AMD Fusion Info Thread

[Atom Ant]

Sure you could notice CPU bottleneck in 1366X resolution, but once you give work for 7970M with turning to 1080p in high or ultra settings than will do fine. Maybe you can overclocking as well, or just swap the CPU to a faster Llano and you can sell me the Trinity.

[Forge]

From what I'm seeing, isn't the 4600m the top dog AMD chip?

[R3d]

It is. AMD didn't release any 45w chips this round.

[forumbrah]

that msi makes 0 sense to me

i would only consider a 7970 with an intel processor

and trinity only alone or at most with a lighter graphics card like 7750

[misterhobbs]

that msi makes 0 sense to me

i would only consider a 7970 with an intel processor

and trinity only alone or at most with a lighter graphics card like 7750

It might make sense to others because it looks like it will be a few hundred dollars cheaper than a comparable IB system. At an estimated price of $1200, this laptop will be attractive for a lot of people because that includes the 7970m. Just because Trinity is slower than IB doesn't mean it's a slouch by any means. For gaming, the bottleneck will happen at the GPU anyways so a lesser powered CPU isn't that big of a deal on a gaming laptop. You could also use the money you saved to get an SSD and see excellent performance gains. If I had to choose because of budget constraints, I'd choose the Trinity/7970m/SSD combo every time over a IB/7970m/HDD or IB/lesser video card system.

[Althernai]

Just because Trinity is slower than IB doesn't mean it's a slouch by any means.

No, it does not... but Trinity is a slouch anyway. The issue is not merely that it is slower, but just how much slower it is. Trinity's CPU performance is inferior not only to the quad-core Ivy Bridge parts, but also to the Ivy Bridge chips meant for ultrabooks. Here are a couple of reviews from AnandTech and the TechReport that compare the 4600M to the i5-3427U. The latter is a 17W, dual-core processor and it thoroughly thrashes the 35W, quad-core 4600M -- it's better in practically every benchmark and by a large margin in quite a few.

I don't see the point to pairing a 4600M with a 7970M. Not only are you gambling on the fact that no game you want to play will be bound by the below-ultrabook CPU performance of the former, but the configuration itself doesn't make much sense. The strength of the 4600M is in its integrated graphics and that strength is almost completely wasted when paired with a 7970M. The benefits of asymmetric cross-fire will be small at best and probably not worth the hassles.

I suppose it might be worthwhile to somebody who has enough money to afford a 7970M but not the cheapest Ivy Bridge CPU, but honestly, it's just a hideous combination.

[HTWingNut]

I dunno, I had my reservations when I bought my Llano notebook and have been overly impressed with its performance in general. I don't see Trinity as being restrictive in gaming, and if it supports overclocking like the Llano, its performance can easily be greatly improved.

Those benchmarks have proven not to matter much in day to day tasks and I don't see any gaming benchmarks yet either. Problem is I hear people talk the paper facts but haven't used the hardware themselves or get solid real world performance feedback before passing judgement. I still don't understand how/why people think they need the fastest CPU to manage their tasks when a Core 2 Duo would be more than adequate for most users' daily tasks.

An AMD CPU/GPU machine should save a significant amount of money and especially for a game machine really shouldn't affect performance.

edit: Note that Anandtech didn't start doing their fps graph over time until I after I started doing them in my reviews? Coincidence? I think not.

[R3d]

Trinity's saving grace is that it has the potential to clock crazy high. Look at the stock voltages. My Llano needs 1.0625v just to run stably at 2.4ghz... Trinity's factory-set voltage for 3.2ghz is only 1.025v (and Trinity can do 2.8ghz @ .8v while I can only do 1.5ghz at that voltage). And my Llano is fully hand optimized, the stock factory settings are something like 1.2625v for 2.5ghz and 1.05v for 1.8ghz. The difference is amazing.

If Trinity is unlocked, I wouldn't be surprised to see people doing 4.0ghz+, which would easily make up for the relatively low IPC.

[idiot101]

Intel Sandy Bridge Processors Gaming Performance: Part II - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

I found this in this thread
Quad core i7 vs. dual core i5 for gaming

These are only Intel processors. I would like to see how the A10 holds up in gaming. IMO, the A10 shouldn't be able to handle gaming comfortably even if I don't think single threaded performance is what is absolutely necessary for most modern games.

[R3d]

Stock trinity isn't too hot. Notebookcheck says that it's around the performance of an i3-2310m, and I agree (slightly lower single threaded perf but slightly higher multi-threaded perf).

It's not meant to be a performance CPU, it's a 35w mid range one.