The Ultimate AMD Trinity Notebook List

guys i think i will fall for this one :

Ordinateur portable SAMSUNG NP370R5E-S01FR - Achat vente - Ordinateur portable SAMSUNG NP370R5E-S01FR

I can have it for 500 euros after cashback.

The core i3 3110M is one efficient cpu when loaded :
http://www.hardware.fr/medias/photos_news/00/37/IMG0037774.png

No wonder the laptop comes with 60W adapter only.

 

I forgot to mention for me the biggest issue for he Envy 15/17, NO Wireless AC option.
Come on seriously its 2013, and considering they have gone the ASUS route of making their laptops thinner and glossy touch screen panel just like the new N series (NOOOOOO we just lost one of the best mate panels on a notebook, but at lest the recessed screen is gone and dust won't be getting in the corners of the bezel but the black rubberized feeling keys are also gone which was probably the best laptop keyboard not in a super high end lenovo) to compete better with them, just WTH, ASUS has already gone and put AC on almost anything from their new laptops to even desktop motherboards.

Also there is a new MSI 11.6'' Windows 8 tablet with A4 Temash but with a 1366X768 resolution (WHY!!!?) MSI W20: tablet da 11 pollici con AMD A4 Temash e Windows 8 - Notebook Italia

 

From what reviews I've seen the highest clocked HD4600 in the 4930MX doesn't even catch up to the HD7660G (on laptops with dual channel memory) on 3DMark11 and most games (CPU bottlenecked games are the ones Intel does better in). Richland should be able to extend the IGP lead a little further until Kaveri comes out, the A10-5750M should be able to reach 1500 point in 3DMark11 with DDR3-1866 memory.

As far as I can tell so far, the lower clocked HD4600 like the one in the 4700MQ is about on par with the HD7640G I have in my Asus K55N, though I doubt I'd be able to find the 4700MQ in a sub $500 laptop (I spend under $500 for my laptop after upgrading the ram, hard drive and wifi card). The TDP on the quad cores from Intel look pretty rough too, 47W for most of their quad core modules, only 2 of them have 37W.

Review Intel Haswell Processors - NotebookCheck.net Reviews (Haswell Mobile review, using only single channel memory for the A10-4600M)
Haswell (microarchitecture) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Considering most of the laptops I've worked on from Asus and HP come with low end single stream wireless N cards, you're probably not missing much by not having a cheap AC card put in. Not sure if HP has a whitelist on wifi cards in their new models, but with Asus laptops you can put whatever wifi card you want in there, AC or otherwise. I replaced the single stream, single band N wifi card in my K55N with a dual band, dual stream N wifi card with bluetooth (Intel N6235), managed to increase my NAS transfer speed from 4MB/s on my old card to 20MB/s on 5GHz band with my new card.

I haven't found any mini PCIe cards for AC, but they should start appearing pretty soon, should be some variants that will work with HP too if they have a whitelist.

 

That's the issue, the only company I know other then ASUS that has Wireless AC adapters other than USB sticks is Qualcomm Atheros, and I can't find those anywhere on sale, so far only OEMs have access to them, putting one of those in their system is what HP should have done. Even the ASUS N56DY - Notebooks & Ultrabooks - ASUS, which isn't even part of the new N series, has a wireless AC option (most likely an Atheros Card, don't know about the new N series).

Also I wouldn't get any Intel adapters, they ave over-hyped, not only do Killer Wireless N cards provide at least the same bandwidth as the similar speced intel ones, but they have ridiculously low latencies due to being gaming optimized.

Finally A decent looking Temash tablet Quanta tablet packs an AMD SoC (Temash) | TG Daily from Quanta with FHD display.

 

I've had a fairly good experience with Intel adapters, they run stable and decently fast, and for $20 for the 6235, I'm not going to complain, the least expensive Killer™ Wireless-N 1202 (dual band, dual stream with bluetooth) I found was for $50.

Should be a decent tablet for media consumption, though I don't expect it will be able to much gaming unless you have a fairly old game and you turn down the settings/resolution a bit.

 

This is the highest end card Amazon.com: Bigfoot Networks KillerN-1103 Notebook Wireless Card: Computers & Accessories and only for $50 on Amazon. Now I have seen this thing much cheaper when on sale, surprised the price went back up, especially since AC will start appearing soon.

AVA Direct sells another on for $42.

 

There's a few problems with using the Bigfoot Networks KillerN-1103, if you're laptop only comes with 2 antennas (like most laptops), then you can't fully use it as you'll be missing an antenna for the 3rd connection, it also doesn't have bluetooth which for me personally is a problem as I occasionally use either a bluetooth mouse or bluetooth headphones.

The KillerN-1202 I was looking at earlier with bluetooth support is selling for the same as the the KillerN-1103 on amazon, both seem to be considerably more than the $20 for the Intel N6235. I suppose if you have a higher end gaming laptop, the KillerN cards make more sense to use as the price of the card relative to the price of the laptop isn't too bad.

In my case, spending $50 on a wifi card upgrade for a $360 laptop doesn't make much sense, especially as the latency difference probably won't be noticed due to the weaker GPU performance; I'm more likely to get FPS lag than network lag.

Amazon.com: Bigfoot Networks KillerN-1202 Notebook Wireless Card: Electronics

 

And there's always Ethernet if you're really concerned about lag.

I would not shell out $1000+ for a laptop that has similar gaming performance for one that's going for less than $800. Those BGA Iris 5200 IGPs are quite expensive, and are only worth considering if you're only playing Starcraft 2, Cities XL, or other poorly-threaded games. In fact, I could probably get better performance from an i7 + dedicated GPU if battery life wasn't that important.

As for the HD 4600: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/review-round-up-intel-haswell-vs-amd-richland/

 

What you have linked are desktop parts, in the mobile area Richland APUs does not have 100W TDP room. Here is notebookcheck HD4600 review and keep in mind Intel with new drivers still can improve performance, because it is a new chip, while Richland same as Trinity, a fully worked out GPU.

 

The fastest/most expensive version of the HD4600 is only getting 1258 points in 3DMark 11, a dual channel A10-4600M will get about a hundred more points and will cost considerably less. I can see Richland A10-5750 with DDR3-1866 getting to 1500 points without overclocking.

For a laptop with a quad core haswell and HD4600 you're looking at a minimum of $800 and that's with the weaker version of the HD4600, the more expensive ones can easily run into the $1000 range, you can pick up a good A10-4600M laptop for around $500 (even around $400 refurbished), Richland shouldn't be much higher than that either.

If you don't need a lot of processing power and are doing casual gaming (apu style graphics), no point spending an extra $300.

 

Nope, Richland A10-5750M with 1866MHz DDR3 only gets 1231 points in 3DMark11 (with 13.6b driver). Besides 3DMark 11 only measure GPU performance with max Turbo, in games the CPU must work also. While HD4600 does not have problem to keep max GPU turbo, the Radeon 8650G struggling of 35W TDP limit.
Than we did not talked about HD5000, HD5100 and HD5200. The HD4600 almost just the entry level from Intel...

 

In GX70 the A10-5750M gets P1434 in 3DMark11, GPU score is P1355. HD4600 scores 14% loe\wer in the GPU test.
But things get much worse in games, at higher settings or resolutions the HD4600 gets destroyed even by the A10-4600M when the A10 isn't CPU limited.
In CS: GO at 1080P and very high settings and 4XAA the A10-4600M is running at 39FPS (possibly with very old drivers) and the HD4600M can't even get passed 30, heck the A10 is 44% faster. Other cases may not be this extreme but at least there is the trend.

HD5000 is estimated to be slower than 8650G, due to low TDP headroom and low clocks. HD5100 might have better 3DMark scores but in games probably wouldn't be any different from 8650G. The only Intel GPU that is faster is the Iris Pro and that thing is rare and overpriced.

 

Always exist few expectations, I'm sure there is a game which running 44% faster on Intel HD4600. The average of many titles what is count.

 

The GX70 uses 1600MHz ram by default: MSI USA - Dragoon Army Site | GX70 Gaming Notebook
With DDR3-1866, should be able to bump it's performance enough to get it to 1500.

Intel has an abysmal record for graphics drivers, so many games have had issues in the past, I'd be extremely wary of trusting Intel drivers to improve, Intel in the past has usually only produced updated drivers for one generation, as soon as a new graphics part came out, they would stop drivers for the old part, at least with AMD and Nvidia you know you get drivers updated on a regular basis and you can get a lot of years out of your graphics.

That's a pretty expensive entry level; $300+ for a quad core haswell with HD4600, Richland is around $100 (and has better graphics)...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)#Mobile_processors

 

The TDP in the Richland products can be configured according to the specific design needs of each notebook manufacturer. It's very possible MSI GX70 overpower the APU, therefore you can see better 3DMark score there. However not all laptops have cooling like MSI GX70, so also possible some manufacturers will underpower the A10-5750M...

 

What kind of games do you plan on playing? Some games (ex: Crysis 3) will simply kneecap the HD 4600, and others (ex: Starcraft 2) will do the same to the A10's CPU.

 

The Intel Iris Pro parts are what AMD should've been aiming for.
I don't understand why they didn't make a more powerful (with higer TDP) part that could compete with a Geforce 650M and a mobile i5 even if the TDP was 45W or 55W.
I hope they release something like that with Kaveri.

 

Processors have set TDP, normal and boosts clocks, I've never heard of a company purposely underclocking a processor, though I know some MSI laptops have an overclocking feature (which may or may not have been used when testing 3DMark). AMD reported 1400 points in 3DMark11 on their reference laptop back in January at CES, faster ram and driver updates would easily bring the performance to 1500 points. Their reference A10-4600M was reported as providing only 1150 points, and I've personally worked on laptops with A10-4600M which put out over 1300 points, so their reference is fairly conservative on performance.

AMD discloses performance of future mobile APUs

They may have stuck with the 35W TDP if increasing it didn't scale performance much, although for the equivalent of a 55W CPU you can get an a10-5750m with a discrete HD 8750M.

Kaveri should be a fairly big improvement over Richland as AMD is focusing more on gaming, I wasn't able to find any specs on the upcoming Kaveri mobile APUs, but I've seen some people claiming a 33% boost in graphics.

The one potential case for much better GPU performance with Kaveri is if they release laptops with soldered on GDDR5 instead of DDR3, in that scenario I could see Kaveri doubling the performance of Richland.

 

Underclocking? Oh no, they simply rely on it throttling when it overheats if they figured that the laptop doesn't need a decent cooling system.

 

Last I heard AMD discarded the idea of using GDDR5 with Kaveri.
33% increase in GPU performance is decent but I would like to see more. The estimated increase for CPU performance is 15%-20% over last-gen. If that is true then AMD will catch up on the CPU portion to Intel since Haswell barely brought any improvements in that aspect.

 

The 15-20% is probably the improvement in IPC alone, I have heard numbers such as Kaveri being up to 30-40% faster. Now that's for the CPU, GPU is a complete mystery, I have also heard GPU having 6-12 GCN compute units. 12 CUs for the Desktop Kaveri will put it on par with the Xbox One APU, though who knows how cut down the mobile version will be. Also all this might be old projections and who knows what AMD has altered by now.

 

Mobile Kaveri's GCN could be like 3 times better than Richland in GPU, well surpassing the overpriced Iris Pro. And 30% better IPC in CPU, which should be a huge power saver, while also being at 28nm. Those will be launched in October probably, maybe in time for notebooks on sale by mid Nov. A lot of the lower priced AMD based notebooks sell in Nov/Dec, and perhaps this year finally a lot of high performance models.

 

I hope so, but there are rumors going around that AMD has scrapped the GDDR5 plans just like they did to 3 module/6 core version of Kaveri

 

The 30--40/ faster CPU numbers you've heard were in relation to first generation Bulldozer not Trinity. If it is over Trinity, then that's great but considering AMD's history I seriously doubt that.

 

Actually, AMD itself stated they realistically expect a (conservative) 45% improvement on the CPU side. Compared to what exactly, I'm not sure, but lets say Bulldozer. So if it's from Piledriver, that leaves about 35% CPU improvement on Steamroller/Kaveri.
Individuals seem to have focused on lower 20%-30% estimates - but AMD has been right on track with their 'predictions' since the Bulldozer fiasco, so its possible they could be accurate (or wrong, but wrong in a manner that results in even higher performance).
We do know that AMD decided to double the number of FPU's on Steamroller (which Kaveri is based on), and there are other supposed improvements across the architecture as well as
So 'real world' numbers could be much higher depending on the tasks and easily match Haswell in single and multi-threaded performance - but we have to wait and see.

The igpu bit... not sure about that one. From what I can tell it is 'seemingly apparent' AMD dropped GDDR5 (we cannot be completely sure however), although the bit on the 3 modules/6 cores being dropped seems to be considered a 'real deal'.

More can be read here:
AMD Updates Roadmaps, Shows 28nm Kaveri for Socket FM2+ - Bright Side Of News*

I'm looking forward to Steamroller/Kaveri, and will likely hold off on any potential new system purchase until it gets released and we get some real numbers going.

P.S. I hope the manufacturers don't give us the middle-finger on Steamroller/Kaveri like they usually do (given Intel practices on that front), but its possible things will turn around because now AMD managed to get into the consoles and is permeating the tablet space.

 

For Steamroller, they claim 30% improvement in Ops Per Cycle from moving to dual decoders (not FPUs) and 15% in general likely from smaller die size and tweaking of the cores themselves, as well as improved fetching.

All of it sort of adds up to about 30% better than piledriver, 45% better than bulldozer. I have been waiting for Kaveri for a long time, and my desktop has been waiting for Steamroller FX, which hopefully maintains AM3+ with no GPU. Without the GPU dual channel DDR3 at 2133 is kind of the expected target if they maintain backwards compatability. But with a new socket for mobile and desktop APUs, they can drop GDDR5 and maybe use triple channel DDR3 for the extra bandwidth needed for the GPU. Funny thing about that BSN article, they got to see NDA, non-discloseure material, and are disclosing details, so who know what they really saw, how much of it they saw, etc....without someone getting in serious trouble.

Now imagine though, if doing something computationally tough that uses the FPUs, and instead just send them over to the GPU, one majorly fast FPU. Then their real computational power using the HSA would explode.

 

Did you guys see this video? In light of E3, I thought it was cool and well made (with just the right amount of cheese). I kind of laughed at the HSA and Turbo Core references however the action kept me hooked. Seemed like a real moive

Kinda reminds me of the new Tron movie. And is that big dude suppose to be Intel? lol versus AMD's 4 cores?

 

It would've made more sense if the big red guys showed up to gun down the boss and everything else upon the activation of the HSA-optimization.

 

Very true, they missed that one?

 

Well AMD have an event sometime in November so I wouldn't be surprised if Kaveri gets released then.

 

I realize this is in the rearview but I got to thinking: we havent really talked much on this thread about how we [er, you] guys like or dislike the trinity-based units you own and Pilot?
so how 'bout a roundup. what do you have Trinity-wise? is it good bang-for-buck? what do you detest about it? does the performance meet your expectations or not? if you have an A8-based unit do you wish you had opted for the A10? which ones overheat and crater? or just overheat? how's the performance on "everything else" but intensive graphics? etc.

I'm a bit of an ebay hound for a number of reasons one being that I do tech work and I have customers that occasionally pay me to do buying for them. I've noticed there's still a pretty good demand for trinity-based units, though the price is decaying substantially - good for the buyer! still a LOT Of units out there going stale however because the seller wants a stoopid price.
saw a lot of 10 m6's go by the other day relatively cheap, but they'll reappear one at a time probably priced 400 bucks, and won't sell. the ones auctioned will sell, for around 330 or so [a8 units...]

 

Mobile Kaveri only in next year, first the desktop versions are coming. And who knows how long will take until someone will put it into laptop. For example Mobile Richland launched march 12th and still hard to find in a laptop...

 

So far I'm pretty happy with my a8-4500m based Asus k55n, I would have preferred one with an a10-4600m, but a new or refurbished laptop would have cost at least $200 more than I paid; I'm from Canada, so we don't have too many options for a10-4600m laptops, just noticed newegg.com has two models with it that aren't on the Canadian site, and the price is pretty good.

That being said, the a8-4500m is still pretty solid, especially when paired with dual channel memory, can handle good quality 1080p videos no problem and my games run fine on lower settings.

Sent from my SGH-I717D using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

further my hopes drop!

If mobile Kaveri launches with no Ultrathin products then I'm just going to buy a Trinity/Richlands Ultrathin and call it a day (assuming there are any around by that time)

I'm genuinely surprised that Sony haven't announced any AMD products considering the PS4.

 

Actually, Kaveri APU release this year is on specifically the 2013 notebook roadmap, and samples have already been sent to OEMs, production volumes just not shipping until later, probably October. And there might be like one or two notebooks out there by the end of the year, maybe. It would be nice to have some nice looking quality notebooks with AMD inside, for holiday sales starting in November, whether they are Kabini, Richland or Kaveri.

 

I'm fairly sure AMD would want at least one of their products to be fully introduced during the Christmas shopping season. Otherwise I'm going to short against their stocks, knowing that they can't afford to keep hemorrhaging cash.

 

Their Kabini line will probably be in more PCs sold in November and December than any other platform out there from anyone. Heres just to hoping that Richland gets into some decent thin and lites well before that and Kaveri makes an introduction.

 

Here I found in English what I've knew from a foreign source;

So, I think Kaveri will have to compete against Broadwell.

 

Intel mentioned that they won't have anything new until 2015. That's a whole year of Haswell vs Kaveri/Steamroller.

 

That article is several months old, while just a couple weeks ago at Computex AMD presented a notebook roadmap showing Kaveri released in 2013 and another desktop roadmap also showing Kaveri in 2013. Whos knows where that guy in your link from Jan got that info from. He made a lot of negative spin on AMD to start with, so he could have just been making some assumptions on releases, as he made it a point to say that releasing desktop skus is easier because of their higher power envelope. And yet, AMD released the notebook Richland well before the Desktop.

It would be a good bet that they will be launched prior to the AMD Fusion Developer Summit that AMD pushed from June to 11 November. Assuming the summit will be about developers progress and results with all of the samples AMD has already sent out and what not, so AMD can give some figures for what kind of gains the HSA of Fusion give with developer's software optimization.

 

If so, than I see brighter future for Kaveri and + this;

AMD say “PC ports of next-generation console titles are likely to struggle” on Intel tech

 

Intel can produce CPUs that can brute-force its way to 120 FPS without the special extensions or HSA.

The IGP? It's going to be a major setback with the titles ported from the new PS4 and Xbox One, since now they're designed with a 7790 or 7850+ as its base, instead of some old GPU back in mid 2000s.

 

HP Pavilion 11 TouchSmart Hands On - YouTube
<iframe width='560' height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/zgbsPoL6B1A" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

what can you guys tell from this, if anything?

 

I'm looking for a small ultraportable like that. I found an Acer Aspire One 722 with a C-60 but id rather not invest in a previous-gen product and the Acer brand doesn't help either. A quad core Kabini/Temash netbook is what id like to get and that 11.6" Touchsmart looks decent.



Sent from my SPH-M580 using Tapatalk 2

 

Can they now?
I doubt it.
The CPU is inherently slower compared to the GPU for such tasks.
And besides, with Kaveri/Steamroller on their way... you have to keep in mind that Intel is NOT that far ahead of AMD in the desktop department on the CPU front.
With all of the stated improvements, Steamroller based cores will likely match or closely approach Intel in single-threaded tasks, while giving a higher multi-threaded performance (on the overall CPU front), while providing a much better igp in the process.
Also, you cannot brute-force your way to everything seeing how its quite ineffectual in the long run.
Furthermore, HSA is basically there to enable usage of CPU based tasks on the GPU (or in this case the igp) to completing the task much faster than what the CPU could do on its own - and AMD's gpu on Kaveri is probably going to be on par, if not better than what Intel put on Haswell (but also designed with HSA in mind).

This I think is fairly accurate, although, we cannot jump to conclusions because we still don't know how will games actually behave on either hardware and what overall benefits we will see (apart from visuals of course).

 

The IGP in Kaveri will likely be 100% greater than even Intel's best $800 Haswell chip with its extra VRAM on the package.

 

Btw... I think I read somewhere that GDDR5 is probably going to be included in Kaveri and that it won't be dropped.
Basically, it was described that the newest sockets made specifically for Steamroller/Kaveri will have GDDR5 support, and while older/current sockets will be compatible with Steamroller/Kaveri, plugging newest APU's into them will mean that GDDR5 won't be supported.

We still don't know how powerful AMD's igp on Kaveri will be, so we cannot make any final conclusions until we get more relevant data - but I am hoping we will get a much more powerful one compared to what Haswell Iris Pro 5200.

 

Looking at the reviews of AMD's low power Kabini models, the GCN graphics is way better on a part that consumes less power. 15W A4-5000 is about 75% better in GPU than the 18W E-350, and the Kabini pulls in the Southbridge and more of the northbridge that accounted for about another 3W, so 15W part destroying 21W of the last gen. The E2-1800 would be a newer part, but its not much better than an E-350 and Anand did an A4-5000 vs E-350 comparison. With a bit of driver optimization I imagine the A4-5000 will actually end up at double the GPU performance of the last gen of Brazos parts. There is also a 25W A6-5200 Kabini though, with 500Mhz more on the CPU cores (2Ghz) and 100MHz more on the GPU (600MHz). That is the part I am waiting to get in a small convertible type laptop. AnandTech | The AMD Kabini Review: A4-5000 APU Tested

Those parts are jumping from 40nm to 28nm, old VLIW4 to GCN GPU. Kaveri is jumping from 32nm to a more optimized 28nm process and VLIW4 to GCN. If you maintain the same TDP in this update, like a 35W mobile part, the mobile Kaveri will likely be 3-4 times better than mobile Richland in GPU, and there are some developer figures out there that were leaked showing about 4 times the compute performance. Gaming increases would likely be somewhere between 2 and 3 times greater. Or at least I can hope.

 

I would love to have such an optimistic outlook as you. I seriously doubt that AMD will catch up to Intel in single-threaded tasks. They didn't manage to with Trinity - it's performance is around an i3 Ivy Bridge in multi-thread and weaker in single thread. AMD never mentioned that such improvements should be expected.
When they change their architecture from the Bulldozer base then I believe they can give a big jump, but Kaveri won't bring these improvements since it is still based on Buldozer.
Expect a 15%-20% increase over Richland in terms of CPU tasks and around 50% in GPU tasks - and lets hope that the CPU doesn't become a limiting factor.

 

All the articles I've read said that Kaveri is based on Steamroller, not Bulldozer. Where are you getting your information?