According to AMD consumers looking to get an Intel ultrabook will pay a premium just to have that Intel Inside sticker on the front. However they will not be getting the same level of performance that they will with the mainstream priced Trinity products. From what we are hearing AMD Trinity based Sleekbooks could cost as little as $500. This is about $200 or so less than Intel’s current ultrabooks. Intel and their manufacturing partners do hope to bring this price down, but you will still end up paying a little more for the Intel books than ones with AMD’s Trinity.

Not all that long ago we talked about what Trinity could do in the Ultrabook and Tablet market if AMD played their cards right. Although most of AMD’s products have memory and caching issues (in terms of performance) where AMD’s APUs score very big is in graphics. We showed you this some of our video coverage of CES 2012 where we saw a laptop running Trinity performing a wide variety of video related tasks and doing them all quite well. AMD has said that they

To combat the performance delta between Intel and AMD, Trinity will have four cores inside its die. This is double what Intel plans for the ULV version of Ivy Bridge. Of course the ULV Ivy Bridge CPUs will have Hyper Threading so they should be a more than a match for Trinity when it comes to raw power and could possibly be more energy efficient (the A10-4655M quad-core draws 25 Watts while the ULV version of Ivy Bridge will only draw 17). Unfortunately Trinity is still being manufactured on a 32nm process so it will still be a little behind Intel for energy efficiency.

AMD is also claiming a 25% performance gain on the CPU and a 50% performance gain in graphic power over Llano. The CPU gain comes from Trinity’s new Piledriver core which is supposed to be much more efficient than the old Bulldozer core while the GPU will be named HD 7000. For those eager to get your hands on one now; we know that HP will have the Envy Sleekbook, while we should see other products from companies like Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony very soon.

Here is a listing of the products and their specs;
Desktop/Mainstream 35Watt (These will be released later)

2.3GHz A10-4600M, HD 7660G
1.9GHz A8-4500M, HD 7640G
2.7GHz A6-4400M, HD 7520G

Sleekbooks Low-voltage 25W
2.0GHz A10-4655M, HD 7620G

Sleekbooks and Tablets Ultralow voltage 17W
2.1GHz A6-4455M, HD 7500G

We fully expect to see AMD in the list of Windows 8 x86 tablets come November and this would be a smart choice for the 13-inch tablets that are aimed at higher level visuals (yes we are talking about gaming tablets) while keeping the costs low. Remember Microsoft was saying they planned for sub $500 x86 tablets for the Windows 8 launch. It could be that AMD will be the APU of choice for those products.

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