More Llano leaks (A8 APU extensively benchmarked)

[Vesku]

Yeah, but I hope the mobile offerings get available to consumers, the desktop varieties start at 65W which is waaay too much for a HTPC.

That's not too much if you are ditching the need for a discrete GPU. Although you'd probably want to see some multimedia reviews of the lower power and thus lower shader count Llano's before deciding if it's the right fit.

 

[Topweasel]

I very much agree with your argument and think you make a lot of compelling points about the big picture of CPU development and its effects on typical/mainstream productivity. I see exactly what you see at my contractor job - lots of E8400s with 4GB DDR2 that lag out and slow down because our overzealous security applications are choking an entire core and eating the capacity of the other core.

However, there are many, many applications that can use the power of a second gen Core system vs a Phenom II system. I am primarily a scientific researcher and I use a lot of compute-intense programs, so I made sure my lab has i5s in it (couldn't afford i7s). However, at home, an i5 system was actually overkill for my needs. I downgraded to an i3 and will probably replace that later this year when Llano matures. I'd much rather have an i3 and an SSD than an i5 and a mechanical hard drive for home use.

Exactly. I understand the benifit of of the true non stop communiting needs of CPU's Folding, render farming, encoding large movies that even today can take hours or days. Maybe some of the stuff your system never finishes but just gets fed more code to compute. Those applications need better CPU performance and until they utalize OpenCL or can offload the code to the GPU for other work through other means Llano is never going to be enough. Hell even if I am measuring in minutes (one general video encode vs. another) its not enough for me to care because pretending that people are robots and that the minute and a half saved on a 20 minute encode can actually be counted towards productivity lost or gained is a pipe-dream. If you talking about larger things where the measurement is in hours and your stacking them then that another thing altogether.

But while we are talking about seconds saved between Stars core and SB core, what I am worried about is our engineer, using some crappy compiler, while opening outlook, while our antivirus system checks his offline email store, the system is going to slow down and crawl and maybe force an app or two to hang or die. An i5 isn't going to save them from that. An i7 2 core with HT isn't going to save them from that. Intel wise the cheapest I could do for them in a laptop is an i7 4c and honestly I die inside a little bit every time I order one. Its not that it happens a lot, but it looks bad on me (even before the i7 was available mobile) when they tell their boss that they didn't answer an email because they didn't check it while their system was compiling. I would love for a 4 core solution that didn't kill the battery and available for less then $200. This isn't just a selective application or department. Almost every department has that one application or task that they run often enough that even on a 2 core system its a hindrance to do anything else.

 

[iCyborg]

I guess you don't get the choking part. It has nothing to do with the processing capability of a thread. A Pentium M is more then enough CPU power for most tasks, When tasks that took half an our take a minute, and now the difference is in measuring 20 seconds for one task to 45 seconds to another it doesn't matter. What I run into with our 2 core setups is that some users combined with really crappy programs hit a wall in threads. Most of the time is our horrible antivirus tying up one core while their app brings the other core to its knees. That's when having 4 cores would be nice. I would rather buy a 4 core CPU at $150 then the $500 (or extra $300 on the build) that the i7m's cost.

The point he's trying to make, and why I said earlier that I'm a bit dissapointed with Llano's CPU performance, is that having 4 cores won't help over i3/i5 if those 4 cores can't beat 2 Intel's even when 4 threads are utilized which seems to be the case. i5 2520M beats 4-core Llano in multithreaded benches by a solid margin, and tramples it in singlethreaded (doesn't look like Llano turbo is making much of a difference, maybe early system issues).

Don't get me wrong, I still think that Llano is a better balanced platform for a regular consumer budget market. And I didn't expect it to beat SB in CPU performance, but CPU on Llano right now is about halfway between Brazos and SB, and I was hoping it would be closer to SB. Low end dual-core Llanos with 240 cores are the level of performance I expect netbooks to be in less than a year...

 

[podspi]

The point he's trying to make, and why I said earlier that I'm a bit dissapointed with Llano's CPU performance, is that having 4 cores won't help over i3/i5 if those 4 cores can't beat 2 Intel's even when 4 threads are utilized which seems to be the case. i5 2520M beats 4-core Llano in multithreaded benches by a solid margin, and tramples it in singlethreaded (doesn't look like Llano turbo is making much of a difference, maybe early system issues).

Don't get me wrong, I still think that Llano is a better balanced platform for a regular consumer budget market. And I didn't expect it to beat SB in CPU performance, but CPU on Llano right now is about halfway between Brazos and SB, and I was hoping it would be closer to SB. Low end dual-core Llanos with 240 cores are the level of performance I expect netbooks to be in less than a year...

Well, one of the nice things is that depending on how threaded an application actually is, it can only use completely consume a certain number of cores. For example, if we had a hypothetical super single-core CPU (capable to equal throughput of 6-SB cores, say) and I ran Firefox on that CPU, and Firefox decides to run around in a circle @ 100% utilization -- the computer becomes unresponsive.

OTOH, in the same situation my Phenom II X6 does not become unresponsive, despite being slower in both single and multithreaded tasks.

And I agree with you on the performance level of netbooks in a year, because I expect E2's in them :awe:

 

[cotak13]

Exactly. I understand the benifit of of the true non stop communiting needs of CPU's Folding, render farming, encoding large movies that even today can take hours or days. Maybe some of the stuff your system never finishes but just gets fed more code to compute. Those applications need better CPU performance and until they utalize OpenCL or can offload the code to the GPU for other work through other means Llano is never going to be enough. Hell even if I am measuring in minutes (one general video encode vs. another) its not enough for me to care because pretending that people are robots and that the minute and a half saved on a 20 minute encode can actually be counted towards productivity lost or gained is a pipe-dream. If you talking about larger things where the measurement is in hours and your stacking them then that another thing altogether.

But while we are talking about seconds saved between Stars core and SB core, what I am worried about is our engineer, using some crappy compiler, while opening outlook, while our antivirus system checks his offline email store, the system is going to slow down and crawl and maybe force an app or two to hang or die. An i5 isn't going to save them from that. An i7 2 core with HT isn't going to save them from that. Intel wise the cheapest I could do for them in a laptop is an i7 4c and honestly I die inside a little bit every time I order one. Its not that it happens a lot, but it looks bad on me (even before the i7 was available mobile) when they tell their boss that they didn't answer an email because they didn't check it while their system was compiling. I would love for a 4 core solution that didn't kill the battery and available for less then $200. This isn't just a selective application or department. Almost every department has that one application or task that they run often enough that even on a 2 core system its a hindrance to do anything else.

Geez really they only get 1 computer? I have 3 infront of me right now. One for compile/develop, one for debug terminal, and one that's being debugged.

 

[OBLAMA2009]

lol apparently amd is now following a reverse moores law with those clockspeeds

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

$700-$800 for a llano laptop is WAAAAYYYY too much. While llano does have a power efficiency advantage, laptops with llano's graphics performance (which is the only thing people are going to care about when looking at this thing as a cheap gaming platform) have been available for a couple years. At the screen size we're probably looking at for this (15" or greater) people aren't going to be gaming on the go, there will be a wall outlet nearby anyway.

In 2009, my friend got a laptop with a 2.8ghz core 2 duo and the mobile equivalent of a 9800gtx for under $800.

In December, I got a dual core Athlon II with Radeon 4650 graphics (400 shaders, 500mhz) for $400. Considering that most games are dual core only still, and that I have a faster gpu than llano (discrete memory!), I'm pretty happy with my purchase as my cheap gaming platform. Right now, I see core i3 systems with radeon 4650 level graphics for ~$500. Llano really needs to drop into the $400-$600 price range to be competitive with its performance levels.

From Anandtech:

Even in heavily-threaded benchmarks where quad-core CPUs can shine, dual-core i5 processors are still typically 30% faster than the A8-3500M.

Really? That's just sad.

And for the people saying that Llano will be substantially cheaper than Sandy Bridge, that's not true. You can buy Sandy Bridge i3-2310M notebooks for $450 right now, and you can currently buy a 15.6" HP dv6t with an i5-2410M and HD 6770M discrete graphics for $830 without any coupons or special deals. With coupons, you could probably get that into the $700 range without much trouble. Maybe Llano would could undercut that price by a bit, but let's be real, even the highest-end 400 shader Llano IGP is nowhere near an HD 6770M either. And Llano's CPU performance is completely obsolete against a SB Core i5.

First, Llano will be in laptops from $500-$700, and the "options" you give don't really hold water in the real world, mainly because they get a lot less battery life. Second, the test systems which all reviews used gave the advantage to Intel from the get-go. The 3500M, like I have said several times, competes with the i3 2310M; the competitor for the i5 2520 is the 3530MX and 3510MX (taking into account average laptop price). Therefore, like I also commented in Tom's Hardware's article, CPU performance for Llano is not as bad as it's being painted. The 3530MX should be around 10-15% faster than the 3500M due to the increased clock speeds, so CPU performance in reality is 15-20% lower than the 2520M in multi-threaded scenarios.

You can mention Intel + NVIDIA Optimus all you want, but laptops with that and comparable battery life start over $100 higher than Llano.

 

[996GT2]

First, Llano will be in laptops from $500-$700, and the "options" you give don't really hold water in the real world, mainly because they get a lot less battery life. Second, the test systems which all reviews used gave the advantage to Intel from the get-go. The 3500M, like I have said several times, competes with the i3 2310M; the competitor for the i5 2520 is the 3530MX and 3510MX (taking into account average laptop price). Therefore, like I also commented in Tom's Hardware's article, CPU performance for Llano is not as bad as it's being painted. The 3530MX should be around 10-15% faster than the 3500M due to the increased clock speeds, so CPU performance in reality is 15-20% lower than the 2520M in multi-threaded scenarios.

You can mention Intel + NVIDIA Optimus all you want, but laptops with that and comparable battery life start over $100 higher than Llano.

What's so special about the battery life that Llano achieves? It's no better than the Sandy Bridge laptops that have been around for half a year, and you're trading a lot of CPU performance to get similar battery life.

The HP dv6t I mentioned above, with i5-2410M and discrete ATI graphics, gets slightly over 5 hours of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi web surfing test. A Llano laptop gets what, .5 to 1 hour more judging from Anandtech's test? I'd gladly take that slight battery life tradeoff for the much better performance of the Core i5 and discrete graphics compared to the crap performance of Llano, which is not good even by 2009 standards, much less 2011 standards.

You want to talk NVidia Optimus? Those models blow Llano out of the water in performance AND battery life. The powerful Thinkpad W520 mobile workstation, with a 2.5 GHz quad core i7-2920 and NVidia Quadro 2000M graphics (roughly GTX 460 equivalent) got over NINE HOURS of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi drain test with only one 9-cell battery. Let's see a Llano laptop provide that combination of battery life/performance. Oh wait...

 

[hans007]

Geez really they only get 1 computer? I have 3 infront of me right now. One for compile/develop, one for debug terminal, and one that's being debugged.

seriously that is just a dumb company.

given how much an engineer costs a year most well run places will give a pretty big budget for hardwrae.

i mean if you spend an extra $2k a year for an extra laptop or 4 extra monitors and it makes your $120k a year engineer work better its a great investment.

i have like, a w510 , a macbook pro, and like 4 desktops at my desk and a few other laptops just for running a test network. and i COULD do this all on VMs or something slow like that, but its not that expensive to grab a few $300-400 laptops for a company instead.

 

[Nemesis 1]

I thougt the llano did alright against the 2 core SB , The IGP wasn't nearly as good as the hype but it was ok . But not really a gaming setup. Than the replies since yesterday I get a sense of apologetic reverie.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

What's so special about the battery life that Llano achieves? It's no better than the Sandy Bridge laptops that have been around for half a year, and you're trading a lot of CPU performance to get similar battery life.

The HP dv6t I mentioned above, with i5-2410M and discrete ATI graphics, gets slightly over 5 hours of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi web surfing test. A Llano laptop gets what, .5 to 1 hour more judging from Anandtech's test? I'd gladly take that slight battery life tradeoff for the much better performance of the Core i5 and discrete graphics compared to the crap performance of Llano, which is not good even by 2009 standards, much less 2011 standards.

You want to talk NVidia Optimus? Those models blow Llano out of the water in performance AND battery life. The powerful Thinkpad W520 mobile workstation, with a 2.5 GHz quad core i7-2920 and NVidia Quadro 2000M graphics (roughly GTX 460 equivalent) got over NINE HOURS of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi drain test with only one 9-cell battery. Let's see a Llano laptop provide that combination of battery life/performance. Oh wait...

Some people here just don't have the ability to either analyze or have no reading comprehension.

Again, you're being highly biased and presenting the situation from a viewpoint that makes no sense. One, the 3530MX is only 15-20% slower than the Core i5 2520. I don't get where you're seeing this huge supposed CPU disparity. However, the Radeon HD 6620G is around 2x faster than the Intel HD 3000. So, you're telling me that you'd prefer somewhat higher CPU performance and a lot lower GPU performance?

That, and your coupon argument should immediately be thrown out the window. You'll be able to get coupons for Llano laptops too, something you weren't keen on mentioning. HP isn't a reliable laptop manufacturer at all either, something you also didn't mention.

 

[badb0y]

What's so special about the battery life that Llano achieves? It's no better than the Sandy Bridge laptops that have been around for half a year, and you're trading a lot of CPU performance to get similar battery life.

The HP dv6t I mentioned above, with i5-2410M and discrete ATI graphics, gets slightly over 5 hours of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi web surfing test. A Llano laptop gets what, .5 to 1 hour more judging from Anandtech's test? I'd gladly take that slight battery life tradeoff for the much better performance of the Core i5 and discrete graphics compared to the crap performance of Llano, which is not good even by 2009 standards, much less 2011 standards.

You want to talk NVidia Optimus? Those models blow Llano out of the water in performance AND battery life. The powerful Thinkpad W520 mobile workstation, with a 2.5 GHz quad core i7-2920 and NVidia Quadro 2000M graphics (roughly GTX 460 equivalent) got over NINE HOURS of battery life in Laptop Mag's wifi drain test with only one 9-cell battery. Let's see a Llano laptop provide that combination of battery life/performance. Oh wait...

That laptop has a 9-cell battery. Llano with 9 cell battery would probably last longer.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Note that these notebook parts are rated for 35 and 45 watts. The upcoming desktop versions are 65- and 100-watt parts. Across the entire A-series family, CPU clocks range from 1.4 to 2.9 GHz, while GPU frequencies are expected to range from 400 to 600 MHz. Since we know the notebook-oriented A8-series APUs are limited to 444 MHz, we’re assuming that it’s the desktop version of Llano that’ll achieve graphics core clocks as high as 600 MHz.

From the TomsHardware piece.

I sure hope that AMD are planning some 35/45W parts for the desktop space too. If nothing else, notebook rebadges in desktop form-factor, for use in mini-ITX HTPC rigs.

 

[386DX]

First, Llano will be in laptops from $500-$700, and the "options" you give don't really hold water in the real world, mainly because they get a lot less battery life. Second, the test systems which all reviews used gave the advantage to Intel from the get-go. The 3500M, like I have said several times, competes with the i3 2310M; the competitor for the i5 2520 is the 3530MX and 3510MX (taking into account average laptop price). Therefore, like I also commented in Tom's Hardware's article, CPU performance for Llano is not as bad as it's being painted. The 3530MX should be around 10-15% faster than the 3500M due to the increased clock speeds, so CPU performance in reality is 15-20% lower than the 2520M in multi-threaded scenarios.

You can mention Intel + NVIDIA Optimus all you want, but laptops with that and comparable battery life start over $100 higher than Llano.

You're clearly right about the A8-3500M competing with the i3! You can clearly see from AMD's marketing slides!

Oh wait it says i5 to i7... so stop trying to make up excuses and lower the bar. Llano is simply a slow CPU no matter what Intel chip you wanna compare it to. There wasn't much AMD can do, there CPU architect is simply to outdated to compete so they did the only thing they could... try to sell the platform based on GPU its a smart thing to do.

I think the A8 will sell pretty well for AMD, there are enough people that may want a faster GPU over a faster CPU; but I have a feeling the A4 and A6 won't sell as well. They have a slower GPU then the A8 and the GPU advantage the A8 has over SB is going to be less to the point where it'll be hard to justify a slightly faster GPU (A4) over an alot faster CPU (i3-i5).

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

You're clearly right about the A8-3500M competing with the i3! You can clearly see from AMD's marketing slides!

Oh wait it says i5 to i7... so stop trying to make up excuses and lower the bar. Llano is simply a slow CPU no matter what Intel chip you wanna compare it to. There wasn't much AMD can do, there CPU architect is simply to outdated to compete so they did the only thing they could... try to sell the platform based on GPU its a smart thing to do.

I think the A8 will sell pretty well for AMD, there are enough people that may want a faster GPU over a faster CPU; but I have a feeling the A4 and A6 won't sell as well. They have a slower GPU then the A8 and the GPU advantage the A8 has over SB is going to be less to the point where it'll be hard to justify a slightly faster GPU (A4) over an alot faster CPU (i3-i5).

AMD's marketing slides are clearly wrong, and should be taken as what they are: marketing. This is something that has already been mentioned by most reviewers. We compare things based on price (I'm sure pretty much everyone will agree), so what I said completely makes sense.

Again, A8-3500M will be in ~$600 laptops, while the A8-3530MX will be in ~$700 laptops.

I'm not making any excuses. Rather, I'd say you're just painting the wrong picture. You're not being objective. The people crying that CPU performance is a huge amount lower are just wrong. Like I've said almost a million times now, the 3500M should be 10-15% slower in multi-threaded apps than the Core i3 2310M, and the 3530MX should be 15-20% slower than the Core i5 2520M in the same scenario.

The reviews compared the 3500M to the 2520M, but those aren't directly competing if we look at prices. The scenario isn't as bad as people are painting it to be. I do agree, however, that for laptops the A6 probably won't sell very well. For desktops it should do well if they price it competitively with Deneb and it can over-clock higher.

 

[iCyborg]

That laptop has a 9-cell battery. Llano with 9 cell battery would probably last longer.

Furthermore, Llano's idling performance is pretty good too

 

[hans007]

Furthermore, Llano's idling performance is pretty good too

i have a W510... whcih is first gen core i7 quad core. and with the 6 cell battery it comes with it doesnt last all that long in any actual real use. maybe 4.5 hours.

 

[Topweasel]

The point he's trying to make, and why I said earlier that I'm a bit dissapointed with Llano's CPU performance, is that having 4 cores won't help over i3/i5 if those 4 cores can't beat 2 Intel's even when 4 threads are utilized which seems to be the case. i5 2520M beats 4-core Llano in multithreaded benches by a solid margin, and tramples it in singlethreaded (doesn't look like Llano turbo is making much of a difference, maybe early system issues).

Don't get me wrong, I still think that Llano is a better balanced platform for a regular consumer budget market. And I didn't expect it to beat SB in CPU performance, but CPU on Llano right now is about halfway between Brazos and SB, and I was hoping it would be closer to SB. Low end dual-core Llanos with 240 cores are the level of performance I expect netbooks to be in less than a year...

Anyone expecting near SB performance even marginally close was delusional. Its a Athlon II x4 with a few tweaks, and on laptops running just short of 2 GHz. Of course it wasn't going to be close to the fastest CPU out.

But even in Multithreaded instances it is almost pointless to evaluated performance. My point is that in these multithreaded tasks its still generally really quick on both. In that sense I want more modern cores instead of marginally faster ones. Not for multithreaded or multicore performance but system flexibility. I would rather someone be able to answer emails while their computer is encoding then it go 5 minutes quicker but they are not able to open those emails for 30-45 minutes.

For laptop users especially those in business that their jobs are more then typing an email and opening a PPT, this CPU is I think a good low cost alternative to an i5, or even i7. Not just the i3. An i5 is the most cost effective but only 2 cores and a 4 core i7 is $300 more when for the most part single application performance is second or third to system stability and responsiveness.

 

[Topweasel]

seriously that is just a dumb company.

given how much an engineer costs a year most well run places will give a pretty big budget for hardwrae.

i mean if you spend an extra $2k a year for an extra laptop or 4 extra monitors and it makes your $120k a year engineer work better its a great investment.

i have like, a w510 , a macbook pro, and like 4 desktops at my desk and a few other laptops just for running a test network. and i COULD do this all on VMs or something slow like that, but its not that expensive to grab a few $300-400 laptops for a company instead.

My company isn't in position to throw 10k of computers at each user/"engineer". Part of the problem is the fact that we are paying them that much, count all of the extra costs of employing them makes spending an extra 300k on computers a year seem like a bad idea. If you think get 10 computers whenever you want is something to expect everywhere you go, you are up for a rude awakening.

 

[996GT2]

I'm not making any excuses. Rather, I'd say you're just painting the wrong picture. You're not being objective. The people crying that CPU performance is a huge amount lower are just wrong. Like I've said almost a million times now, the 3500M should be 10-15% slower in multi-threaded apps than the Core i3 2310M, and the 3530MX should be 15-20% slower than the Core i5 2520M in the same scenario.

The reviews compared the 3500M to the 2520M, but those aren't directly competing if we look at prices. The scenario isn't as bad as people are painting it to be. I do agree, however, that for laptops the A6 probably won't sell very well. For desktops it should do well if they price it competitively with Deneb and it can over-clock higher.

15-20% slower in multithreaded apps than the 2520M? Herp Derp. Maybe compared to Arrandale instead of Sandy Bridge...

Oh, and since many apps aren't heavily multithreaded, let's not forget the importance of single-threaded performance. Strong showing for AMD, amirite?

Anand tells it like it is:

"Looking at other laptops and tests where we’re looking purely at CPU performance, suddenly Llano starts to struggle. The Arrandale i5-520M offers 92% higher single-threaded performance in Cinebench R10 and 48% better single-threaded performance in R11.5; multi-threaded performance also goes to Arrandale, with a 23% lead in R10 and 17% lead in R11.5. x264 also gives Arrandale a decent lead, with i5-520M 17% faster in the first pass and 29% faster in the more intense second pass. The overclocked i3-380M in ASUS’ U41JF tells a similar tale—and both of these laptops are running processors from early last year. When we shift to Sandy Bridge, even without looking at the quad-core parts AMD’s CPU performance is tenuous. The i5-2520M is anywhere from 50 to 150 percent faster depending on which test we look at; even if we toss out the older Cinebench R10 single-threaded result of 150%, R11.5 given the 2520M a 94% lead. In general, then, a moderate dual-core Sandy Bridge i5-series processor looks to be at least 30% faster, so quad-core Llano really only competes with Core i3 and its lower, non-Turbo clocks."

 

[996GT2]

That laptop has a 9-cell battery. Llano with 9 cell battery would probably last longer.

The Sandy Bridge W520 got 9 hours with a 94 Wh battery. The Llano laptop tested got 6 hours under similar conditions (Wifi web surfing) with a 58 Wh Battery.

Pretty similar scaling, really...until you factor in the fact that the tested configuration of the Thinkpad had a quad-core i7 @ 2.5 GHz and a graphics card that was roughly equivalent to a GTX 460, whereas the Llano based laptop has a processor that can't even beat Intel's lowest end Sandy Bridge Core i3 and an GPU that is in no way close to a GTX 460 or its Quadro equivalent. When you look at it that way, the Llano's battery life numbers don't look so hot anymore...compared to what Intel released 6 months ago.

 

[hans007]

My company isn't in position to throw 10k of computers at each user/"engineer". Part of the problem is the fact that we are paying them that much, count all of the extra costs of employing them makes spending an extra 300k on computers a year seem like a bad idea. If you think get 10 computers whenever you want is something to expect everywhere you go, you are up for a rude awakening.

its sad that accountants make this happen, since productivity doesn't fit in their excel sheets well.

that extra incremental cost of say 2-3k a year when you are already paying them $150k with benefits , to get the most of out of them is stupid. why not buy a ferrari and put all season tires on it.

i've had friends who worked at places where they could not even get ram upgrades for their computers etc, its just sad management doesnt see it the way they should.

 

[ikachu]

The Sandy Bridge W520 got 9 hours with a 94 Wh battery. The Llano laptop tested got 6 hours under similar conditions (Wifi web surfing) with a 58 Wh Battery.

Pretty similar scaling, really...until you factor in the fact that the tested configuration of the Thinkpad had a quad-core i7 @ 2.5 GHz and a graphics card that was roughly equivalent to a GTX 460, whereas the Llano based laptop has a processor that can't even beat Intel's lowest end Sandy Bridge Core i3 and an GPU that is in no way close to a GTX 460 or its Quadro equivalent. When you look at it that way, the Llano's battery life numbers don't look so hot anymore...compared to what Intel released 6 months ago.

I'm not sure why you're mentioning the clock speed and GPU of the intel system like they are actually in use during that test. The GPU is probably turned off and the cores are in a minimal power state.

Unless the Intel system somehow surfed the web 'better' than Llano did, then really all that test demonstrates is that with an equivalent battery a Llano system would surf the web for 9 hours and 40 minutes while the i7 system would surf for 9:05.

 

[cotak13]

Some people aren't really in this industry from what they are posting here.

It's quite simple really you can get your i7 plus a discrete GPU and say look this can idle just as long. Fire it up though and it's a different story. Also, you aren't getting that i7 and discrete in a small formate light laptop. At least not without it having no battery life and potentially burning family jewels. Just look at the 13 inch MacBook pro. NO DISCRETE graphics. As there just wasn't space to cram in the battery they wanted and have discrete graphics.

So all this crying about discrete and i7s is really missing the point. Yes somewhere you can get a computer that's faster etc. But you aren't fitting it inside a ultra portable without scarifying battery life. AMD's provided the industry with a chip where they can build a ultra portable with decent 3D graphics.

What is so hard to get about this product?

 

[996GT2]

I'm not sure why you're mentioning the clock speed and GPU of the intel system like they are actually in use during that test. The GPU is probably turned off and the cores are in a minimal power state.

Basically all you've proven is that Llano has slightly better power saving features under light load than an i7.

Not sure if srs.

I showed that a laptop using 6-month old technology (Sandy Bridge) is capable of getting the same battery life as Llano with the same-sized battery. Yet the Sandy Bridge based laptop has performance that much, much higher. So tell me, what's impressive about Llano's battery life performance relative to its performance?