The Llano Desktop Preview: AMD A8-3850 CPU & GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:00 AM ESTIf you haven't gotten the hint, today is all about Llano. The big story is of course Llano's notebook appearance; however, in the coming weeks you'll be hearing a lot more about Llano on the desktop as well. This is AMD's Socket-FM1, the brand new socket that'll be used for desktop Llano parts:
If you read our Computex coverage, the socket should look pretty familiar. Motherboard manufacturers all over Taiwan are busy readying their Socket-FM1 boards for retail release. In fact, there was so much interest in desktop Llano on behalf of the motherboard manufacturers that a number of Socket-FM1 boards and CPUs made their way off the island as Computex ended.
Existing Socket-AM3 coolers will work on FM1 motherboards
By now you may have already seen a lot of information leaked from AMD's Llano presentations, as well as its desktop strategy. In the past few days performance numbers have been revealed as well. While we're hard at work on our full review of AMD's desktop Llano APU, we wanted to chime in with some thoughts on Llano's desktop performance.
AMD isn't ready to disclose pricing or the entire product matrix for Llano on the desktop, but what we do have is the high-end desktop Llano SKU: AMD's A8-3850.
The 3850 has four cores running at 2.9GHz and doesn't support Turbo Core. On the GPU side it has the full Radeon HD 6550D configuration with 400 shader processors running at 600MHz.
Sandy Bridge's GPU performance is the target, but how much better will AMD do on the desktop? Let's find out.
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SlyNine - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
And why exactly is that, or do you actually believe that X86 is slows your computer down and uses more power?davegraham - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
milli,AMD was the first in the consumer market to do an IMC. Intel was second.
AMD developed the x86_64 ISA; Intel licensed it from AMD (EMT64; not IA64 which is EPIC/Itanium)
as far as Fusion goes, could be several different aspects to things there...(core fusion, gpu/cpu fusion, etc.). Arguably, AMD announced their GPU/CPU fusion capabilities before Intel did.
cheers,
Dave
Akv - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Interesting conclusion.However, if you are like me a member of the 0.001% of geek website visitors who use computer for cognitive activities, you will find that gaming performance is not that important.
Sandy Bridge offers more CPU power and totally sufficient IGP for sciences, technology, arts and video. How come you can write that that is not acceptable graphics ?
If you are a roaring swearing illiterate teenager however you will need something stronger - and uglier - in front of your eyes. Like a war game or something.
The more I visit reviews website, the more I wish teenagers would be kept away in their bedrooms, with their gamez and their loudspeakers.
ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I'd love to know what you mean by "cognitive activities" exactly. Gaming certainly includes many such activities, such as perceiving the environment, remembering it, responding to on-screen action, and so on.Even an Atom offers CPU and GPU power that's totally sufficient for "sciences", "technology" and "arts". If by that you mean browsing websites and reading about them. I mean, if you remain on the vague side of definitions there's no particular need to go for a powerful CPU.
And even if you keep teenagers locked up, the majority of gamers happen to be in their twenties and thirties, so that probably won't have as huge an effect as you think.
So your conclusions seem a lot more "interesting" than those of the article.
BernardP - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
CPU performance is as expected, considering it's based on a tweaked Athlon II core. But the positive effects of the tweaks don't show in benchmarks.GPU performance is disappointing: With 400 shaders, expectations were higher than the results shown here. Not even to the level of NVidia's GT 220.
Overall, an adequate and hopefuly cheap APU for basic PC and HTPC.
I'm still waiting to see what Bulldozer can do: No integrated graphics for me.
mczak - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Keep in mind the ddr3-1333 memory - I bet it scales almost linearly with memory frequency (especially the fastest part here). Intel HD3000 may also only use ddr3-1333 but this is by vendor choice (H67) plus it likely relies a bit less on memory bandwidth (first because it's slower, second because it can use L3 cache). I bet it would easily beat GT220 with faster memory.If you're running ddr3-1333 with desktop Llano, you're either using some old memory you already have, got a prebuilt box where the vendor saved 2$ for 20% performance hit, or are just plain crazy.
whoaaaaaaaa - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
As a PC gamer I love that CPUs are finally getting somewhat respectable integrated graphics.I hope Ivy Bridge continues on what Sandy Bridge did...if it can play TF2, COD, WOW in decent graphics at a decent resolution, PC gaming just got a lot more accessible.
I suspect there has been a quite a few people with crap PCs who have tried to play games but found out they couldn't because of the integrated graphics.
Perhaps this is what Intel and AMD are thinking? They want more gamers on the PC because they buy hardware. Ensuring that everyone on a PC can play games can ultimately get more people to buy higher end graphics cards and processors so they can play in good details.
jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
As I mentioned earlier today, the only games I tend to find on "normal folks" PCs and laptops are the Sims games.Thats pretty much it. In three years of business I've seen a lot of PCs and laptops and so far only about 3-4 of them have been what I would call 'gamers'.
If it can run The Sims/WoW and Farmville and make them look pretty then its mission accomplished.
The other 10% will be using a separate GPU anyway.
Might help the Bitcoin miners though? Every little helps.
SlyNine - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I say, Most people try a game, find it cannot run and uninstall it.Why would I have a game wasting space ( and in many peoples minds performence even when its not running).
The other 10% use a separate GPU because the IGP cannot handle gaming.
ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
True WoW and other MMO's are the most demanding games a casual gamer will run, but it's only with Sandy Bridge and now Llano that integrated graphics were able to satisfy that demand, and even then a little more power won't hurt.