I doubt it. I think 3 channels is a no-go for notebooks and budget desktops alike.
Triple channel ddr3-2133 would give twice the bandwidth of dual channel ddr3-1600 indeed, solving the bandwidth issue pretty much (for now). I just don't think it's realistic.
I'm still thinking this makes a lot of sense. Though I wonder now if AMD will really do it now. Because a 2-module BD with a 8 SIMD VLIW4 GPU is going to be seriously large if it has the same cache organization as Zambezi (2MB L2 per module, 2MB L3 chunk per module) - larger than Llano in any case, closer to 250mm² probably (though I guess that would be managable, AMD certainly did with Phenom II Danebs). They could skip L3 cache again and go for similar die size to Llano instead, though without L3 cache and only two memory channels the GPU would be very very bandwidth limited.
Bringing the pieces together, with 512SP VLIW4 GPU, that'll be 8 SIMDs at ~700Mhz clock. Would also mean twice the texturing rate...
Well I think 14" is an excellent form factor for Llano too. Only rarely do you get anything better than IGP or lowest-end chips (Caicos, GF119) in them (Llano easily beats both of them, at least the faster versions).
Ok my "just above 20% on average" was just guessed from looking at the scores
.Ok my "just above 20% on average" was just guessed from looking at the scores
FWIW anand has also published some ddr3 scaling numbers including ddr3-1333, ddr3-1600, ddr3-1866:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/llano/review/desktop/ddr3scaling-16x10.png - also using widescreen res (1650x1080 though I'm wondering if that shouldn'be be 1680x1050...).
Game - ddr3-1600 vs ddr3-1333 - ddr3-1866 vs ddr3-1600:
Crysis Warhead: 114% 106%
Metro 2033: 115% 109%
Hawx: 116% 110%
Civ 5: 107% 102%
Dirt2: 113% 105%
Mass Effect 2: 117% 105%
Starcraft II: 117% 101%
So going from ddr3-1333 to ddr3-1600 scaling seems exceptional - for 20% more memory bandwidth you get 13% - 17% more performance, with only one outlier (Civ 5 only 7% - maybe even cpu limited?).
The additional 17% from ddr3-1866 doesn't nearly pay off quite that well (max another 10% only) but it's still a solid increase overall. Not sure though why it's that worse compared to the increase from ddr3-1333 to ddr3-1600 you'd expect maybe slightly worse scaling due to diminishing returns but not that much worse. Though no latencies are listed, I wouldn't expect this to be really latency sensitive but it could play some role here.
But either way at least the desktop A8 makes not much sense without at least (dual-channel, of course!) ddr3-1600, considering current memory prices.
Why not? The cpu doesn't quite hold up to Sandy Bridge i3 overall (certainly not in single threaded loads despite i3 doesn't turbo), though it can beat it in multithreaded workloads, just like the Phenom II of similar frequency.
Ivy Bridge probably. I certainly don't want something that's slower in any way than my old Q6600 @ 3.0.Llano goes down to dual core, with presumably 160 shader gpu. If the rumored sub 3.0Ghz cpu clocks are true (desktop Llano data is unconfirmed) cpu performance won't be any bit faster than the predecessor (could well end up slightly slower actually unless they up the clocks to same A II levels), though you get a much improved gpu (but it will be back to "better than intel" rather than "quite good" with only 160 shader units).
