Do we know the pinouts of Llano's socket yet? What I meant to say was, I hope they designed the socket with that in mind
It's extremely unlikely that there will be any sideport RAM on the MOBO, because that would need a socket upgrade. You might be able to fit one or two GDDR5 dies on the package.
You read a story where someone quipped "might be using sideport" and you take that as confirmation that you are right and Llano "will be" using side-port?
Mind you the actual "story" here is from Turkish site donanimhaber and nowhere in the original article was sideport ever mentioned.
http://www.donanimhaber.com/islemci...izli-entegre-grafik-birimi-Radeon-HD-6550.htm
It's extremely unlikely that there will be any sideport RAM on the MOBO, because that would need a socket upgrade. You might be able to fit one or two GDDR5 dies on the package.
what socket upgrade ?? Llano already use newer socket and completely different than AM3+
Yup, it uses socket FM1, which if supposed pictures of it are to believed, has 905 pins. If that is indeed the case, it basically kills any possibility of off-package sideport memory as there simply aren't enough pins for it.
how do you know that it was not enough?
This Llano setup is probably where you will actually get decent increases in performance using high-bandwidth ram. My personal testing of a Tri-Core 740 @ 3.6ghz got the same or better performance from DDR3 @ 9xx and cas6 timing than 1600mhz ddr3 @ cas9 timings. And each speed bump @ the same timings didn't do much in most tasks either. Although the cpu side won't get much benefit with the high-speed ram, the gpu could see a nice increase with each speed bump. :thumbsup:
A 128-Bit memory interface using 1600mhz DDR3 could feed the 400 shaders pretty well... And allocating 1GB of ram should be more than enough as well.
From experience from previous sockets?
In those 905 pins they have to have 2 ddr3 channels, power, a HT link, and the links to the display interface. GDDR5 has 67 data pins. You also need more power and ground pins every generation because voltage goes down (= at the same power, current goes up). There just aren't enough.
ok thanks, btw why amd didn't use mcm module like they did with their embended graphic card? Although it will make huge socket.
Expense. (For the present generation at least) Llano is superior to separate processor/gpu combo in basically 2 ways -- reducing power use and reducing cost. A bigger socket would have increased cost over the whole product line and improved only the lowest-margin products in the line, which can be served reasonably well with a separate card.
Doesn't llano support up to ddr3-1866 though? That'd be even better
anyone with 4gb of ram will have enough ram for llano.
Agreed, next gen APU that comes after the llano will most likely have a new motherboard/socket, required.I imagine backwards compatibility will not be a large concern with Llano either, with the bulk of shipments being OEMs or people who are going to build an HTPC and then leave it there for half a decade...
The problem is DDR3-1866 is still kinda on the low-side for memory bandwidth.
DDR3-1866: 64x1.866 / 8 x 2 = ~29,856 GB/s memory bandwidth.
Basically CPU+GPU are shareing ~30 GB/s of memory bandwidth... which is just not very much.
DRAM inside the CPU package is the future for APUs, not uber overclocked multichannel RAM running off the socket. So you get an MCM solution (APU+DRAM) for the "high-end" APUs and standard shared memory like what we have now for the high volume versions.
totally agree, I just don't understand why AMD don't do that from the start just like this :
A little bird told me that a new CPU review is imminent. I think it has to be Llano. I don't know what else it could possibly be.