AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 Series & Llano “Fusion” APU: A Story in Pictures
by Ryan Smith on October 19, 2010 12:01 AM ESTAMD’s Radeon HD 6800 Series & Llano “Fusion” APU: A Story in Pictures
We happen to have the AMD Radeon HD 6870 and Radeon HD 6850 in-house for testing at the moment. We wanted to play Show & Tell, but the nice people from AMD’s Legal Department say that we’re not allowed to tell you anything about these cards quite yet. But they are letting us go ahead and show you the cards, so without further ado:
Radeon HD 6870
Radeon HD 6850
Llano
While we were at AMD’s latest press event to see the Radeon HD 6800 series, we also had the opportunity to take a quick look at an AMD prototype board housing a Llano APU. AMD is publically showcasing the Llano demo board at the AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition in Taiwan this week, which means we’re finally allowed to discuss what we saw.
At this point AMD isn’t telling us much about Llano. Besides being on a prototype board, we don’t know much else about the hardware other than that there was a Llano APU running on the board. We don’t know the clockspeeds of the CPU or the GPU, but as with most prototypes we’d imagine both are lower than they will be when it ships. AMD had the Llano prototype running Windows 7, and on top of that running the Alien vs. Predator rolling demo. The demo was running with its default quality settings at a resolution of 1024x768. The framerate wasn't being displayed, but we'd guesstimate it to be in the mid-to-high 20's; not quite high enough to be smooth, but you could probably play on it in a pinch.
Llano Running the Aliens vs. Predator Benchmark
Note: Llano is the chip under the copper pipped heatsink; that's not a NB/SB chip
AMD is also showing additional applications at TFE that we didn't get to see, including SuperPi and Blu-Ray playback in order to showcase the APU's multitasking capabilities when it comes to stressing the GPU and CPU portions simultaniously.
And speaking of TFE and APUs, AMD is also showing off Zacate at the show, which we saw last month opposite to Intel's IDF.
AMD's Chris Cloran showing off a Zacate promotional video
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Voldenuit - Wednesday, October 20, 2010 - link
I think you're confusing Llano for Bobcat here. Bobcat is the real Atom/CULV competitor. Llano is destined for mainstream dekstops and notebooks.Veroxious - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
My guess is between 20-30% raw performance improvement over the 5xxx series. I think the greatest gain will be a smaller hit when running high AA at 2560x1600 if the new cards sport 1.5GB of memory or more as this has been it's weak point. Also I think the 6xxxx will also take less of a hit when running in DX11 mode which is another strong point of the Fermi cards.Doubt that overclocking will be any better than the 5xxx series butcould run slightly cooler unless the factory clocks are higher than the 5xxx series.
I don't know why but I still feel drawn to the GTX470........waiting for the price to drop some more.... and then relook at the Radeon 7xxx series in 2012/2013.....
softdrinkviking - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
based on anandtech's review of the 5870 eyefinity, in the chapter called "2GB vs. 1GB, does it really matter," they conclude that 2GB does not change a thing.http://www.anandtech.com/show/3621/amds-radeon-hd-...
but i would be curious to know if you found something else that contradicts those findings? (reference please)
Sufo - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Just got my 2nd 5850 >_<Simen1 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Read the small green letters at the Zacate screen: 769686 Gflops (@ 19,0 Watt)numberoneoppa - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
769 TFlops? Doubt it. :Pextide - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Looks more like 21.xxx Gflops to me (which is pretty good for a small little dual core)cfaalm - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
I think the heatsink looks very small. Is this 32nm+hkmg speaking? I wonder what the temperatures/cooling requirements are.Stuka87 - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
Well the screen shows it is only 19W, so it would not require much cooling at all if it does run at that power level.cfaalm - Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - link
The picture of the board is Llano, the comparison with i5 is Zacate. Isn't it? It looks like Llano runs pretty cool too.