Llano Outperforms Sandy Bridge... at least the graphics

http://www.legitreviews.com/news/10565/

Not terribly surprising. I'm sure most are expecting Llano to have a more capable GPU, but on the CPU side it will probably be far less capable than Sandy Bridge. The A8-3510MX especially appears to be a beast, according to Wikipedia it will have 480 SPs. Should be quite capable for mainstream gaming.

Something to keep in mind, though, the K series desktop processors and all the mobile Sandy Bridge chips have twice the number of EUs as the 2600 (12 vs 6) and as such would probably have roughly twice the performance in this benchmark (probably a little less for the mobile parts since they are clocked lower than the desktop part used for this test). The article is incorrect in stating that the 2600 has HD 3000, it's actually the weaker HD 2000. Of course if this is legit they're still far behind Llano, but in the mobile sector they probably won't lose as badly as this video suggests. The 45W mobile Sandy Bridge parts will probably have closer to 1/2 the GPU performance of the A8-3510MX than 1/4.

And video is already gone it seems. Anyone have a mirror?

AMD had the new video taken down but there is an older video still up from March

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/01/amd- ... re-i7-kil/


and then there is http://techreport.com/discussions.x/20836

What AMD need to do is stop publicising what their future technology will or won't do, can or can't do and actually deliver product to the market. In the meantime, comparing a Llano desktop CPU with Intel's 2GHz mobile (laptop) Core i7-2630QM and claiming that "Llano is faster than Sandy Bridge" is frankly bizarre. In reality AMD, by delaying Llano until it seems June or maybe July of this year has effectively handed the desktop processor market to Intel. Intel has made some mistakes with Sandy Bridge, the most obvious being the lack of the HD3000 graphics unit on lower priced processors. This is due to be corrected in May when the 2105 and 2405 CPUs are scheduled to be released bringing HD3000 to the Sandy Bridge Core i3 and i5 ranges.

All in all, the delays on Llano have only served to allow Sandy Bridge to become firmly entrenched, including for example the fairly recent release of the H61 chipset. This means that a range of budget priced Sandy Bridge H61 motherboards is available right now. And there is yet another Sandy Bridge chipset, Z68, due for release in May. Certainly by June Intel should more or less have completed the Sandy Bridge launch, eroding maybe a bit more off of AMD's market share. So AMD will be launching Llano in perhaps the least favourable conditions they could have imagined. However they will at least have launched it.

It remains to be seen how competitive Llano will be with Sandy Bridge in the market place, but one likely outcome is, I suspect, that Intel will have to price Sandy Bridge somewhat more keenly that it is at present. This will certainly be good for consumers, whether it will be good for AMD is another matter.

I have never seen any intel chip that has worthwhile graphics capabilities ever. It never will happen, it will always be a heap of crap.

Decoding/accelerating 1080p video is like not what I consider "up to par" graphics ability. A 90 dollar blu-ray player for your home theater does that better and is complete with power, wiring, software and all. This is just for corporations and for the "genera" public who always assumes their new bestbuy computer will run like crap soon anyways.

It is worse than that. Ivy Bridge, by some estimates is due out before the end of this year.

Llano's competition could end up being Intel's next generation chip. Llano will pale on so many dimensions they will have to give the chips away.

+1

And the launch of the Intel Z68 chipset is imminent, with motherboard previews already leaking out onto the web. This makes the sixth Sandy Bridge chipset - the others being the H61, H67 and P67 for the desktop, Q67 for the enterprise and the somewhat obscure B65 for small and medium businesses. The only bright spot for AMD I guess is that Z68 will enable the HD2000/HD3000 graphics unit to work together with a discrete graphics card, so maybe their graphics side at least will benefit.