Jan 18, 2011 20:31 GMT  ·  By

Just a few days ago, we brought you the very first details regarding AMD's Bulldozer performance and now it's time to see how well the company's other processor architecture to be released in 2011, namely Llano, fares against the opposition.

Llano is AMD's second Fusion chip to be released this year, after the company introduced the Brazos platform during CES 2011.

Compared to Ontario and Zacate, however, Llano is a much more powerful chip and is destined to be used in mainstream desktops as well as in mainstream and performance oriented notebooks.

The chip uses AMD's Stars processor architecture (found in Phenom II and Athlon II chips) with a few enhancements, and pairs it together with a DirectX 11 compatible on-die GPU.

In addition, the CPU will also carry an integrated PCIe 2.0 controller, a dual channel DDR3-1600 memory controller, 1MB L2 cache per core, and is manufactured by GlobalFoundries on their 32 nm SOI process.

Once officially released, Llano will be available in dual, triple and quad-core configurations, the Donanimhaber website providing us with the very first performance details about these chips, citing official AMD documents.

Starting with the dual-core version of Llano, code-named Winterpark, the chip offers about the same performance as that of the dual-core Intel Pentium E6500 and of the Athlon II X2 250, its integrated graphics being about 4.7 times as fast as that of the Intel G31/G41 chipset.

Moving to the company's quad-core Llano processors, the tested CPU is on the same level with the Athlon II X2 640 and the Core i3 540 while the integrated graphics core comes somewhere between the Radeon HD 5550 and HD 5600 in terms of performance.

The put things in perspective, the Core i3 540 features dual-processing cores, Hyper-Threading support, 4MB of L3 cache, and is clocked at 3.06GHz.

According to AMDs current roadmap, the first Llano engineering samples will be ready in March, the chip going for mass production in June.

All Llano processors feature Turbo Core support and are compatible with the Socket FM1 motherboards.