My Llano summary in two graphs and four sentences.

[cebalrai]

So the llano processor makes the GPU faster? Take an Athlon II and Llano that are the same exact speed and pair them with some type of Radeon GPU. Will the graphics be faster on the Llano?

 

[Bman123]

I got really hype at first til I found more benchmarks. Llano is gonna be great in laptops that's for sure. Desktops is a whole nother ball game tho. If you play low res and want to play older games with onboard llano is good. In some games x fire scales good in others not so much.

I think I'm gonna have to pass on llano for now. Id rather buy a p2 x4 with L3 cache and a gtx 460 then use llano and a 6670 video card

 

[Arkaign]

So the llano processor makes the GPU faster? Take an Athlon II and Llano that are the same exact speed and pair them with some type of Radeon GPU. Will the graphics be faster on the Llano?

As it sits, only up to the 6670(?) I think are qualified to work with hybrid Xfire with the on-chip GPU to give some extra fps. At present there are some driver issues with older games (seems like it slows DX9 stuff down at the moment), but that should be ironed out quickly. It's concievable that sometime down the line more GPUs will work with the Llano hybrid Xfire, but when you think about it, it's probably not reasonable. Something like an HD6850 for example is so vastly faster than the Llano GPU that the boost would either be irrelevant or impossible to properly implement.

Otoh, the Llano CPU portion is slightly better than Athlon II X4 due to more L2 cache, but a little weaker than PhII X4 due to zero L3 cache, afaik.

 

[Arkaign]

I got really hype at first til I found more benchmarks. Llano is gonna be great in laptops that's for sure. Desktops is a whole nother ball game tho. If you play low res and want to play older games with onboard llano is good. In some games x fire scales good in others not so much.

I think I'm gonna have to pass on llano for now. Id rather buy a p2 x4 with L3 cache and a gtx 460 then use llano and a 6670 video card

Yeah it's kind of limited for gamers in this first variation. It's an interesting experiment though, and it could be compelling tech in the future in the next gen or two.

 

[hans007]

i was really excited about llano. but now that its out maybe not so much.

i've got a 785g and an athlon ii x2 245. which is well not really super fast, but plenty for regular internet stuff and programming. i could just upgrade the chip and buy a video card or replace with a llano.

I mean a phenom II x4 840 is $105 on newegg. cheap board AMD biostar 770 baord on newegg is like $50 and i'm not looking at super cheap rebate deals. and a video card (sapphire 5670 gddr5) is $60 on newegg.

compared to the llano at $140 + $100 board... and the other combo is slightly cheaper AND faster. granted no usb 3.0 and its not as power efficient, but its faster in both cpu and gpu. its hard to justify llano's cost now.

if anything the launch motherboards are way too expensive. the cheapest one is probalby the gigabyte one with 2 dimm slots and its $100 ish everywhere. when thats down to $55-60 for some biostar/ecs/foxconn board that works, and the a8-3850 is down to $100-120 then it at least makes sense competing against just buying a phenom ii x4 combo or upgrading an older setup.

now in laptops this argument doesnt matter because the power use and integration are a huge plus, but on desktops it is much much harder to justify paying more for ulness you have to have a tiny computer. hopefully discounts starts happening and i assume they will. there is no reason the boards should cost so much as this is not a high end platform that should justify $100 boards.

 

[Ghiddy]

How would this chip/platform be for HTPC stuff? It seems like a low power chip with decent video capabilities might be good combined into a smallish case with several power efficient drives in a RAID array. Put WHS (or whatever OS HTPC builds like to use) on it and you get a combined Windows HTPC with good hardware acceleration for Win Aero/Flash/Blu-ray/etc. This would also double as a NAS to both store & stream content, and also store backups for other devices on the home network.

All for pretty low cost, and power efficient to boot.

I've been out of the loop for a while when it comes to gaming and media ripping/watching, but 5+ years ago people who cared about 3d gaming performance generally got discrete graphics, so it's interesting to now see people talking about an integrated CPU/GPU chip that might actually do decent gaming (though not at max settings).

 

[Ghiddy]

How would Llano stack up against the hardware in devices like Boxee and Roku?

 

[Dribble]

How would this chip/platform be for HTPC stuff?

I take it you haven't read http://www.anandtech.com/show/4479/amd-a83850-an-htpc-perspective

 

[ultimatebob]

I'll bet that the price on this part is going to drop fairly quickly, which is a good thing.

Once it gets cheap enough, I could see this processor/GPU combo being popular in the next generation of $300 PC's being sold by big box stores like Walmart a year from now. It might be the first time in awhile where the PC's on Walmart's shelves can actually play the GAMES on Walmart's shelves properly without having to add a video card.

Which is good, considering that Walmart doesn't even sell video cards.

 

[Concillian]

I got really hype at first til I found more benchmarks. Llano is gonna be great in laptops that's for sure. Desktops is a whole nother ball game tho. If you play low res and want to play older games with onboard llano is good. In some games x fire scales good in others not so much.

It's not a desktop chip for people who read AT forums. It's a desktop chip for half my WoW guild who are on P4s with IGP or some other suckage and are more concerned with how small their next computer is than with what's inside.

The reality is that there are a lot more people like half my WoW guild than anyone here wants to admit.

 

[Bman123]

I know some wow players and fortunately I'm not one of them. Id like to see how cod4 runs on llano. I'll wait it out for someone to post a benchmark before I do anything stupid lol...

 

[Bman123]

I am tossing up the idea of a llano build or a 1155 Pentium build. The sb Pentium will at least get me on the socket 1155 then I could get a 2500k later when I have the funds which seems like a better idea

 

[Dark Shroud]

How would Llano stack up against the hardware in devices like Boxee and Roku?

The boxee uses an Atom CPU and Roku uses ARM, the Roku2 will use a Broadcom 2835 SOC.

So Llano & even Brazos are better than these boxes.

I'm annoyed that Intel hasn't released a i3 with the HD 3000 graphics. So any lower end box I build from now on will be AMD. Like others I've been waiting to build an Mini-ITX system.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm annoyed that Intel hasn't released a i3 with the HD 3000 graphics.

i3-2105?

 

[SolMiester]

1. Any modern multicore CPU (sans the Atoms) is enough for web browsing, email, and office productivity.

2. Light gaming like WoW, L4D, Dead Space 2, etc. no longer requires a discrete GPU.

3. You can either spend $125 (i3-2100) + $60 (H61 mATX board) or $145 (A8-3850) + $100 (cheapest FM1 board right now) - both systems can do everything the typical computer user needs to do with similar power consumption, the latter system can game for an extra $60 (and I expect this cost difference to diminish after the initial rush is over).

4. OEMs (i.e. non-dGPU systems) are going to sell a lot of Llano systems, and so am I.

Power consumption doesn't look that flash against the i3!..what is the comparison of CPU compute like?, you only show gaming and lets face it, no-one is going to be gaming on Llano!

 

[busydude]

^^ ever heard of the story about frog in a well?

 

[GaiaHunter]

Power consumption doesn't look that flash against the i3!..what is the comparison of CPU compute like?, you only show gaming and lets face it, no-one is going to be gaming on Llano!

And of course people are going to play on Llano - not everyone is a graphic primadona that only play the latest games.

Gamers like games. Some gamers are also IQ Enthusiasts.

 

[Vesku]

Power consumption doesn't look that flash against the i3!..what is the comparison of CPU compute like?, you only show gaming and lets face it, no-one is going to be gaming on Llano!

I guess you can be elitist and say all those people who casually game on their low cost OEM boxes are nobodies. This is not a gaming enthusiast product by any means. While it is a nice improvement in the low end I'm going to be more interested in the bulldozer + VLIW4 implementation that will be the next iteration for evaluation of htpc type duties.

 

[busydude]

This is going to be huge upgrade for my brother who is still rocking our old P4 1.8.

Just waiting for Llano to hit the Indian market.

 

[Bman123]

Honestly this is a great start and I can't wait to see how good integrated graphics are a few years from now

 

[Idontcare]

Power consumption doesn't look that flash against the i3!..what is the comparison of CPU compute like?, you only show gaming and lets face it, no-one is going to be gaming on Llano!

I was rather surprised at how much power the quad-core takes at 2.9GHz despite being on 32nm SOI+HKMG.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1649/16/

^ to me this says a lot in regards to the challenges AMD must surely be facing in getting Bulldozer's clockspeeds up while fitting inside the traditional TDP tiers. (140W max)

 

[Idontcare]

I guess you can be elitist and say all those people who casually game on their low cost OEM boxes are nobodies. This is not a gaming enthusiast product by any means. While it is a nice improvement in the low end I'm going to be more interested in the bulldozer + VLIW4 implementation that will be the next iteration for evaluation of htpc type duties.

Yep, I intend to get a Llano laptop as I like to play all my old skool games on the lappy. MOO, MOO2, LOTR, Gal Civ 2, Port Royale 2, Civ 4, etc.

No need for SLI 485M for those games, but it sucks to try and play on my Intel IGP because the drivers are so crappy/buggy/dodgy.

Intel's graphics team just strikes me as having the classic government contractor stereotype mentality "good enough for gov'ment work!". They don't really seem to care how crappy their IGP is because they know they are assured >80% of the market by default.

The whole 23.976fps vs 24fps situation with movie playback is classic. AMD delivers a product customers will appreciate, Intel delivers one they just have to live with.

 

[Arkaign]

^^ Damn that's horrible. So much for more efficient. I can understand a GPU-heavy task causing more power usage, as the GPU in the Llano is much faster than the Intel HD crap. But holy mother of god, why does Handbrake and Prime cause it to ramp up so horribly? That's the kind of power usage you'd see with an overclocked C2Q or thereabouts, and definitely more than SB.

 

[Idontcare]

^^ Damn that's horrible. So much for more efficient. I can understand a GPU-heavy task causing more power usage, as the GPU in the Llano is much faster than the Intel HD crap. But holy mother of god, why does Handbrake and Prime cause it to ramp up so horribly? That's the kind of power usage you'd see with an overclocked C2Q or thereabouts, and definitely more than SB.

That was my thought too. If a quad-core stars core clocked at a mere 2.9GHz on 32nm is pulling those kinds of watts then what is a 3.8GHz 8core zambezi going to be pulling?

Probably very good reasons why they aren't for sale right now, I can't help but wonder if this isn't an indication of what one of those good reasons might well be.

 

[Vesku]

That legitreviews power comparison is a bit of an outlier. Most other reviews show closer to a 40W-60W difference at load, which is still pretty hefty considering. The gap actually narrows quite a bit to only 20-30W if gaming on IGP. Intel's IGP is quite the power hog once it hits high clocks. Wonder how much of the non-gaming load power draw is from the beefier IGP even if it's just running basic desktop stuff? I became curious about transistor count difference and the official transistor count of the A8-3850 is more than double that of i3-2105 thanks in good part to that dense IGP (1.45B vs 624M). Wonder what 8 core BD transistor count is like compared to an 2600K. Any thoughts, taking that stuff into account, Idontcare?