The Turks over at Donanim Haber have come upon yet another official-looking AMD slide detailing one of its future products. This time, that product is Trinity, the next-generation Fusion APU that will meld Piledriver CPU cores with an integrated GPU code-named Devastator.
Piledriver is an update to AMD’s current Bulldozer cores, and the slide says performance is 20% better than Llano with a "digital media workload." The IGP is claimed to be faster than its Llano predecessor by an even greater margin: 30%, according to the slide. Interestingly, the slide mentions a video-compression engine associated with the UVD video decoding block. Intel’s QuickSync transcoding tech may soon get some direct competition.
When we saw Trinity demoed at IDF in September, AMD wouldn’t confirm whether Trinity would slip into Llano’s Socket FM1. The slide mentions Socket FM2, suggesting backward compatibility may be out. Support for DDR3 memory speeds up to 2133MHz is apparently in, however.
At IDF, AMD told us Trinity should be out before Intel’s next-gen Ivy Bridge CPUs hit next spring. A separate set of slides published by TechConnect pins the mass production of mobile Trinity APUs for January of next year, so that certainly sounds plausible. The first wave of mobile chips will be 35W models, but the production schedule teases a 17W version that’s supposed to sample late this year and be ready for production in February. Ultrabooks with decent graphics, anyone?