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Originally Posted by Jebusman You know, that battery life comment is funny, considering in real life, general usage, non-benchmark situations, that SB i5 matches power consumption with the A10. Kind of makes the 2nd point moot if I'm getting comparable battery life.
So let me get this straight here. The TWO (maybe 3) things AMD has going for them right now, is that their laptops can play games on settings "slightly" higher than "Low" (without discrete graphics), and you'll get better battery life during gaming due to the Trinity's more efficient yet powerful IGP. Oh yeah, and maybe price depending.
Like I said, the only thing that is going to determine how great Trinity actually is, is the price. Until I see a HWC review that says otherwise, every single review I've found (with maybe one outlier), has Trinity pegged as a "Good, not amazing" architecture. Depending on the price, that could go from "Good" to "Sweet jesus everyone buy 70 of these" |
You are actually referring to TDP, which isn't necessarily power consumption per se but rather the maximum thermal value at which a given architecture will operate. On the mobile platform in particular, the real determining factor for battery life is HOW LONG a given architecture will need to operate at or close to its TDP to deliver sufficient performance.
Let's take a step back and look at this for a moment. Let's say for argument's sake that one 45W processor performs a bit better but does so by remaining closer to its TDP most of the time. Another 45W processor may not offer as much benchmarkable performance but to an end user, delivers exactly the same perceptible experience and yet it remains at a lower TDP level most of the time. That first processor will have shorter battery life and a higher heat signature than the second one. Thus, you can't automatically assume that a present TDP value will translate directly into power consumption.
While I have yet to test Trinity, what I can tell you is its dynamic GPU power gating, SIMD partitioning and real time power management features could actually give it a leg up on Intel's Ivy Bridge (which for all intents and purposes is NOT a particularly efficient architecture) regardless of its chosen 32nm node. At least from a battery consumption standpoint...
Now, onto the performance aspect. As I said in the article, 95% of notebooks don't need bucket loads of x86 performance. Not these days. Heck, I can slap a high performance SSD into a dual core netbook and in most tasks the little thing will "feel" just as fast as a high performance notebook that's been equipped with a spindle-based drive.
Will I be using my slim and light notebook for thread-intensive tasks like raytrace computing, gaming, etc? Heck no, and most of the typical compute-intensive tasks like encoding, file compression, Flash acceleration, Photoshop editing and HD video decoding can now be accelerated by a GPU anyways. Hence why I think Trinity is a step in the right direction: to balance out serial and parallel processing.
We've all been brought up on a constant diet of e-peen growing, marketing mumbo jumbo about more cores being better and faster speeds being needed. It is for this reason that mainstream notebook battery life really hasn't improved significantly over the last four or so years. Using the GPU to deliver performance when its needed in compute intensive tasks and a quartet of x86 processors for the rest of my needs strikes me as perfect. Personally I can't imagine buying a notebook with anything more than a four threaded processor anyways.
Trinity isn't about gaming, framerates or any other fringe activity. It is about delivering a balanced computing experienced where certain architectural elements (ie: the GPU) can be harnessed for increased performance in certain demanding tasks. If you want gaming, the upcoming Piledriver-based FX series or high end Ivy Bridge processors alongside a dedicated GPU is the ticket to satisfaction. Otherwise, for a balanced experience, Trinity seems to have what it takes. So does Ivy Bridge for that matter but why would I spend $200+ more just for an Intel badge and a processor that's a bit faster on paper? At least, that's what AMD is hoping you'll think.
The key word here is "experience". That can't be benchmarked, nor can it be accurately described. But what I do know is that charts, when taken alone, cannot show the benefits of AMD's APU architecture. Nor can they show the benefits of any CPU+GPU heterogeneous computing processor for that matter.
Will Trinity be a success? I certainly hope so but after years of people being fed the same crap about faster processors offering a better computing environment, AMD has a lot of marketing to do. I mean, how do you effectively market an experience?
/end rant