AMD has formally announced its second-generation A-Series mobile processor, which you’ll see in notebooks branded as AMD Vision A4, A6, A8 and A10.
- Check out our AMD A10-4600M review
As well as traditional notebooks, AMD is also targeting ‘ultrathin’ notebooks with this release – going after Intel’s relatively new Ultrabook target market. AMD was first to announce AMD-powered ultraportables last week, with what it called Sleekbooks.
AMD says that Trinity represents an inflection point in computing, and while that’s little more than PR bluster, there’s no doubt that AMD is a serious option for those who want both performance and DirectX 11 graphics in their mobile devices. However, whether AMD can start to seriously impact on Intel’s dominance is quite another matter.
Trinity follows on from last year’s Llano APU, the first mainstream chip to combine DirectX 11 graphics and processing on a single die. The new 32nm chips deliver double the performance-per-watt of their predecessors.
The all new architecture features dual or quad new Piledriver x86 cores – an evolution of the Bulldozer architecture. AMD claims up to a 29 per cent improvement in productivity performance over the Husky32 cores found in Llano.
Battery life is the battleground
The GPU are HD 7000 Series cores, based on AMD’s Northern Islands architecture – the high-end A10 chip we’ve been testing features integrated AMD Radeon 7600 graphics – AMD is calling the integrated 3D core the Radeon HD 7660G.
Battery life is a big focus of the new chips – AMD claims 11 hours of resting battery life and five hours of video playback. Clever technology (called AMD Turbo Core 3.0) enables automatic bi-directional power management between the x86 and Radeon graphics cores to deliver power and performance where it is needed.
Mobile versions of the APUs are being made available first, with desktop chips at a later, currently unknown, date. The mobile chops will be available in a number of configurations rated at 17W, 25W and 35W thermal design power (TDP).
The memory controller on the 2012 AMD A-Series platform supports up to DDR3-1600 and adds support for low power 1.25V DIMMs. There’s also support for DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort 1.2 for up to four displays.
When Alienware announced the Ivy Bridge refresh for its gaming notebook lineup, one model was conspicuously absent. Word filtered out that the smallest member of the range, the 11.6” M11x, would not be refreshed and that Dell was preparing to discontinue the line. For ultramobile gamers, the loss of the M11x is a huge blow, because it was one of the more unique notebooks out there—a near ultraportable with legitimate gaming aspirations, backed up by gaming performance that lit the class standards on fire. It was a truly standout notebook, and it will be sorely missed.
But now, a spiritual successor emerges in the form of Clevo’s W110ER. We have this unit courtesy of Eurocom, who are calling it the Monster 1.0, but other boutiques selling the W110ER include AVADirect, OriginPC, Sager, and XoticPC amongst others. We typically see this with larger notebooks from Clevo and Compal, but it hasn’t been as prominent with smaller notebooks until now, with the exception of some ASUS models from years past.
The W110ER spec sheet actually reads like a pipe dream, something that you would come up with if things like thermal limits didn’t exist. The performance-class GPU is present and accounted for—Clevo ships every W110ER whitebook with a Kepler-based GT 650M (2GB DDR3, 384 CUDA cores, Optimus). But the most impressive thing here is that the W110ER has support for Intel’s new IVB 35W quad-core CPUs. Yeah seriously, a quad-core 11.6” notebook. Just to refresh your memory, the M11x made use of Intel’s low voltage dual-core parts, so this is a significant step up in CPU performance. It’s a ridiculous amount of performance stuffed into a tiny notebook. Interested? Read on.
While we were off at NVIDIA’s GTC 2012 conference seeing NVIDIA’s latest professional products, NVIDIA’s GeForce group was busy with some launches of their own. The company has quietly launched the GeForce GT 610, GT 620, and GT 630 into the retail market. Unfortunately these are not the Kepler GeForce cards you were probably looking for.
| GT 630 GDDR5 | GT 630 DDR3 | GT 620 | GT 610 | |
| Previous Model Number | GT 440 GDDR5 | GT 440 DDR3 | N/A | GT 520 |
| Stream Processors | 96 | 96 | 96 | 48 |
| Texture Units | 16 | 16 | 16 | 8 |
| ROPs | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Core Clock | 810MHz | 810MHz | 700MHz | 810MHz |
| Shader Clock | 1620MHz | 1620MHz | 1400MHz | 1620MHz |
| Memory Clock | 3.2GHz GDDR5 | 1.8GHz DDR3 | 1.8GHz DDR3 | 1.8GHz DDR3 |
| Memory Bus Width | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit | 64-bit |
| Frame Buffer | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB | 1GB |
| GPU | GF108 | GF108 | GF108/GF117? | GF119 |
| TDP | 65W | 65W | 49W | 29W |
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm | TSMC 40nm |
As NVIDIA was already reusing Fermi GPUs for GeForce 600 series parts for the OEM laptop and desktop market, it was only a matter of time until this came over to the retail market, and that’s exactly what has happened. The GT 610, GT 620, and GT 630 are all based on Fermi GPUs, and in fact 2 of them are straight-up rebadges of existing GeForce 400 and 500 series cards. Worse, they’re not even consistent with their OEM counterparts – the OEM GT 620 and GT 630 are based off of different chips and specs entirely.
At the bottom of the 600 series retail stack is the GeForce GT 610, which is a rebadge of the GT 520. This means it’s either a GF119 GPU or cut-down GF108 GPU featuring a meager 48 CUDA Cores and a 64bit memory bus, albeit with a low 29W TDP as a result. This is truly a rock bottom card meant to be a cheap as possible upgrade for older computers, as even an Ivy Bridge HD4000 iGPU should be able to handily surpass it.
The second card is the GT 620, which is a variant of the OEM-only GT 530. With 96 CUDA cores we’re not 100% sure that this is GF108 as opposed to the 28nm GK117, but as NVIDIA currently has a 28nm capacity bottleneck we can’t see them placing valuable 28nm chips in low-end retail cards. Furthermore the 49W TDP perfectly matches the GF108 based GT 530. Compared to the OEM GT 620 the retail model has twice as many CUDA cores, so it has twice as much shader performance on paper, but because of the 64bit memory bus it’s going to be significantly memory bandwidth starved.
The final new 600 series card is the GT 630, which is a rebadge of the GT 440. Like the GT 440 this card comes in two variants, a model with DDR3 and a model with GDDR5. Both models are based on GF108 and have all 96 CUDA cores enabled, and have the same core clock of 810MHz. At the same time this is going to be the card that deviates from its OEM counterpart the most. The OEM GT 630 was a Kepler GK107 card, so this rules out getting a Kepler based GT 630 retail card any time in the near future.
As always, rebadging doesn’t suddenly make a good card bad – or vice versa – but it’s disappointing to once again see this mess transition over to the retail market. We hold to our belief that previous generation products are perfectly acceptable as they were, and that the desire to have yearly product numbers in an industry that is approaching 2 year product cycles is silly at its best, and confusing at its worst.
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Expert Reviews – PCs
The new Kepler GPU that Nvidia recently announced has been five years in the making.
It will be at the heart of supercomputers that will help make scientific discoveries as well as powering gaming clouds and high resolution remote computing. But why is Kepler more than just another really powerful, really expensive GPU?
If it was just really powerful, Kepler would still be impressive. Demonstrating a combination of fluid simulation and ray tracing, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang pointed out that "Doing ray tracing for films takes up the vast majority of processing time – the hours and hours that are necessary to render a frame – and with Kepler we’re able to do ray tracing in real time.
"These are real time simulated effects that are only possible because of high performance computing only possible because were really doing fluid simulation, light simulation. Simulation and computer graphics are merging; in a few years computer graphics will look nothing like the easily shaded graphics we see in console games today."
Faster and lower power
Architecturally, Kepler is both faster than the previous Fermi GPU and lower power; there are many more cores but they run at 750MHz rather than 1.3GHz.
Two GPUs on a graphics card like the Kepler-powered GTX 690 will be able to communicate directly with each other; they can also communicate with up to 32 CPU cores instead of just one CPU at a time, and data parallelism means the GPU can look at the results of computations and decide what to do next instead of sending information back to the CPU and waiting for instructions.
It also has a memory management unit; combined with Nvidia’s hypervisor and VGX architecture, that lets Kepler be a virtual GPU for remote access with a tool like Citrix Receiver on a tablet or Microsoft RemoteFX on a thin client – or power gaming cloud services that Nvidia is calling GeForce Grid.
Not all of that is in the first Kepler GPU, the Tesla K10 that’s just started shipping, but all the features will be in the Tesla K20, coming in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Services like Playcast and Gaikai will use Kepler GPUs later this year to let you play console-style games on any device with an H.264 decoder. That’s similar to the OnLive service but Nvidia General Manager Phil Eisler says GeForce Grid will be much more efficient to run.
"With the first generation of cloud gaming that’s out there, you pretty much take a one to one ratio of one computer, one graphics card to one game, which is pretty expensive. The new Kepler architecture is much more power efficient; we can actually render a game in half the power.
"Plus the built in encoder means you can offload encoding from the CPU so you can run many more games per server; you can go from what is effectively one game per server to about eight games per server and that reduces the cost by that much and reduces power by half."
The cost of running a service will be low enough that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsuan Huang told TechRadar the expects the monthly price for access to mainstream games will be the same as streaming films from Netflix. "Our goal is to be streaming at a cost level like Netflix. In which case you’ll be able to enjoy hundres of games, thousands of games in a library for a month. And for blockbuster video games the moment that it comes out, the nanosecond it comes out, you’ll be able to enjoy that for some premium charge."
Huang thinks that cable TV companies and Internet TV providers will offer their own gaming services. "They offer different channels and instead of ABC and CBS there would be potentially a channel that says GeForce GRID and has a whole bunch of games inside."
Kepler is going to power high resolution remote computing for work and high performance gaming in the cloud, but what about putting it in your home PC and having your own cloud? Huang likes the idea but he’s realistic about how well it would work in practice.
"The challenge is you want to be able to stream at a very low latency and that PC sitting in a den somewhere is literally right in front of you but we need to stream that over the clumsy Wi-Fi in people homes so there’s a lot of obstacles. That’s exactly the PC I want at home though. I want a PC with three GTX 690s – because that’s the most you can put in a PC- and put that in the basement somewhere and just stream it to wherever our family happens to be."
One thing Nvidia isn’t talking about this week is whether any of the same technology powering Kepler is going to show up in the ARM CPU it promised to build back at CES 2011, but Project Denver is still going strong according to Chief Scientist Bill Dally.
"It’s an ARM core with performance better than you can get with cores availability from ARM and it has substantially better energy efficiency even at this higher performance. That’s all we’re saying about it now, because we don’t want to tip our hand and have our competitors know what we’re doing."
Huang is making his usual bold predictions about Project Denver though; "You are going to be so happy," he promised. It doesn’t sound as if they’ll be ready for the Windows RT launch though.
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