Today, AMD is announcing availability for a few new A-series desktop processors. Versions of these chips, codenamed Trinity and based on AMD’s Piledriver architecture, have already been shipping in laptops and desktops for some time now, but this marks the first time that the chips will be available to consumers and system builders directly.
The chips aren’t bad—the integrated graphics processor on some of the chips are capable of beating Intel’s HD 4000 GPU in gaming performance, though the CPUs aren’t quite capable of beating last year’s Sandy Bridge processors at similar clock speeds. For AMD, the issue is that they’re still talking mostly about desktop and laptop chips.