AMD has been a leader in graphics design ever since its acquisition of ATI several years ago and currently holds the crown of the fastest graphics card produced to date. It has taken several years of development and product evolution for the results of this merger to become apparent to the general public; but thankfully it seems that time is upon us.
The AMD Athlon II range of chips has served AMD well but has increasingly been squeezed into the value market where acceptable performance and excellent value for money are the aim of the game. This has left Intel almost a free reign in the middle to high range of processors to set its pricing as it pleased. Select processors from AMD’s Phenom series have caused Intel to pause for thought, such as the X4 970 and X6 1055T, but nothing you could honestly say was a game changer. Certainly nothing that Intel could not counter by reducing the price of some of its range.
Thankfully, Llano holds a lot of promise, with competitive pricing and a revolutionary take on what a processor is this is AMD truly back on form. Incorporating a quad-core processor, DirectX11 integrated graphics and the Northbridge into a single chip is an impressive feat. AMD is calling this melding of technology an APU or “Accelerated Processing Unit” which, for the first time ever, makes a computer’s processor more than just the sum of its parts.
Take a look at the launch trailer from AMD for a little more information:
AMD has been pushing the branding of Fusion for a while now and it is finally upon us. Going back to 2009, when the first rumours of this platform surfaced, it seemed like a farfetched platform and it has certainly taken AMD a long time to get physical products to market.
Initially AMD will be launching two Llano A-Series APUs and then five more at a later date which is as of yet unknown.
The top of the line APU is the A8-3850 which is priced at £106.25, it has a 2.90GHz quad-core CPU, 600MHz GPU with 400 Radeon cores (sometimes known as stream processors), 4MB of L2 cache and a 100W TDP. This chip has the potential to offer excellent performance in modern games and applications. The graphics on the A8 series has been coined the Radeon HD 6550D and is capable of 480 GFLOPS of performance.
The lower end model is the A6-3650 which has a 2.6GHz quad-core CPU, 443MHz GPU with 320 Radeon cores, 4MB L2 cache and a 100W TDP with a price of £89.96. The AMD A6 series features the Radeon HD 6530D GPU which is not as impressive as its bigger brother but still able to compete favourably on paper with almost all other integrated graphics solutions.
AMD also have lined up an A4-3300 and A4-3400 pair of APUs. These are dual-cores running at 2.5GHz and 2.7GHz, have 2MB of L2 cache and a respective HD 6410D graphics frequency of 443MHz and 600MHz. Both parts maintain a TDP of 65W.
The A6-3500, to confuse matters, is a tri-core processor with 3MB of cache and the standard A6 range’s graphics setup of a HD 6530D clocked at 443MHz.
The other two APUs which are not initially being released are the A8-3800 and A6-3600; featuring the same GPU speed as their respective counterparts but lower CPU x86 clock speeds. They will feature AMD Turbo Core Technology and due to the lower clock speeds are just 65W TDP parts, there is no pricing currently available for these chips but they appear to be ideal candidates for media centres.
AMD A8 Llano APU Retail Box
To sum up, the AMD A-Series APUs come in three ranges: the A4, the A6 and the A8. The major difference between the series is that the A4 chips are dual-cores with basic graphics, the A6 chips are tri- or quad-core processors with mid-range graphics and the A8 are exclusively quad-cores with the fastest graphics.
The real world performance of the Llano processors is impressive, able to peg the Intel Core i3 SandyBridge processors on power consumption and exchange blows in different tasks to which processor is suited to what task.
Any graphics intensive programs are hugely accelerated by the Llano processors which include video editing, gaming and media playback. For example, in the popular Left for Dead 2 title at a 720p (HD Ready, 1280x720) resolution with all the settings set to high the integrated APU graphics can maintain a frame rate of 50FPS+ at all times, comparing this to a Intel’s SandyBridge Core i3-2100 which only managed 12FPS+ this is a huge indication on Llano’s strengths.
AMD’s A-series processors offer a compelling buy for those looking to buy a low-powered media centre PC or a budget gaming rig for use with a smaller monitor. It also has the ability to render a large proportion of the entry level graphics cards obsolete with a single stroke which is no bad thing, reduced overall system cost can only have positive benefits.
If you’re planning a budget build, or simply want an office or lounge PC that can still handle a little gaming when required then the new AMD platform is ideal as it will be significantly cheaper than building an i3-2100 system with an additional graphics card. With more than enough CPU power to deliver a quality desktop experience, and the advantage of a dedicated GPU to provide genuine 3D performance, it’s a highly competitive package that we cannot help but to recommend.
For those of you looking for some more technical analysis then I would recommend taking a look at these articles:
Bit-Tech A8-3850 Review - http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/06/30/amd-a8-3850-review/1
Bjorn3D A8-3850 Review - http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=2079&pageID=10744
Bjorn3D Llano vs SandyBridge HTPC Shootout: http://www.bjorn3d.com/articles/Llano_vs_Sandy_Bridge_HTPC_Performance/2087.html
LegitReviews A8-3850 Review - http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1649/1/
