Reviews - AMD A10-4600M 'Trinity' APU

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

From Hexus' review I'm not too impressed by its performance - but that may have been because I underestimated Intel with their iGPU (HD4000) and hoped for too much from AMD. It's fair to say that both Intel and AMD have upped their game in the iGPU departments again with both of them showing up to 50% gains. Obviously for Intel this is less in absolute terms as the HD3000 was much weaker, but in relative terms we can't deny that both have done well. On top of that AMD has managed to create something very power efficient too.

Personally I'd like to see AMD compete a bit with Intel in the "ultra portable laptops (ultrabooks/ultrathins/sleekbooks)" market but I'm not sure how profitable it is as most people either buy a MacBook Air if they want portable or a netbook if they've got a low budget with low requirements.

Here is the mobile IB line-up:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5192/i...ineup-overview

But you do need to consider a few things:
1.)The AMD A10 chips are 35W TDP ones
2.)All the IB Core i7 chips so far are 45W TDP ones
3.)The A6 tested had a 45W TDP
4.)The 45W TDP Core i7 CPUs have more TDP headroom for the HD4000 IGP meaning it can Turbo to the maximum clockspeed more often
5.)The IB Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs will have HD4000 IGPs with lower Turbo clockspeeds and lower CPU performance. The lower TDP probably means the IGP will Turbo to the top clockspeed less often.
6.)The Core i7 systems are most likely to cost much more.

I would also suggest you look at these reviews too as they test more games:
1.)http://techreport.com/articles.x/22932
2.)http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/a10-46...iew-32445.html
3.)http://www.anandtech.com/show/5831/a...00m-a-new-hope

The latency tests in the first review are quite interesting - I really hope more websites also add this.

It does seem for some games,the HD7660G is not much faster than the HD6550D,whereas in others it is much faster. It is hard to say whether it is down to the VLIW4 shaders or driver issues. The other aspect is that CPU performance might be an issue,but considering that Skyrim does quite well but not a game like Batman it indicates something else is going on.

Now,the major is cost IMHO. Hopefully,the laptops just using the A10-4600M only,won't be Core i7 level pricing but closer to Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs.

[Amorphous_Blob]

I would be interested to see how in batttery life is when gaming, the APU really ought to perform quite well there. Its a shame they are using HD6xxx rather than HD7xxx.

I think its about time to replace my ancient Sony.