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Gee, I'd like to dump my laptop just to get myself a new laptop with an A10 APU! How cool is that? I'd always like to have more GPU power than CPU, but a little bit of increase in CPU performance wouldn't hurt.

I don't know why AMD does not have a roadmap to get these chips on a super computer. Their architecture would be easier take advantage of than GPU by themselves (Kepler). First there is no PCIe bottleneck, and second, the global memory "is the memory" no double staging of memory and no streaming.

As a mobile platform, however, I think Fusion is to ultrabook what Tegra is to smartphones and tablets. That is... they are awesome !

This post has been edited by kronoscornelius: 18 May 2012 - 01:46 PM

kronoscornelius, on 18 May 2012 - 01:45 PM, said:

No doubt in my mind, they WILL have APUs in supercomputers after HSA kicks in. They will probably also throw SeaMicro's fabric into the mix as well.

Any serious PC user will not be using either the built in intel graphics GPU or AMD's so these performance numbers and claims are pretty lame.

The (second)thing I did when I got a quad core i5 with Sandy Bridge was disable the onboard GPU and drop in a cheap ($99) NVidia card.

The FIRST thing I did was try running a few of my games and apps using the built in GPU and confirmed they basically suck.

I have no idea why Intel and AMD persist in this futile desire to put crappy GPU's in their laptops and desktops.

dk3d, on 18 May 2012 - 04:30 PM, said:

I can think of a very good reason for AMD's efforts. I have a Lenovo X100e rocking an AMD E-350 that can play nearly any game on the market (granted with low quality settings). It can also get 6 hours of battery life. And yet it is still as tiny as any other 11.6" netbook. Hmmm... sounds like an ideal machine for the frequent traveler.

dk3d, on 18 May 2012 - 04:30 PM, said:

I agree 100%. The problem is that most people out there who buy a new PC, have never heard of graphics cards. They buy a new computer that they are told is great and then they wonder why the game they bought doesn't run well or doesn't run at all.

I've been a PC gamer since there were PC's and in my opinion there is nothing more satisfying than running a new video game with a nice graphics card installed in my PC. I'm just wondering when nVidia is going to enter the CPU market...

CPU performance is mattering lesser and lesser every year,with browsers speeding up and gaining gpu acceleration,same with operating systems and programs,internet connections,PCs gaining SSDs, hybrid disks.

"I have no idea why Intel and AMD persist in this futile desire to put crappy GPU's in their laptops and desktops"

The GPU's get better and better with each iteration. If you don't play games or you are not a graphics professional these built in GPU's are just fine.

waldojim, on 18 May 2012 - 04:57 PM, said:

I thought you had the MV-40 in it - they only offered the E350 in the x120e. (and as I recall, the x130e offers the E300, E450, and SB i3) Anyway, what I've found is that my x120e's graphics aren't great - it's okay for playing some games at 1024x600, but it doesn't do it all that well. That said, for a lower-end gaming machine, Trinity looks fairly promising. It seems that, as long as the CPU is decent, it's not a bottleneck anyway.

LiveBrianD, on 19 May 2012 - 12:06 PM, said:

Ooops - sorry, for some reason I have E-350 on the brain.

IMO, any SERIOUS gamer will buy a desktop for this purpose. The amount of heat generated by top-end graphics circuitry will overwhelm what a laptop can handle.

Combine this with a puny monitor (15" or less), and it should be clear that laptops shouldn't be considered anything more than a stopgap measure when it comes to gaming.

JimH443, on 19 May 2012 - 02:11 PM, said:

That may be your opinion, but it certainly doesn't fit everyone. When I need to travel across country, I do NOT want to take my desktop with me. For soldiers in the military, many don't have room for a desktop, and certainly can't take it with them to Iraq.

Any properly designed laptop can deal with the heat being generated. Shoot, I have a W520 that can attest to that. Not only can it deal with the heat of the CPU and the video card, it can even deal with me overclocking both. That laptop plays games well enough to satisfy most desktop gamers. Even for SERIOUS gaming.

waldojim, on 19 May 2012 - 02:48 PM, said:

The conditions you cite are why stopgap measures are necessary. I never said they weren't. There will be those who are in situations where the length of time this is necessary will be long-term or even indefinite.

waldojim, on 19 May 2012 - 02:48 PM, said:

I'm sure you're aware that the heat sink on top-end video cards gets hot enough to cause blisters with even the slightest touch. I have yet to see a laptop that can handle this much heat.

JimH443, on 19 May 2012 - 03:38 PM, said:

That is relatively easy. First, pipe the heat away from the source. Then use a BIG freaking heatsink to draw the heat off the pipes. lastly, use a fan to move enough air to keep the heatsinks cool.

It works quite well. I play with my W520 on my lap as needed, or use a cooling pad when I overclock to help it deal with the excessive heat.

But if you’re a gamer or want longer battery life in your laptop, AMD has an edge over Intel.

And despite the less-than-overwhelming overall CPU performance gains, Trinity-based laptops will be more than fine for mainstream tasks"
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I'm going to agree with that, despite prefering the better performance gains from Intel Honestly AMD chips will still handle the general users tasks, including the demands of a gamer just fine. (That is Not above a 1080p resolution, and not ridiculously crazy, or i guess video editing? who knows, Needless
but to say HD 4000 Got raped, Again. Oh well, It is nice to know that AMD is still holding their game with Graphics performance, better the nothing rly. I almost wonder if their's a reason their CPU chips are always slower.

Lets also compare prices. In the USA, the customer for desktops or laptops is not very price sensitive, whats a hundred or so dollars more for Intel. The end user really does not benefit from Intels offerings. On the otherhand the server world does, where mips does mean a great deal.

Wow..!! I have an HP with AMD's APU and with a discrete card in addition to the integrated one. I can ran professional graphics intensive applications and all kinds of games on my AMD APU laptop.

The AMD can use AMD's Crossfire technology to combine the integrated and discrete graphics cards to have a great graphics performance.

On my former Intel's laptop, I have to disable the Integrate GPU because it cannot handle advance 3d graphics and it does not have integration with the NVIDIA GPU.

The new AMD Trinity APU's will be able to use eyefinity, will be able to remove shaking from video in real time, and the discrete and integrated GPU's will provide top end graphics.

I know they don't do 3d graphics benchmarks with both the integrated and discrete GPU's because Intel doesn't support yet any multi-gpu integration technology, but what kind of benchmarks are being posted if they choose the lowest capabilities of a system to match the dis-advantages of another system?

I will like to see Trinity based laptops benchmarks perform with the integrated and discrete GPU's enabled, with multiple-displays enabled, with video shaking removal benchmarks, etc.

The later is why I chose the AMD APU's. In real life, the AMD APU based laptops (with integrated and discrete GPUs) outperform the Intel with NVIDIA discrete GPU options, since NVIDIA GPU's don't integrate with the Intel GPU's.

Hopefully Intel will improve further their GPU's but for now, AMD with dual integrate and discrete GPU's are a better choice. AMD's APU multi-thread very good, too, compare to the Intel's CPU's, so unless you ran single CPU applications, you may really want to ran on an AMD system.

Andress7ij, on 20 May 2012 - 07:43 AM, said:

I am not sure how you come to the conclusion that Nvidia cards SLIed with Intel IGPs would be needed to compete with AMD. However, real world performance differences beg to differ. Most especially in games that quickly hit the CPU limits of AMD processors.

Intel Sandy Bridge GPu's do not support DirectX 11 (it only supports Direct X 10) and when you use them with NVIDIA
gpus's on old games that don't use DirectX 11, there are serious graphics problems that forces the user to disable
the Intel's discrete card.

I don't see any mention from Intel that they will support NVIDIA SLI Direct X 11 with the Intel HD 4000 GPU's, so
I don't know if they are supported or if anybody have tried.

Having two graphics cards working in tandem, one integrated and one discrete, provides many benefits for running
OpenCL/Direct-Compute, which Adobe, video processing applications, music applications, etc. use intensively to boost performance
significantly. CPU's are not use for the latter processing because they cannot compete with the 100's or 1000's
processors that the GPU's (discrete or not) use. OpenCL/Direct-Compute the new computation APIs that current and future
softwares will use for huge parallel computations. CPU's are not designed for massive parallelism, even less in
a laptop or a desktop, but the GPU's can through standards like OpenCL and make the laptops behave like small vector
supercomputers.

Anybody knows if the Intel Ivy Bridge HD 4000 fully support Direct X 11.1 and if it supports NVIDIA SLI? I think
Ivy Bridge may only support Direct X 11, and the Intel's future generation Haswell will support direct X 11.1, which
means NVIDIA's cards that support Direct X 11.1 will not be compatible unless downgraded to ran Direct X11.

AMD and NVIDIA are always releasing cards that beat each other. Before NVIDIA released Kepler, AMD was the fastest
graphics cards. AMD will soon release a dual card that will out perform NVIDIA's and this will repeat itself over
and over and over.

waldojim, on 20 May 2012 - 09:11 AM, said: