AMD Launches Trinity To Compete With Intel’s Ivy Bridge

AMD has long been playing catch up to Intel in the processor wars, with both companies recently finding that their main competitor is actually ARM Holdings for the future and not so much each other. In this regard, Intel recently launched its Ivy Bridge series of CPUs for the thin MacBook Air-esque “UltraBooks” and Trinity from AMD is their competitor for the same products which they refer to as “SleekBooks”. The HP Envy SleekBook is the only such device with a Trinity chipset on the market at the moment, but Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung, Sony, and Toshiba all have competing devices in the pipeline.

Trinity will debut AMD’s Piledriver microarchitecture, but is still based on a 32nm process (compared to the 22nm process of Intel’s Ivy Bridge). AMD claims that the dual-core Trinity APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) will perform at the same level as the dual-core Llano APU, effectively doubling the performance per watt with the new generation, and notebooks using the APUs are expected to get an impressive 12 hours of battery life when idle due to new energy efficiencies.

The biggest change for Trinity, however, is the introduction of the AMD HD Media Accelerator suite, which takes on a lot of the previous media heavy lifting (like transcoding video) with more efficiency in the APU. The suite offers:

• AMD Perfect Picture HD: Automatic video processing, which will make fine adjustments to image quality on the fly
• AMD Quickstream: Handles bandwidth intelligently with higher priorities for applications and websites that make use of the GPU to try and help avoid streaming video buffering
• AMD Video Converter: Dedicated hardware-based encoding lets Trinity transcode media files faster and more efficiently
• AMD Steady Video: Helps stabilize shaky recorded video
• AMD Eyefinity: Multi-display support without needing a discrete GPU meaning SleekBooks can potentially output to three external displays