If you are on the look for a new budget PC or a notebook, you might want to know that AMD has launched the second generation of its Accelerated Processing Units (APU). Dubbed Trinity, this new lineup of APUs replaces the company’s Llano family and is faster and more efficient than the first-gen APUs. As a matter of fact AMD’s new Trinity offers double the performance per watt compared to Llano which should make it quite an interesting solution for not only economy PC builds but also for those ultrathin notebooks.
The Trinity APU can have up to four Piledriver CPU cores and comes with a dual channel DDR3 memory controller, as well as a unified northbridge and an AMD HD Media Accelerator. The graphics muscles are provided by the Radeon HD 7000 graphics which Advanced Micro Devices says that it is up to 56% faster in comparison to the previous generation that the Llano has. In addition, the CPU is now about 28% faster than before.
AMD Trinity APU
For mainstream notebooks, AMD has three different Trinity APUs to choose from, in the form of the A10-4600M, A8-4500M and the A6-4400M. As for ultrathin notebooks, AMD has prepared the A10-4655M and the A6-4455M. All these APUs are built using the 32nm manufacturing process and their size is bigger than the previous generation, measuring 246 square millimeters in comparison to Llano’s 228 square millimeters size.
AMD says that this new lineup of APUs is considerably more power efficient than before. Llano APUs need 35W for dual cores and 45W for the quad cores on notebooks, while Trinity requires only 17W for dual cores and 35W for quad cores. As for the wattage requirements for desktop computers, the figures have remained the same, varying from 65W up to 100W, depending on the APU.
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