Buying a new laptop with a Trinity AMD card in it?

Question

As I said in the title the laptop has the AMD Trinity A10-4600M processor and that card has integrated graphics. But the laptop also has an AMD Radeon HD 7670M card in it. Will Ubuntu 12.04 be able to use both at the same time or will one have to be disabled? I haven't been able to find any good info about this.

Answer 1

Review: Phoronix. They are using 11.04 in this review.

One of the AMD Linux engineering systems for Trinity is running nicely even on Ubuntu 11.04 with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel. The CPU string is AMD Eng Sample 2M252057C4450_32/25/16_9900_609 and its graphics are the Trinity Devastator Mobile with 512MB of video memory and an AMD Pumori motherboard. The PCI ID on the Trinity Devastator appears to be 0x9900. This Trinity APU is quad-core and running at 2.50GHz. The current quad-core Llano offerings are clocked at 2.6GHz (A6-3650) and 2.9GHz (A8-3850), while this Trinity part is clocked slower, it's numbers are nice compared to my A8-3850 Linux system.

It appears that the graphics acceleration support for the Trinity Devastator is in place as of the fglrx 8.90 release stream. It's nice to see the Trinity APU working with Ubuntu 11.04, albeit on the proprietary driver. By the time Trinity is officially out, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS should be here and hopefully with mature support and perhaps some performance optimizations within the GCC compiler.

So yes it works. And works well.

The AMD Radeon HD 7670M (7-series in general) used to be a problem but no more since 11.04.

Answer 2

My a10-4600m notebook runs 12.4 fairly well.

Some problems I'm having are poor battery life maybe due to kernel 3.2 not supporting trinity and the fglrx version seems to be catalyst version 12.4 support for the 7660g was introduced in catalyst 12.6.

Answer 3

you can choose which gpu to use in the catalyst ccc panel thing. if you get the 12.6 drivers to work (I haven't been able to) you are supposed to be able to use crossfire. for the moment I have my discrete gpu disabled in bios (its a 7490 so weaker than the 7660g on die)