It is believed that the AMD’s forthcoming “Trinity” APU is going to be landing out of the production house somewhere in January 2012 and become a part of actual products in between first quarter and second quarter.

Now how it is going to perform is hardly known but some leaked slides from AMD has made some comparisons between AMD’s second generation APUs meant for desktops and the ones meant for the Llano predecessors.

Essentially, Trinity seems to be about 20% faster in performing the general purpose tasks and when it comes to graphics processing applications it is about 30% faster as compared to the already existing chip from the company.

It is notable that in 3DMark Vantage, AMD‘s Trinity A8 and A6 got to score about 1000 points more than the Llano equivalents. Even the A4 series of Trinity showed some improvement though it wasn’t that impressive and made about 500 points.

Again, in the PCMark Vantage Suite based “general performance” benchmarks, Trinity APUs were found to be ahead of their precursors by around 10% to 20% margins and at the same time in the “compute capacity” benchmark Trinity A85 series came up with an increase of about 72% compared to its counterparts from Llano.  However, you need to note that all this information is from the company itself so don’t try believing on them blindly.

There’s another claim from AMD that when the A8, A7 and A4 Trinity series are paired together with the discrete Turks Pro GPU properly known as Radeon HD 6570, there is a noticeable improvement in the dual graphics configuration.

AMD is to be using 32nm SOI HKMG process technology at GlobalFoundries for the second generation APU especially made for the mainstream personal computers which offers Comal in the case of notebooks and Virgo in the case of desktops.

Four “Piledriver” cores which happen to be the improved versions of the Bulldozer core that are being used by the FX series processors will be offered by Trinity and along with this, you’ll get AMD Radeon HD 7000 series “Southern Islands” graphics core including DirectX 11 class graphic support, DDR3 memory controller and some other enhancements are also offered. You’ll find the chip to be showing compatibility for the latest FM2 sockets.

AMD has just come up with its first dual core Llano APUs. With the addition of these APUs namely A4-3300 and A4-3400, their line has got extended by more than five models which are available right now and have even got the price of the entry-level desktop reduced to mere $70. Both the chips use a Radeon HD 6410D GPU integrating it with 160 shaders and 1 MB L2 cache, maintaining a 65W TDP at the same time.

It is only their CPU and GPU frequencies on the basis of which you can differentiate between these chips. Checking out A4-3300, it’s found workable at 2.5GHz with its GPU clocked at 443 MHz, where as the CPU core of A4-3400 runs at 2.7 GHz and has a GPU frequency of 600 MHz.

While in its features, an integrated USB 3.0 controller, AMD Steady Video support in order to remove the jitters and shakes at the time of video watching, and AMD Dual Graphics that lets you pair the integrated GPU with a discrete Radeon HD 6000 Series graphics card for performance enhancement are expected. However, none of the A4 models support Turbo Core.

Both the chips are expected to be working well in all existing Socket-FM1 motherboards. The official prices declared for 1K quantities for A4- 3300 and 3400 happen to be $64 and $69, so the retail price at which they’ll be available by the later part of the month will be slightly higher.

If buzz is to be believed, AMD is getting ready to roll out a brand new flagship which happens to be an A-series Fusion processor. One can expect to have it out by the end of this year.  It is believed that A8-3870 will be offering a core clock frequency of about 3.1 GHz together with an unlocked multiplier which will be offering an effortless over-clocking; this feature was missed out when A8-3850 was launched.

Although it will be improving the clock speed by 200 MHz and multiplier is also being made adjustable, yet A8-3970 is going to be quite identical to 3850. It will come along with four processing cores neighboring a 600 MHz Radeon HD 6550D graphics core, a 4MB L2 cache and not L3 cache with a support for about 1866 MHz DDR3 dual channel RAM, and a TDP of 100 W.

The locked multiplier of A8-3850 creates difficulty in over-clocking the processor cores as it forces you to set the clock speed of the graphics engine and memory controller at a higher point. Since, it didn’t appear a very hopeful job to over-clock the APU, so the clock speed was increased by 25% without making any adjustment with the voltage, when the gadget was being reviewed. And this increase brought about 13% to 31% boost for Llano in the software benchmarks of the reviewers.

It was found lot ahead of Sandy Bridge when it came to single chip gaming performance. It was also found that A8-3870 is quite flexible and if you are ready to fiddle around with the voltage settings, you can get still better results than it gave to the reviewers.

AMD is counting upon the next Llano APU as an important revenue provider for 2011. Llano will be launched in the coming weeks as a laptop orientated chip. It will offer a combination of CPU and GPU on to one chunk of silicon and within no time you’ll find its desktop version.

According to a guesstimate, the desktop-based Llano will be appearing in the market in July 2011. Reports say that CPU cores derived from 4 Phenom II and GPU of low-end Radeon HD 5000 series will be incorporated to the chip. Llano’s direct competitor would be Intel’s second-generation core chips which were earlier known by the code name, namely Sandy Bridge.

The coming of Llano in the market implies that AMD’s mid-range chips, quite similar to that of Intel’s, will now deviate from being just CPU-only silicon in most of the markets. This bringing together of CPU and GPU is a much progressive shift made by Llano to bring out an entirely new variety of motherboard.

For the sake of preview, Gigabyte accommodated HEUS with a desktop Llano board. No performance numbers would be yielded by the dead board as right now they are under NDA. However, it enables us to see how around the new APU, designing is done by a tier one manufacturer.

The GA-A75-D3H is a slimline ATX board with no cluttering at all, this is because Llano has as less requirement as a solitary supporting chip. The board also breaks away from the AMx tradition and uses FM1 form factor. But there is one trouble with it that it isn’t compatible with the current chips, this leads to extra expense for the Phenom or Athlon processors’ users if they are thinking of using AMD’s APU.

There’s enough space about the socket to place bulky coolers over the two retention brackets running parallel to the FM1 socket. From the DIMM slots one can make out that dual-channel DDR3 is supported by Llano, at about a speed of 1,600 MHZ.

The Hudson D3 is the single AMD provided chip that sits hidden under Gigabyte heatsink. Hudson is a new introduction just like the FM1 socket. It is believed that it supports 6 SATA 6GB/s storage ports, out of which 5 are on the PCB of Gigabyte – 4 native USB 3.0 ports, along with Llano that offers digital displays of an electric range.

Checking out the expansion slots one can say that Llano offers venerable PCIc – 3 such slots are offered on the board of Gigabyte as well as 2 PCIe x16 slots and a few x1 that work as add-in cards. How the chip allocates the lanes for graphics is yet to be disclosed. Yet according to a guess, about 16 lanes are reserved for graphics which are bifurcated to x8 in two-card mode. The layout suggests that Llano is a mid-range offering and the Bulldozer based Zambezi will be of the enthusiast class which will be launched sometimes after this APU.

The inherent qualities of Llano make it useful for HTPC usage along with its usage for general computing. The visual output trio comprising of VGA, DVI, and HDMI which are powered from the APU’s graphics portion is supported by Gigabyte’s A75-D3H. The chip is expected to provide the latest version of UVD video-acceleration technology of AMD.

The 4 USB 3.0 ports work particularizing the Hudson D3 whereas Gigabyte uses up eSATA in the mix. It appears that it will target the users who are looking for a general purpose PC and have a kind of bias towards the multimedia usage but the A75-UD3H will do well only if AMD handles the retail pricing of the Llano APUs at accommodating levels.

So one will have to wait just a little to make out how the APU of AMD will compete with Core i3 and Core i5 Sandy Bridge chips. So whether or not the motherboard manufacturers will bring out Llano supporting boards can also be seen in the coming weeks.