AMD A10-5800K (Trinity) APU and the A85X Chipset

The first thing to note about the new Trinity platform is that it brings with it a new socket in the form of FM2.While similar to the original Llano FM1 socket, we do have some slight changes that make it impossible to install a Llano based FM1 CPU into an Trinity based FM2 board and vice versa.

While we're dealing with a new socket, out of the three chipsets that are available, two are based on the previous generation A55 and A75 chipset which AMD says is targeted at "Entry level"� and "Entertainment level"�. Along with these two known chipsets, though, we've got the new A85X chipset which is targeted at the "Performance level"�.

While annoying that Llano users can't make the upgrade to Trinity without moving to a new motherboard, looking at the above image you can see that AMD intend to use the FM2 socket for its next generation APU which is yet to be announced.

The biggest change the A85X chipset brings to the table is CrossFire support which of course puts it in that "Performance"� category. Along with that the new chipset also sees an extra two SATA III ports bringing that number up to eight. On the USB front we see the same four / ten / two setup in terms of USB 3.0 / 2.0 / 1.1.

My feeling on the new chipset is a little weird. It's cool that AMD brought CrossFire support to the table here, but if you're going to start looking at building a CrossFire rig and want to go down the path of AMD, we'd probably suggest the move to the higher end FX platform which we'll be looking at in just a moment.

Moving away from the socket and chipset and onto the APU side of things the new Trinity platform brings with it a host of new chips to play with which can be seen below. We've got four series in the form of the A4, A6, A8 and top of the line A10 chips. The main differences between the different models come in the form of the on chip graphics, amount of cores for both the GPU and CPU, speed, cache, and the ability of being unlocked or not.

Today we've got on hand the top of the line A10-5800K which brings with it a 3.8GHz / 4.2GHz clock speed with the latter number being used when Turbo Core is used. Being a "K"� based chip means like the Intel ones it's also unlocked. Along with that we see it supports 1866MHz DDR memory like the A6 series and above while we've got 4MB of cache like the A8 series and above.

Compared to the Llano platform there's not a lot of changes. We've got the same 32nm manufacturing process being used. The die size has been increased from 228mm to 246mm along with a larger transistor count which sees 1.303B instead of 1.178B.

Trinity doesn't really bring with it any huge surprises. It's a progressive step up from the previous generation Llano APU. We've got improvements in all the areas you'd expect and a new socket brought into the mix. The biggest detail probably comes in the form of the A85X chipset which brings a more performance focused chipset to the market thanks to its included CrossFire support.