More Llano leaks (A8 APU extensively benchmarked)

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html

Was on for like 5 min and taken down. Grabbed a link.

Are you referring to the link you posted? Do you have another working link?

 

[nonameo]

Review is up on pc perspective..

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Series-Llano-APU-Sabine-Notebook-Platform-Review

no surprises here

 

[Kevmanw430]

Man, it worked like, 5 min ago.. It was front page, but they must have pulled it, since they can't really post till tomorrow.

 

[Vesku]

No big surprises, nice battery life though.

Summary:

Low to Mid CPU performance, 4 core Llano has to work to compete with 2 core / 4 thread mobile SB

Good GPU, hybrid graphics working better than ever with dedicated radeon

Competitive battery life (those lowish CPU clockspeeds were to keep the whole package svelte in the power department)

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

no surprises here

I haven't read the review completely yet, but I have to say this isn't really fair on AMD from the get-go. If you want to compare, a system with the A8-3530MX or 3510MX should've been used against the Core i5 2520M in their other laptop.

The 3500M should compare with the Core i3s.

 

[hans007]

toms review is still up on the mobile site.

http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html

 

[Idontcare]

Review is up on pc perspective..

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Series-Llano-APU-Sabine-Notebook-Platform-Review

Man that "review" is the weaksauce :\

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

toms review is still up on the mobile site.

http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,2959.html

Hmmm...

Bear in mind that Sandy Bridge-based CPUs already employ a mature 32 nm process, and Intel is on the verge of making a shift to 22 nm with the Ivy Bridge die shrink later this year.

What bullshit is this? Ivy Bridge won't be out until Q2 2012. Tom's Hardware, as always, very biased.


No profanity in the tech forums please.

Idontcare
Super Mod

 

[Vesku]

I do think the picture will be a bit brighter once we get some sites doing a more broad comparison and not just the top of the line SB which you won't find much in the lower end of the notebook pool.

 

[Drakula]

Not sure if the reviews are trying to make Llano look bad or trying to show its superiority or by compare Llano 1.5GHz against i5 2.5GHz. But either way, the battery life is very good and its performance, though cannot compare to i5 at raw power, is fairly good. Wonder how much improvement in performance it will have if the clock speed is ramp up to the same clock as i5-2520M.

Llano might just power the next laptop if the price is right.

By the way, does Llano have AVX extension?

 

[Vesku]

Wondering if Tom's setup had functional turbo, numbers all seemed to line up with Phenom II @ 1.5GHz even in single threaded benches.

 

[Accord99]

Wondering if Tom's setup had functional turbo, numbers all seemed to line up with Phenom II @ 1.5GHz even in single threaded benches.

It's performance in single-threaded things like LAME and WinZip versus the Ph II suggests that it is.

 

[busydude]

Man that "review" is the weaksauce :\

LOL yeah.. I posted it without reading.. pretty pathetic I have to say.

 

[Idontcare]

LOL yeah.. I posted it without reading.. pretty pathetic I have to say.

Oh I don't blame you for the quality or judge you for linking it up, it was better to read than nothing at all. But I really really hope that review is not indicative of the caliber of review efforts we can expect from AT and others.

 

[nonameo]

Well, anand's review is finally up.

 

[ElFenix]

3 articles

 

[Idontcare]

Well, anand's review is finally up.

Wow...compared to mobile SB, the mobile Llano is about as lopsided in GPU power (to its advantage) as it is in CPU power (to its disadvantage).

I had not been paying attention to mobile SB benches of late, had no idea the cores were that strong.

Now it comes down to price. Llano is for me on my next laptop (been holding off my upgrade for this) but I need some retail options now.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

Wow...compared to mobile SB, the mobile Llano is about as lopsided in GPU power (to its advantage) as it is in CPU power (to its disadvantage).

I had not been paying attention to mobile SB benches of late, had no idea the cores were that strong.

Now it comes down to price. Llano is for me on my next laptop (been holding off my upgrade for this) but I need some retail options now.

You also have to look at it this way: Llano will find its way on laptops ranging from $500-700. For a bit under $700, you should be able to buy a laptop with the 3530MX, which should have a CPU that's ~10-15% faster than the 3500M. That would put CPU performance at around 15-20% slower than the Core i5 2520M (in multi-threaded scenarios), but laptops with that CPU and its integrated GPU are around $750. Battery life should be comparable, if not a bit in AMD's favor, in normal usage scenarios.

What we're left with is a CPU that, for a comparable laptop price, is some 15-20% slower than Intel, but a GPU that is on average 2x faster.

Looking at the lower end the scenario tips in AMD's favor even more. Laptops based on the 3500M should be around $600, and the Core i3 2310M should only be some 10-15% faster with the GPU disparity being the same.

If you don't need a lot of CPU performance, Llano is clearly the way to go if you're looking for a $500-700 laptop.

 

[nonameo]

HP offerings:

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=6154&news=hp+amd+new+laptops+llano+apu

strange, only the MX variants are offered. Perhaps AMD is asking a lot more for them??? it's only 10w.

 

[iCyborg]

Quad core being beaten by a dual core even in multithreaded benchmarks is a bit disappointing, though if it's priced below the said dual cores, it's still pretty good, GPU part is substantially better than HD3000 and battery life is also better. 3530MX will be better, but it has higher TDP as well, not sure if it's worth the power consumption sacrifice.
If I really needed/wanted a laptop right now, I'd go with Llano, but since I don't, I think I'll wait for Trinity next year with Bulldozer + 6000 series GPUs.

The only downside for me is that, while performance is fine for what I need in a laptop, $700 notebooks almost invariably come with screens that are crappy even by TN standards. I'd gladly pay $200-$300 more for a better screen and mainstream performance, but that doesn't seem to be an option, apart from perhaps Dell XPS with an upgrade.

Desktop Llano doesn't impress me much. If the price is not much more than $100 I might get one for my dad, his X2 5000+ is due for an upgrade.

 

[Khato]

Looking at the lower end the scenario tips in AMD's favor even more. Laptops based on the 3500M should be around $600, and the Core i3 2130M should only be some 10-15% faster with the GPU disparity being the same.

Agreed, I'm quite interested in seeing what the entire line-up will look like. The top-end model is pretty much as expected, the question being how much the GPU cuts from A8 -> A6 -> A4 affect graphics performance. My current guess is that it'll be comparable to the slight frequency cuts that Intel's graphics receives between their high and low end, since I'd expect that Llano is more memory bandwidth limited.

The really awesome thing here for AMD isn't the graphics performance though, it's the power consumption. I'd expect the fact that they're finally comparable to Intel in that area to be a major selling point. Traditionally, that's been their weakness in the mobile area and why they were relegated to the budget segment. Llano finally moves them into the mainstream consumer segment, which is great. Doesn't look like they'll go any higher than that though, even with their ACF, since the CPU quickly becomes the limiting factor.

On the flip side... These initial benchmarks imply that Intel isn't completely incompetent when it comes to GPU design - the performance difference is pretty much what it should be given the difference in graphics die size. It's quite encouraging, since as we know, both AMD and Intel are at their best when they have actual competition.

 

[AtenRa]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m/2

This chip weighs in at 1.45 billion transistors, nearly 50% more than Sandy Bridge. Around half of the chip is dedicated to the GPU however, so those are tightly packed transistors resulting in a die size that's only 5% larger than Sandy Bridge.

Llano 1.45B transistors @ 228mm2
SB 995M transistors @ 216mm2

It seams GloFo's 32nm Gate first has a tremendous density advantage vs Gate last ??

and one more thing,

Either Bulldozer is smaller than 290-300mm2 (if it has the same transistor count as Llano) or it has more than 1.5B transistors. I will say again that i believe BD will be close to 260mm2 or even smaller.

 

[bart1975]

The lowest speed Llano would make for an awesome netbook.

 

[Borealis7]

Quad core being beaten by a dual core even in multithreaded benchmarks is a bit disappointing

does it really? are you running heavy duty computations on a laptop?
in the end, its twice as fast in games as the dual-core SB. that's what it was meant to do.
now pricing has to decide whether its a good product or not.

 

[Dribble]

The top end llano was competing with a stock Q6600 in the anand review!

That's a 4 1/2 year old processor!