AMD Trinity On The Desktop: A10, A8, And A6 Get Benchmarked!

Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012

We know that AMD isn't particularly fond of diagnostics like Sandra, which aren’t indicative of real-world alacrity. But it does help us analyze our results by exposing potential strengths and weaknesses.

Llano doesn’t have a lot of the ISA enhancements included in Trinity. However, its efficient architecture facilitates solid performance, despite a 2.9 GHz clock rate.

Support for AVX helps bolster Trinity’s floating-point performance, despite the fact that its two Piledriver modules share FP resources. The more substantial gain happens in integer throughput, which benefits from higher clock rates and four distinct cores.

Trinity includes acceleration for AES encryption and decryption, and the performance of that feature is closely tied to available memory bandwidth. Llano does not support those additional instructions, which is why it lands at the bottom of this chart for AES throughput.

Despite common data rates and timing settings, the Llano-based APU gets more out of its dual-channel DDR3 memory controller than Trinity. AMD’s newer design technically supports higher settings, though, meaning you should be able to get up to DDR3-2133 using one slot per channel.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
  • mayankleoboy1
    Nice scoop, Chris!
    Reply
  • Youngmind
    This is so exciting! AMD is probably going to dominate the lower-end and give the poor gamers like me more bang-for-buck as their IGP get better and better :)!
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    depending on how its priced, its a really nice alternative for bare budget gaming that opens up a quad core as well
    Reply
  • I can't WAIT for this, HAIL AMD!!!!
    Reply
  • So this means that a 'Crossfired' Trinity APU would beat ANY similarly-priced Intel (CPU+discrete GPU) ???
    Well at least in gaming
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    JiggerByteSo this means that a 'Crossfired' Trinity APU would beat ANY similarly-priced Intel (CPU+discrete GPU) ???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.
    Reply
  • Well, where are the Ivy/Sandy i5's and i3's???

    Once they are pitted against each other, that will be A TRUE measure of the APU Trinity's marketability
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    in the OpenCL Winzip benchmark, when openCL is enabled the workload is done only by the iGPU or the CPU as well ?

    i mean what is the processor usage during the benchmark ? are all CPU cores used? or only one?
    Reply
  • cangelini
    mayankleoboy1in the OpenCL Winzip benchmark, when openCL is enabled the workload is done only by the iGPU or the CPU as well ?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.
    Reply
  • monkeymonk
    This is awesome. Glad to hear pile driver is making improvements.
    Reply