AMD Trinity Desktop Chip Schedule Challenges Mobo Makers
AMD's Trinity desktop CPUs, originally scheduled with a June introduction date, are now expected to arrive no earlier than October.
Mainboard manufacturers told German publication heise online that only samples are available to them at this time as AMD intends to get rid of its pile of Llano processors before Trinity is released. If correct, don't expect to get a retail desktop Trinity CPU before the Christmas season is in full swing.
AMD somewhat confirmed the manufacturer statements by telling heise that only major vendors such as Acer, Asus, HP and Lenovo are getting Trinity chips right now. Retail chips will be made available "later" this year, AMD said. Manufacturers are not exactly pleased and complain that they cannot get their finalized board designs into production. They also said they lost contacts at AMD due to the layoffs at the chip maker.
It appears that AMD is clearly prioritizing its supply and is getting Trinity into the hands of those that may otherwise decide to completely rely on Intel's Ivy Bridge for this Back-to-School season. However, AMD is compromising the possible impact of Trinity by making enthusiasts wait.

but who wants them? I want Trinity.
but who wants them? I want Trinity.
Me too,
but I will go for Ivy Bridge. Just plug a graphics card if more gpu is needed.
Heh. Deja vu?
I do believe that Heise Online should be capitalized, since it's the name of a media outlet.
AMD must have a fair bit of stock.
I picked up an E450 notebook for a song ... they won't take long to clear them.
I'd say August rather than September ...
I am most definitely displeased. I was hoping to build a nice HTPC with trinity for CPU/GPU.
Guess not.
A 3rd party APU equivalent to an i7, with AMD's GPU, with IBM's magic. Oh god that would be frightening, for AMD and Intel.
Seems like that'd make things a lot easier on motherboard makers, and consumers wanting an upgrade path.
that cant happen because the APUs and the bulldozer CPU are totally different architectures. if they were to make the APU fit on an AM3+ socket, theyd have to remove the IGP completely, defeating the purpose of the APU. AM3+ is made to support bulldozer which has no IGP in the die.
That'd be nice. Wouldn't count on it though. Not entirely surprised by the delay. All companies across all industries tend to hold off or limit the release of new product until all the previous iterations are at a low enough level in terms of supply. Intel did the same with Ivy Bridge, though that delay ended up being relatively short.
It's also not unusual that vendors get first crack at new tech since the predominant sales are likely to be those buying a complete system as opposed to those building. What worries me is the fact that the manufacturers are making it seem like they aren't getting ANY samples to work with. At this stage of the game, that is very concerning. When you're talking about the fact that about now they were supposed to be releasing their new boards with Trinity, but are still waiting on samples to finish the boards, that seems very strange and troubling.
I would think that the CPU difference between desktop models of Llano and Trinity would be about 800MHz as evidenced with the A10-4600M and A8-3500M comparison made recently. Mobile Trinity seems to perform between 15 to 30% better in most CPU tasks which shows less instructions per clock than Llano but easily more instructions per core and at a lower power level. An 800MHz boost over the A8-3870K would result in a lower % gain for desktop Trinity, but thanks to resonant clock meshing (which allegedly should do more for sort of clock speeds that desktop Trinity will run at than the mobile variant) they can have a CPU that performs up to 25% faster, never slower thanks to TurboCore v3, and I haven't even mentioned the improved GPU...
If Piledriver is the first step to fixing the Bulldozer microarchitecture, a 25% CPU and 50% GPU performance boost over the previous generation whilst using the same or less power is actually significant, and should mean there's a good amount of extra performance to come with the GCN-and-Steamroller-equipped Kaveri. One can dream.