AMD's Bulldozer CPU is on the verge of being released. Sever markets will see the CPU soon, while desktop customers will have to wait until Q4 (which is only a month away at this point). No one likes to ship a delayed part, but if you do your job right the part that follows should arrive in a timely fashion. The follow-on to Bulldozer is called Piledriver and it will make its debut with AMD's Trinity APU in 2012. 

Trinity is a higher end successor to Llano. It will integrate 2 - 4 Piledriver cores and feature some sort of a Radeon GPU on-die. Performance across the board will be higher than Llano. Piledriver should offer better performance per clock vs. Bulldozer, but Trinity won't be targeted at the same high-end market that AMD's FX series based on Bulldozer will address. Presumably we'll see a Piledriver based FX CPU at some point down the road. AMD indicated that Trinity was a few months away, implying an early 2012 launch. 

To show the health of Trinity silicon, AMD showed it running Deus Ex in a suite a block away from IDF. The Trinity demo was done in a generic notebook chassis. We weren't allowed to benchmark the APU unfortunately. You can check out the demo in the video below:

If AMD can deliver Trinity in early 2012 and continue to execute beyond it, we may finally see the end of AMD's CPU woes. The company needs to put out a solid design and improve on it regularly. With Trinity following Bulldozer so closely, AMD may be doing just that.

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  • Ebonstar - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link

    I see the AMD guy mentioned the stuttering on the Intel system in that demonstration.

    I wonder if the (very recent) patch to Deus Ex would fix that!

    (From the patch notes):
    Fixes:
    - We have addressed various issues that can occur for players that would result in ‘stuttering’.
    o Stutters that are the result of graphics driver shader processing are now removed or significantly reduced.
    o Stutters that are the result of data streaming have been removed or significantly reduced.
    o Performance has been improved and made more stable on dual-core systems. This could previously also result in stuttering.
  • silverblue - Friday, September 16, 2011 - link

    It is a bit curious. When AMD did the Llano vs. Sandy Bridge comparison, they had the good sense to include the specs and driver versions at the end of the video. Obviously, it can't be done in this case, but still, knowing how both platforms measure up would be helpful. It's almost as if AMD are saying "we're using alpha hardware and software, so regardless of a performance enhancing patch aiding the HD 3000, we're still going to mop the floor with it".

    Has anyone tried playing the game on their i7 laptop using the integrated GPU? It would be interesting to know how it performs pre- and post-patch.

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