Llano IGP vs SNB IGP vs IVB IGP

ninelven said:
I hate being pedantic, but the constant misuse of this word is annoying.

niche - a distinct segment of a market.

Of course x86 is a niche of the market... niche != small.
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I disagree. x86 on phone/PDA-like devices such as UMPC is a niche, but you can't say that for mainstream computers, servers and the like.

if a niche is a subset of a market, then if 100% of all computing was all x86, it would be a niche as the full set is a subset of itself :p

more seriously, x86 is present in many markets including tablets (anecdotal), industrial, embedded, and dominates the desktop, laptops and servers.
a niche instruction set or technology would have significant presence in one market (or dominate it) and be mostly irrelevant in others.

it was even put in consoles (twice) and in a nokia smartphone back when the word smartphone didn't exist.
 
liem107 said:
I haven't seen it mentionned but anandtech previews are up.
as expected K10.X gen cpu performances don't exactly shine vs corei3....yep AMD really n eeds to push strong on APU programming to try bridge the gap with SDB cpu perfs.
but GPU perf is quite enough for low end gaming.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m
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Yeah looking good. Definitely either comparable to or better than the Core 2 Q6600, and dangerously close to beating the GT220 in some of the gaming benches.
 
liem107 said:
I haven't seen it mentionned but anandtech previews are up.
as expected K10.X gen cpu performances don't exactly shine vs corei3....yep AMD really n eeds to push strong on APU programming to try bridge the gap with SDB cpu perfs.
but GPU perf is quite enough for low end gaming.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-desktop-performance-preview
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m
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And right about where I expected it to land. Around entry level discrete graphics performance (6450) versus the somewhat exaggerated expectations of some that were hoping for midrange performance (x5xx/x6xx) from it.

Still a pretty good first step and with an, IMO, better balance between GPU/CPU than Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge still has far better pure CPU power. But Llano strikes a better balance if a user does occasional gaming.

Wish they had been able to indicate power consumption however.

Regards,
SB
 
AnarchX said:
Nearly 1 billion transistors for a 32nm SOI Redwood (627M @ 40nm bulk)? :oops:
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SOI is generally a bit denser than bulk at the same node.

Custom logic has more density than synthesized logic.

Caches also increase density. There's not much of it in GPUs.

~900 GFLOPs for Trinity.
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I hope we'll get to see this sometime in 2012.
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4444/amd-llano-notebook-review-a-series-fusion-apu-a8-3500m/10

It's such a shame that AMD screwed up with the drivers for Hybrid Crossfire at launch!

Just look at those 3DMark Vantage & 11 results, and they're not even using the best APU nor the best dGPU available, far from it. I bet the "HD6775G2" combination could turn out faster than some of those GTX460M results, even with the CPU advantage.

There's a huge potential in there, but the games aren´t using it at all... It seems the driver team just rushed the Crossfire profiles for 3DMark and that's it..

And what's up with the "DX10\11 only" crossfire support?! It's such a shot in the foot... so there won't be any Crossfire for Skyrim, Bioshock 2, Unreal 3, and previous games?
Dave, please tell us DX9 will be supported for "G2" combinations!


And I wonder why send laptopts with DDR3-1333MHz, if the platform supports DDR3-1600? Llano should be pretty much bandwidth-hungry, right?
 
Silent_Buddha said:
And right about where I expected it to land. Around entry level discrete graphics performance (6450) versus the somewhat exaggerated expectations of some that were hoping for midrange performance (x5xx/x6xx) from it.

Still a pretty good first step and with an, IMO, better balance between GPU/CPU than Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge still has far better pure CPU power. But Llano strikes a better balance if a user does occasional gaming.

Wish they had been able to indicate power consumption however.

Regards,
SB
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Anand tested his APU with DDR3-1333, while Llano officially supports DDR3-1600 and 1866.

That's almost 40% more bandwidth left on the table.
 
Alexko said:
Anand tested his APU with DDR3-1333, while Llano officially supports DDR3-1600 and 1866.

That's almost 40% more bandwidth left on the table.
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Not mentioning this in article was unfair.
Also comparing hd6450 + 2500k to APU bias results even more thanks to much faster CPU.
If they would put Athlon Ii X4 + 6450 we could draw better conclusions.

At least Anand is going to do prpoer review in coming weeks.
 
Alexko said:
Anand tested his APU with DDR3-1333, while Llano officially supports DDR3-1600 and 1866.

That's almost 40% more bandwidth left on the table.
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In a system where memory bandwidth definitely makes some difference, and with DDR3-1600 being pretty much the "minimum standard" nowadays (equally priced to DDR3-1333, at least), it's just odd that he's decided to couple the system with slow memory.
 
ToTTenTranz said:
In a system where memory bandwidth definitely makes some difference, and with DDR3-1600 being pretty much the "minimum standard" nowadays (equally priced to DDR3-1333, at least), it's just odd that he's decided to couple the system with slow memory.
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Are we sure that he chose that configuration, or is it more likely that this configuration was provided to him somehow? I don't know, just asking...
 
Albuquerque said:
Are we sure that he chose that configuration, or is it more likely that this configuration was provided to him somehow? I don't know, just asking...
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In this case we are talking about Desktop Llano and Anand has several boards from manufactures, so this implies he is deciding which components to build it around.
In case of SB memory support is limited to 1333 (officially), but Llano Desktop officially supports DDR3 1833.
It's like testing SB platform with DDR3 800, does it make sense from performance point of view? No! Can it be done when comparing performance impact of faster/slower memory on different tasks? Yes!
 
It looks like Llano performs similar to a M5650 in games and that's nice. Maybe that 35W variant will end up in some interesting little notebooks.

But wow the CPU tech is looking really poor up against recent Intel hardware. There are a few tests at Anandtech that show Intel more than doubling CPU performance. It's interesting that they dumped the Phenom shared L3 design and stuck with the Athlon II design. Tom's shows a Phenom II really beating up Llano (they think it might have to do with TDP limitation).

Regarding DDR3 speed, 1066 and 1333 are common in notebooks and that's where this chip is most interesting I think.
 
rpg.314 said:
Caches also increase density. There's not much of it in GPUs.
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But as the register files are done with SRAM, there is more than roughly nothing of it in Llano (256 kB register files + 32kB local memory per SIMD). That alone amounts to ~1.4 MB SRAM arrays. Add the texture L1-caches (40kB), the (probably) 256 kB texture- L2, 64 kB GDS, the ROP caches (color and Z) and a few buffers here and there and I would be surprised if the Llano GPU has a lot less than 2 MB SRAM (roughly 100 Million transistors?). It's less than on the CPU side though (4.5 MB L1 + L2 cache).

I would guess a part of the high density of the GPU part also results from the somewhat relaxed latency and frequency requirements of the GPU. 600 MHz of the GPU part in the desktop versions in 32nm SOI does not appear very challenging when one considers a HD6870 runs at 900 MHz in 40nm bulk from TSMC (and has even a higher transistor density as the whole Llano).

edit: Llano die shot (each of the groups with 4 VLIW-units are accompanied by 32 small blocks of SRAM [each 2kB in size]):

11.jpg


What looks a bit confusing to me is that the upper part of the SIMDs are slightly different from the lower half.
 
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anands announces a smaller llano chip with dual core CPU and 240SP GPU.
that one will be pretty good on light laptops, or ones with a large battery life and no overheating.
though no earth shattering in any way - it feels like a core2duo with a geforce 8600M :p

a good laptop imo would have a 15.6" or 16" IPS, high res screen, a 2C llano, 4 or 8GB memory, a 60GB or something SSD, a 1TB hard drive and no optical drive.
 
The review at Toms is (for once) pretty good with comparisons with Phenom2 X4 at 1.5 and 2.5 ghz, and a 5570 for the graphics. Only missing an X2 to see how threaded the various CPU benchmarks really are.
But feels like Turbo Core is rarely kicking in, which is strange considering that the GPU should be mostly idle in those tests, so even with 4 cores it should be quite a bit more than 1.5 ghz.
 
Yup the Tom's review shows the Phenom II laying some smackdown. It doesn't always keep up with the 1.5 GHz Phenom II. The lack of shared L3 is probably hurting it in highly threaded apps ala Athlon II. Turbo looks very weak. Gimpy CPU with a decent GPU. ATI saves the day.
 
Tom decided to only use the DX9 versions of DX10/11 games for the antialiasing benchmarks, so the Crossfire wouldn't work.

wtf?
 
I am not really interested in problematic Crossfire/SLI, especially when weak GPUs are involved. There are plenty of such results at Anandtech though. This CPU is too weak for a really fast GPU setup anyway.
 
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