Revisiting The Trinity: AMD's APU Card

Revisiting The Trinity: AMD's APU Card

So I feel as though I should revisit my post from last night. I feel like it is going to be construed as biased against AMD. The fact is I've been a bit of an AMD fanboy for the last couple years. Looking for any processor that offered the best price to performance, you were looking at AMD. Both Intel and Nvidia had some shining examples but AMD pretty much had it on lock until recently. So what happened? What is AMD putting out now? Are they simply playing catch up? Or is there an AMD product that manages to satisfy the holy trinity?

The answer is a bit complicated. AMD's processors have failed to hit a single point, they're neither cheap, nor power efficient or low power, nor do they perform that great. Their GPU's at least have hit on the performance front, but use a ton of power, run hot, run loud, and are still not priced well enough to make up for these other short comings. So what does AMD have? They have their APUs. To understand APUs and what they are really you have to go back and look at iGPUs of the past.

Integrated GPUs have really never been any real good. Their only purpose was to be powerful enough to power a monitor and basic 2D images. For anything more any self respecting person would purchase a dedicated GPU. For years the iGPU was part of the motherboard, AMD had a different idea and felt a decent GPU could be fused with a CPU on one die. Intel beat them to the punch in a way with the first generation of core i3/5/7 processors featuring the intel HD graphics. Of course it still was pretty worthless. 

AMD gave us our first taste of what could be with their first gen A series APUs. For the first time ever we had a decent CPU melded with a decent GPU all in one. On the CPU side the A8-3870K wasn't about to beat any benchmarks but it performed solidly. The GPU was the first time we saw something integrated that could perform as well as some mid-range cards, albeit on the low end of the mid-range, but still it was impressive. It all came in a package with a 100w TDP and under $120. Overall it hit all the marks. It's value was relegated to niche market of people looking to have some gaming and 3D ability but did not want to use a dedicated card. It really was great for small form-factor HTPCs.

The next/current generation was a minor improvement, but was able to bring the performance of the previous gen down to 65w TDP in the case of the A10-5700. It definitely shows promise in this field, and will probably continue to be the only field where AMD manages to hit all the points of the trinity so it's a bit ironic that they code named it Trinity. The prospect of a APU where you have a decent CPU mixed in with a mid ranged GPU coming in around $100 with a TDP under 90w (hopefully closer to 65w and below) is very exciting in the desktop market.

Even more exciting is the prospect of seeing this in laptops. Most laptop CPU's that are worth a damn come in with a 35-45w TDP, while most GPU's come in at 45w, this doesn't serve too well in a laptop which is why most laptops that can do any sort of gaming are either big and loud, have poor battery life, run hot, or all of the above. If AMD can work its magic and give us a decent APU under 70w we could see that all change. We have the possibility of seeing thin and cool laptops that have pretty good battery life, that can also game fairly well.

Anyways I just felt like I should give AMD a fair shot because they're not entirely out of the running. They just have their focus in another direction and it is exciting. Keep an eye on them to see what comes out next, in particular in the mobile field.