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Trinity Launching On Desktops This Summer
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AMD is expected to introduce its new mobile Trinity APU in a week or so and now we are hearing some timeframes for desktop parts as well.
According to Digitimes, desktop Trinity parts are coming in August, while Brazos 2.0 chips are expected in June. There is no word on Trinity ULV parts yet and we believe they will be the most interesting of the lot.
AMD Shows Off New Radeon Chips
AMD has now officially updated its HD 7000M lineup of mobile GPUs with HD 7700M, HD 7800M and HD 7900M GPUs that are all based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture. The first in line that should show up in notebooks is the flagship HD 7970M GPU.
As noted, the entire lineup is based on AMD’s 28nm GCN architecture, but as always, the naming scheme of the AMD mobile parts has nothing to do with the desktop ones. The HD 7900M, codename Wimbledon, is actually based on 28nm Pitcairn destkop GPU that features 1280 stream processors, 80 texture units, 32 ROPs and up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
The HD 7800M series, codename Heathrow and the Radeon HD 7700M series, codename Chelsea, are both based on Cape Verde desktop GPU but with a slight twist. While Heathrow, HD 7800M series features fully enabled Cape Verde GPU with 640 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, the Chelsea HD 7700M series is based on a “crippled” Cape Verde core with 512 stream processors and 32 texture units. Both the HD 7800M series and the HD 7700M series will feature up to 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 128-bit memory interface. Of course, we expect at least two SKUs for both HD 7700M and HD 7800M series.
AMD also decided to ditch the PCI-Express 3.0 support on the HD 7700M series mainly as this one is aimed at lower-performance platforms that are all about power saving, and performance gain was simply too low.
For now, AMD has only shed precise details regarding the HD 7970M GPU that is based on the fully enabled Pitcairn GPU with 1280 stream processors that will end up clocked at 850MHz for the GPU and 4.8GHz for 2GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface.
As you can notice, the HD 7970M has lower GPU clocks than its HD 7870 desktop counterpart, but AMD also decided to keep the memory at the same level resulting in 153.6GB/s of memory bandwidth. According to AMD slides, HD 7970M should end up to be anywhere between 30 and 60% faster than HD 6990M and anywhere between 16 and 76 percent when compared to Nvidia current high-end GTX 675M GPU.
AMD’s Trinity To Have Fewer Cores
AMD’s soon to launch A10 5800K is a 100W quad-core Trinity 32nm CPU with 3.8 GHz base clock and 4.2GHz maximal clock possible with AMD turbo core dynamic overclocking technology.
The A10 5800K has 4MB of L2 cache, supports DDR3 1866, dual graphics configurations as well as AMD’s new FM2 socket. The fun part is new HD 7660D GPU that works at 800MHz and comes with 384 shader units. The current APU market leader A8 3870K that works at 3GHz has HD 6550 graphics with 400 cores running at 600MHz.
AMD claims that new Radeon cores from Trinity CPU including A10 5800K are more efficient and this is the main reason why you have fewer cores that can deliver superior performance. The other reason is that with 800MHz core clock they can probably process more data, meaning that HD 7660D of A10 5800K should end up quite a bit faster than the Llano A8 3870K.
All these Radeon cores are a key feature of the Vision Engine that accelerates GPU enabled applications. AMD also tells the world that Trinity is DirectX 11 compatible, supports Direct compute and the new A series of processors, including the A10 5800K all the way to dual-core A4 5300, should not have any issues playing Blu-ray 3D. The GPU part of Trinity supports AMD V, UVD3 as well as Open CL acceleration.
AMD 7990 Specs Unveiled
As we draw close to the official Nvidia GTX 680 Kepler GK104 launch day it is no wonder that we’ll hear more and more about AMD’s upcoming dual-GPU HD 7990 graphics card and Chinese site INPAI has shed some new light on the dual-headed beast. Apparently, the HD 7990 will pack two Tahiti XT chips squeezed together on one PCB.
According to the post at INPAI, the upcoming HD 7990 features two 28nm GCN Tahiti XT chips, same one found on the HD 7970 graphics card. This means that we are looking at a card that will have 2048 stream processors and 3GB of memory per GPU. Appearently, these two Tahiti chips will end up clocked at 850MHz while memory will work at 1250MHz (5GHz effective).
Did AMD Want nVidia Instead of ATI?
While it is ancient history now, it seems that the story about the controversial buying of ATI by AMD was not an easy process.
Forbes has found a deep throat who has left AMD who has told it that AMD approached graphics processor designer Nvidia about an acquisition before snapping up Nvidia rival ATI in 2006. AMD leaders believed that shrinking transistors would create an opportunity to add new capabilities to the processors AMD and rival Intel designed for PCs and servers.
AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz decided to bet that AMD could get ahead of rival Intel by grabbing a piece of the market for GPUs. Fusing CPUs and GPUs would let AMD hit the PC market with something Intel wasn’t ready to offer. Initially AMD thought that Nvidia was the best bet but the deal was killed off because Nvidia Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang insisted on being chief executive of the combined company.
Ruiz decided it was better to buy Nvidia rival ATI in July of 2006 for $5.4 billion. Nvidia replied by unleashing several strong products, gobbling up market share. AMD has fought its way back, with a strong lineup of graphics processors, Nvidia pushed into mobile processors. Nvidia has a market capitalization of $9.7 billion.
Will AMD’s HD 7950 Debut Next Month?
AMD has decided to delay the launch of its HD 7950 graphics card to early February.
This comes after news that the HD 7970, which AMD ‘launched’ on 22 December, will not be available until 9 January. This wasn’t received too well by the media and customers as it does help to have some stock to sell on launch day.
To avoid another bashing for a ‘paper launch’ the firm will launch the HD 7950 in February when it will actually be available. Guru 3D had confirmed this but the article has since been taken down.
AMD has told us that it won’t comment on rumour, speculation or any unannounced products.
The upcoming HD 7950 graphics card will use the same 28nm Southern Islands Tahiti GPU as the HD 7970, with the latter the first to do so. According to AMD it has 4.3bn transistors, more on-chip cache and greater overclocking potential than previous cards.
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