AMD Starts Shipping A-Series Fusion ‘Llano’ APUs

Advanced Micro Devices has just announced that the company has started shipping the very first batch of Llano accelerated processing units (APUs) to its OEM partners and that the first desktops and notebooks built around these processors are expected to reach the market by the end of the second quarter 2011.

Llano is AMD's second-generation Fusion APU and it combines two or four x86 processing cores with a on-die GPU that is based on the Radeon HD 6000 architecture.

“Customers are very excited about Llano coming to market and we will look forward to seeing our “Llano”-based systems in the market this quarter - the second quarter," said Thomas Seifert, chief financial officer and interim chief executive officer.

While the announcement that went live on AMD's Blogs was scarce in technical details, from what we know until now, the processing cores used inside the Llano architecture are called Husky and are based on the K10.5+ architecture that is also used for Phenom II and Athlon II CPUs.

The quad-core Llano APUs will be paired together with a BeaverCreek on-die GPU that can pack 320 or 400 stream processors and the dual-core chips with the WinterPark graphics core that packs 160 stream processors.

However, all the APUs, will feature an integrated dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, a PCI Express 2.0 controller, 4MB of shared L2 cache and some models even feature AMD's Turbo Core technology.

The initial launch, that is planed to take place later this quarter, will include at least four quad-core and one dual-core desktop chip as well as a series of mobile parts.

Sadly, no details about the mobile chips were disclosed by the company, but, judging by a video demo of the new APUs that was posted earlier this year on AMD's YouTube channel, the Llano A-series processors seem to hold their own against Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs, especially in graphics intensive scenarios.