Hardware AMD Launches Llano APU

AMD launches its Llano APU, promising huge increases in battery life and performance for laptops.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/06/14/amd-launches-llano-apu/1

 

but can it run crysis are they any good?

 

Review on its way?

 

Review one of these please, would love to see the difference between them and convential stand alone CPU's and GPU's

 

Looks like a good HTPC/nettop alternative, more attractive than a Brazos.

 

For those that want a peak Expert Reviews got sent a prototype laptop with the finalised hardware for the A8 mobile chipset.

 

Bulldozer.....???

All together now..."why are we waiting, Oh why are waiting...."

 

Careful with that naming convention. How long until someone confuses an AMD APU with the ARM-based thing in the iPad?

 

What is it about AMD cpus that just makes them sooooooo boring???

 

I'm not even going to attempt to understand AMD's marketing.

 

Over at http://www.anandtech.com/ there's a review of a Llano notebook and an ASRock ATX-board available.

The tested notebook with an A8-3500M seems rather unimpressive tbh, and I'd rather buy an i5-24xx based laptop. The IGP of Llano is good, and yes it's way better then intels HD3000, but the CPU of Llano is exponentially worse then intels i5-24xx. And let's be honest... a laptop is ment primarily for office-tasks or mobile productivity and not for gaming and Llano simply lacks performance for productivity-tasks.
It doesn't even use less power then intels i5-24xx and the A8-3500M based notebooks are said to cost some $600 which is aswell not any cheaper then what i5-24xx laptops start at.

AMD didn't deliver there at all unfortunately and they can only sell these chips, if they drastically lower the prices cutting their profits, loosing money.

I was really expecting more from Llano and hoped for some decent 13" notebooks with good performance and long battery-life, but it looks like intel will make the race for the next round aswell.

 

i would like to point out i've predicted this ages ago, and was mocked with Audi jokes.

AMD really need to sort out their naming. why is an A6 competing with i3? similarly, why are 68x0 competing with 560 and 550 mid range graphics cards?

 

Wait, so you're criticizing AMD for not going along with Nvidia's crazy naming schemes?

 

looks to me like they delivered, a cheap notebook that will do all most people need, there are a hell of a lot of people running about with Atom based net/notebooks, this thing blows them out of the water and shouldn't cost a lot more.

An Atom was fine for most office tasks but the platform was piss poor at web based stuff due to crap CPU and GPU, we now have GPU accelerated browsers etc, this llano and to some extent Brazo are winners here providing a better user experience in the low end notebook netbook market which is where the volume is.

They've certainly got a customer in me if the pricing is right, almost jumped on a dm1 for £300 with a Brazos but I'll keep chugging on my eeepc 1000h for a few months and see what llano solutions are like, could be a good fit for a sub 13.3" machine, certainly not many sandy bridge parts in that market for a reasonable price.

 

criticising them for using a higher number to make their product seem better than competitor's. graphics card is just a bad example.

A6 is aiming to compete with i3. should be A4 compete with i3, A6 with i5 then it makes a bit more sense.

not the naming scheme, but their way of assigning tiers.

 

A8 Llano isn't any cheaper then i5 SandyBridge. Both start at $600. So what exactly did AMD deliver there?
AMD delivered a product at the same price as intels with the same battery-life, better graphics but way less CPU-performance. Average Joe still needs better CPU-performance instead of graphics tho, especially in notebooks which are not ment for gaming.

 

Average Joe doesn't care about CPU performance. Also, what kind of spreadsheets are you making that require so much CPU grunt? My E-350 handles spreadsheets with a few thousand entries without breaking a sweat.

 

Its a bit of a redundant discussion really as these things aren't out yet, estimated and actual could be vastly different either way but if the average Joe needed CPU performance then the Atom would never of existed nor would it of sold by the bucket load.

there is a world of difference between my netbook running the Intel GPU and a netbook runing same Atom but with an Nvidia GPU in terms of user experience, its not the CPU that improves that, its the GPU and the GPU is being brought to do a lot more tasks from OS UI acceleration, browser acceleration and a number of plugin accelerators like flash, a lot of the time leaving the CPU to do not a lot.

Its like gaming, CPU barely comes into it in most cases, its all about the quality of the GPU really, the CPU just needs to be fast enough, these Llano will achieve that.

A quad core Athlon should be enough for everyday office tasks don't you think, my email and office applications run as well on my netbook as they do on my gaming rig. Can't see where I would need extra CPU speed on my netbook, might speed up my finance package a bit but a better GPU will definitely allow me to do more in the web/media/game space and is something I would notice everyday.

 

Answer: Because it needed another die respin.

OK?

 

Dont think we will really get a full picture untill they have launched the entire range and we see a decent spread of benchmarks.