AMD displays Trinity’s capability and announce its own Thunderbolt alternative

AMD took the time at CES to demonstrated their next-generation accelerated processing unit, known as APU, codenamed “Trinity”, which will make up the 2012 A-Series APU line up from AMD.

Trinity will be presented for mainstream-thru-performance notebooks as well as mainstream desktops, each form factor offering its own standard.

Pictured above is the notebook-specific BGA package which has an exposed rectangular die with a stabilizer frame around it. The cooling will be composed of heat pipes making direct contact with the die. Trinity packs two Piledriver modules, which is an evolution of Bulldozer, but also DirectX 11.1 capable AMD Radeon HD 7000M graphics (for notebook APU) or HD 7000D (for desktop APU).

The crowd, including HotHardware who captured it on video, was presented with a spectacular demo. Without spoiling the surprise, the public was shown two monitors connected to an ATX desktop, one of which was running Dirt 3 DirectX 11 game demo at high-quality settings while the other was revealing the APU to be running GPU-accelerated video transcoding. All was run on a embedded HD 7000 graphics, no discrete cards were used.

Here’s the video:

Just in case, for those unable to see the video, here is what happens (SPOILER ALERT): if so far you haven’t been impressed, be prepared,  when the lid of the ATX desktop case was removed by an AMD representative, the crowd got a look at what the monitors were connected to; a 14″ laptop doing all the work. It doesn’t stop here, as the laptop’s main screen wasn’t idling, on the contrary, it was running a high-definition video playback.

Now you may have heard and seen some benchmarks about Trinity, but whatever they say, its real world performance do impress.

On another subject, a discreet meeting with select journalists took place in a backroom, where AMD also talked about their own version of Intel’s Thunderbolt, referred to as “Lighting Bolt”. This interface will use the same mini-DP port design as Thunderbolt does, it will be able to drive up to four HD displays and multiple USB 3.0 devices but will also have a hub cost of under $40.

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