As Don pointed out in his mobile A10-4600M coverage, shifting Trinity to the VLIW4 architecture first found in AMD’s Radeon HD 6900-series cards allows it to deploy fewer shaders, but take better advantage of them. By then turning clock rate up or down (depending on thermal headroom), it’s able to improve performance without adding a lot of complexity to the APU itself.

At its most feature-complete, Trinity’s Devastator graphics processor includes as many as six SIMD engines, each with four texture units and 16 thread processors. There are four ALUs in each thread processor, adding up to 384 total shaders and 24 texture units.
Sliding down AMD’s stack, SIMD engines are gradually turned off and clock rates are dialed down to create differentiation. The A10s both have 384 shaders. The A8s lose two SIMDs (and eight texture units), creating a 256-shader component. AMD’s A6-5400K sports three SIMDs, totaling 192 shaders. And the A4 looks to be a 128-shader offering.
Dual Graphics
Like Llano, Trinity supports Dual Graphics configurations—cooperative rendering using the on-die Radeon engine and a discrete card of roughly comparable potency. Although I don’t have any of the models AMD lists in its support matrix, I did discover that a Radeon HD 6670 does the trick as well.

Our baseline blue bars represent the Radeon HD 7660D built into the A10-5800K APU. The green bars are our Radeon HD 6670 on its own. And the red bar is both graphics engines working cooperatively.
At 1280x720 there isn’t enough graphics load to let Dual Graphics shine before this platform runs into a processor bottleneck. The gap opens up at 1680x1050, though, and continues to show off the benefit of Dual Graphics at 1920x1080, where the integrated Radeon HD 7660D and Radeon HD 6670 average almost 100 FPS.
| Discrete GPU | Desktop APU | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discrete Graphics Code-Name | Radeon Product Name | Recommended Memory | A6-Series HD 7540D | A8-Series HD 7560D | A10-Series HD 7660D |
| Desktop Configurations | |||||
| Turks XT | HD 7670 | GDDR5 | Discrete Available | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended |
| Turks Pro | HD 7570 | GDDR5 | Discrete Available | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended |
| Turks Pro | HD 7570 | DDR3 | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended |
| Caicos XT | HD 7470 | DDR3 | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Available | Discrete Available |
| Caicos Pro | HD 7450 | DDR3 | Discrete Available | No Discrete (APU-Only) | No Discrete (APU-Only) |
| All-in-One Configurations | |||||
| Onega LP | HD 7670A | GDDR5 | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended |
| Onega LP | HD 7650A | DDR3 | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Recommended |
| Caspian XT | HD 7470A | DDR3 | Discrete Recommended | Discrete Available | Discrete Available |
| Caspian Pro | HD 7450A | DDR3 | Discrete Available | No Discrete (APU-Only) | No Discrete (APU-Only) |
| Cedar | HD 7350A | DDR3 | No Discrete (APU-Only) | No Discrete (APU-Only) | No Discrete (APU-Only) |
We also benchmarked Batman: Arkham City using the Low quality setting preset and found that performance actually slid backward with Dual Graphics enabled. The version of the driver we tested, however, still doesn't offer Dual Graphics support in anything but DirectX 11 applications. You don't get DX 11 features in Batman until you choose a higher preset. Fortunately, AMD has a beta driver (Catalyst 12.6) that adds DirectX 9 compatibility, too. We didn't have time to give it a spin before today's piece, but it's something we'll follow-up on.
What we do know from WoW is that Dual Graphics has serious potential on this platform. Notably, the setup process is significantly easier than it was back when I evaluated Llano. You simply plug in the discrete card, keep your display attached to the on-board GPU, and install the drivers. Dual Graphics even gets enabled automatically now.
Display Connectivity
Another advantage that Trinity holds over Llano is Eyefinity support. The new APU includes four display controllers, whereas its predecessor only included two. That means you can do three- or four-way monitor configurations, providing you use the right combination of outputs. Four screens, for example, require DisplayPort 1.2 multi-streaming on at least one output. A trio of screens is easier. You can use two non-DisplayPort panels, plus one DisplayPort- or VGA-equipped screen as the third.
- Trinity: Coming Soon To A Desktop Near You
- Piledriver: Half Of The Trinity Story
- Turbo Core Finds Its Way Into APUs
- Graphics: Fewer Shaders, Better Efficiency
- Memory Bandwidth Scaling: Feed The Beast
- Socket Compatibility And The A85X FCH
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
- Benchmark Results: Adobe CS5 And 6
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: File Compression
- Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm
- Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Benchmark Results: Diablo III
- Benchmark Results: OpenCL
- Power
- Trinity On The Desktop: Already Announced, But Enthusiasts Must Wait
Once they are pitted against each other, that will be A TRUE measure of the APU Trinity's marketability
Well at least in gaming
really the question is what gpus are able to hybrid crossfire with it. the information was never public. not all amd gpus will hybrid crossfire with it.
Once they are pitted against each other, that will be A TRUE measure of the APU Trinity's marketability
i mean what is the processor usage during the benchmark ? are all CPU cores used? or only one?
Good question--I'll take a look for you.
It was public... It will crossfire with up to the 7670, which is a rebranded 6670 from what i know, but with some slight improvements.
Thats what I was wondering... every time you get an intel cpu review they always throw in an amd or two for comparison. Why didnt they do that here? Cant make an informed purchase if you compare 3 versions of the same car make and model when there are other makes and models out there to look at.
Oh and Jill... amd only has 10% of the market even with the APU's out there. So if they fail intel only goes from 89-99% of the market... dont see them changing their pricing plans over that.
Dual Graphics is actually in there ;-)
Because this is an article of amd's apus. They've already done a comparison between trinity's igp's and intels 4000 series.
Anyone tell me if I'm wrong and why.
EDIT: Oh wait, they're clocked higher, but not by that much, though it is substantial. I would think it's still a big architectural improvement.
Also, I've noticed that in multiple articles, the writers are strapped for time. This isn't good though it could be understandable. Maybe TH should hire more "hands" or something?
I'm not sure how we'll find out when that video mentioned of the comparison with the A8-3870K and the i3-2100/2105 would show up. Well, unless we constantly check back.
Don't worry TH, you haven't lost me as a fan. It's just constructive feedback. I love you guys!
Don't worry--I'm working on the data right now. As it stood, this story took more than a week of all day/all night testing, troubleshooting, new BIOS installing, and re-testing to nail down. It can go on indefinitely if you let it ;-)