would be making Windows prioritize using one core per module and not switching threads between cores too much like it usually does. It's not as good as completely disabling the second core, but with only two modules, it's better to keep all cores and simply prioritize the first core of each module rather than disable the second core because four good cores, even if they don't have perfect scaling with this fix implemented, are still better than two only somewhat faster cores.

I just remember setting my RAM sticks to go to 1866MT/s from its rated 1600MT/s with a BIOS multiplier, and I remember, that it still stayed at 1600MT/s. I'll give this a go again just to make sure I'm doing it right. Tell me, is loosening timings generally better if it means increasing transfer/clock rate? Also, if I don't overvolt, should I have concerns about RAM temperatures? Since this might be a case to case thing, what I mean is, maybe in a sense like would they shut off before damaging themselves just like a CPU does (TjMax)? I'd prefer this so that they can "let me know" if it's too much already.

I agree with what you're saying about scheduling. When you said it was easy to implement, did you mean by Microsoft, application developers, etc. or by the actual user? I ask this because it isn't as simple as totally barring off one core per module. It's now a case of prioritizing one but still leaving the other to "pick up the scraps leftover" right? Thanks.

 

[abitoms]

There is no question about the superiority of AMD A10 and A8 APUs in the IGP gaming tests.

When it comes to the non-gaming tests, there were about 12 'real-world' tests. From what I observe,

5800k vs. i3-2100
5800k leads the i3-2100 in 8 tests out of 12
Average lead where 5800k wins: 12.5%
Average loss where 5800k loses: 8%
Overall: 5800k leads the i3-2100 by 6%

5600k vs. i3-2100
5600k leads the i3-2100 in 8 tests out of 12 (again)
Average lead where 5600k wins: 10%
Average loss where 5600k loses: 13%
Overall: 5600k trails the i3-2100 by 2%

I think the overall status between 5600k and i3-2100 is tilted towards i3-2100 mainly because of i-Tunes

 

[Wisecracker]

We need a Turks-Pro discreet with that i3, and comparable Trinity benchies with...

DUAL GRAPHICS!
(clap clap clap clap clap)

DUAL GRAPHICS!
(clap clap clap clap clap)

DUAL GRAPHICS!
(clap clap clap clap clap)

Go, Chris, go!

 

[blazorthon]

Blaze i know you have said the same thing about fx has anyone tried this with trinity yet?

Same basic CPU architecture, so it should still have at least roughly the same effect. It might help a little more or a little less due to the improvements, it wouldn't be easy for me to predict which way, if either, but it should help.

 

[blazorthon]

I just remember setting my RAM sticks to go to 1866MT/s from its rated 1600MT/s with a BIOS multiplier, and I remember, that it still stayed at 1600MT/s. I'll give this a go again just to make sure I'm doing it right. Tell me, is loosening timings generally better if it means increasing transfer/clock rate? Also, if I don't overvolt, should I have concerns about RAM temperatures? Since this might be a case to case thing, what I mean is, maybe in a sense like would they shut off before damaging themselves just like a CPU does (TjMax)? I'd prefer this so that they can "let me know" if it's too much already.

I agree with what you're saying about scheduling. When you said it was easy to implement, did you mean by Microsoft, application developers, etc. or by the actual user? I ask this because it isn't as simple as totally barring off one core per module. It's now a case of prioritizing one but still leaving the other to "pick up the scraps leftover" right? Thanks.

Well, it should be very easy for MS to implement it, devs probably wouldn't have a hard time doing it but realistically, why would devs want to optimize for something that a fraction of users have and doesn't make more than a roughly 20% boost. As for the actual user, I'm sure that there are ways. If worst comes to worst, then it is still very easy for the end user to change thread affinities. I'll be looking into ways to prioritize the cores. Maybe there's a way to get them treated as Hyper-Threading Technology logical threads or a similar trick.

As for the memory, yes, the BIOS should shut it down/reset or simply automatically change the memory frequency settings at boot if they are unsafe. If you can't increase it without a voltage boost, then you could look into if a voltage boost would be a problem for you and if not, then you can try one. Memory modules are designed to not be damaged by short term voltage hikes and should be able to take voltages far more than reasonable before they take damage. If something gets damaged, then maybe the CPU northbridge/memory controller can get damaged, but the memory should not be damaged. Even then, you can look up if the northbridge needs a boost or not to correspond with a memory voltage boost.

Temp increases could be a problem for you, but that's unlikely unless you have a high voltage. If it does become a problem, then make sure that your memory modules have heat spreaders. If they do, then I don't think that they would have temperature problems unless they have poor quality heat spreaders.

 

[philmedell]

announcer "and my personal Favorite Skyrim"
Me "Report to the ship as soon as possible, we'll bang Okay?"

 

[markem]

Wow, loving the AMD Trinity...

Was going to get an i3 but not now, especially after watching the Intel i3 getting thoroughly trounced..

Keeping an eye out for XFire on AMD Trinity vs Intel i3+Discreet showdown