14 DAY TRIAL // With the official launch of its next-generation processors approaching little by little, AMD decided it was time to offer the public something concrete, so it demonstrated part of the Llano's capabilities, the APU set to address the mainstream market.
Advanced Micro Devices attended the Technical Forum & Exhibition 2010 trade show that took place in Taiwan, last week.
There, the maker of CPUs and GPUs showed off one of the Llano accelerated processing units (APUs) as it performed several different tasks, sometimes even multiple at once.
For those interested in a reminder, the Fusion are 32nm-based processors that place the CPU, the GPU and the functions of the Northbridge on the same die.
Of course, since the formal launch is still some way off, there are no actual specifications, like clocks or cache, available.
Still, what is known is that Llano is a derivative of the Phenom II architecture, not Bobcat or Bulldozer, and lacks a L3 cache in favor of a larger L2 (1MB per core).
Nevertheless, the Sunnyvale, California-based company decided to raise some hype, so it had the Llano handling three compute-intensive tasks at the same time.
The model used in the tests was a quad-core chip and among those aforementioned tasks were HD video decoding and Pi calculating.
Nevertheless, as far as consumer are concerned, the gaming performance is what will ultimately cause waves, and AMD's creation seems to definitely have things under control, at least according to HotHardware.
To be more specific, the demo had the APU running Alien vs Predator in a resolution of 1,024 x 768 pixels and with DirectX 11 features activated.
The Llano should start sampling to OEMs more or less soon and actual availability is slated for the first half of 2011, which means that pricing and details should not be too far off.