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Ooh I spotted a Llano laptop, haha.

G

Gigantopithecus

Diamond Member
HP dv6z

Base model is $610, and comes with the middle of the road A6-3400M quad core APU. That's a 1.4GHz base/2.3GHz Turbo CPU with the Radeon HD 6250G GPU. CPU-wise the A6-3400M appears to perform somewhat similarly to the i3-2100 (PassMark CPU Mark, at least, can't find other benches). GPU-wise it appears to perform very similarly to the Radeon 4290.

What I find particularly interesting is that the upgrade to the top of the line A8-3530MX is $100, making the laptop $790.

Without thinking too much about this, if you look on Newegg, $700 is where most Intel-based laptops with discrete GPUs start appearing. So I think at under $700, AMD has a clear winner on its hands. At $700-800, the Core i3/5 CPU + discrete GPU laptops are arguably superior to the Llano APU laptops, but the Llano laptops are likely going to offer better battery life.

This is exciting. AMD still can't compete with Intel's mid-high to high-end desktop CPUs, but considering that even AMD's budget mobile chips were pretty awful compared to Intel's, seeing them return to competitiveness in the budget to mid-range notebook market is great for consumers.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
considering that even AMD's budget mobile chips were pretty awful compared to Intel's, seeing them return to competitiveness in the budget to mid-range notebook market is great for consumers.
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I agree! I once bought an AMD notebook a few years back. It was a dual core Turion x2 with a discrete GPU and it was slow, ran hot and battery life was terrible. More recently, got my wife a netbook sized unit (11.6" 3 pounds) based on the AMD Nile platform (1.6GHz ULV Turion x2 with AMD IGP) and it was much better, but still with room for improvement. At least it made me a believer in AMD again for lower end notebooks. Llano will hopefully extend that towards the mid range.

BTW HP pulled the product page.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
. . ..

This is exciting. AMD still can't compete with Intel's mid-high to high-end desktop CPUs, but considering that even AMD's budget mobile chips were pretty awful compared to Intel's, seeing them return to competitiveness in the budget to mid-range notebook market is great for consumers.
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Fo' sho'.
 
I picked this up today. I was looking for something more modern than my 6910p to replace my desktop (which I will be turning into a media server, but that's another thread).

For $644 net ($744 after taxes -$100 GC), it seems to be a good solution for me. I find myself wanting to return to pc gaming a bit more and this should fit the bill for awhile. We'll see how it goes.
 
Please let us know your impressions when you receive it! I'm sure I'm not the only one eager to hear about end-user experiences with Llano-based laptops.
 
That one is badly priced. Other laptops with that APU should be landing at a bit under $600. Expect laptops with the A8-3500M and A6-3410MX at around $600 and A8-3510MX and 3530MX at around $700 (the ones with no dGPU).

Priced higher, they don't make much sense. Getting the ones with dual GPUs doesn't make sense, even for gaming, because the platform is already a bit CPU limited. You'll get little change in gaming performance. Instead, you should be looking at the ones with no dGPU. As far as GPU and CPU performance, obviously you should expect the Radeon HD 6620G to be around 2x faster than the Intel HD 3000, and the 3530MX should be around 20% slower in multi-threaded apps than the Core i5 2520M, and around the same performance as the Core i3 2310M.
 
LOL_Wut_Axel said:
Getting the ones with dual GPUs doesn't make sense, even for gaming, because the platform is already a bit CPU limited.
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I am skeptical of this statement. I'm too lazy to look up and post objective data, but I seriously doubt an Athlon II X4-level CPU is going to bottleneck any iGPU + dGPU combo at the <$1,000 laptop price range.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
I am skeptical of this statement. I'm too lazy to look up and post objective data, but I seriously doubt an Athlon II X4-level CPU is going to bottleneck any iGPU + dGPU combo at the <$1,000 laptop price range.
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It's not Athlon II X4 level. Even the slowest Athlon II X4, which is EOL, is clocked at 2.6GHz, while the fastest mobile Llano A8 APU is clocked at 1.9GHz, 700MHz lower. Because of that, it should be around 30% slower if we take higher IPC into account.

It being clocked this low is gonna be a performance detriment in CrossFire, even if it's with two mainstream GPUs.
 
Gigantopithecus said:
Please let us know your impressions when you receive it! I'm sure I'm not the only one eager to hear about end-user experiences with Llano-based laptops.
Click to expand...

Here's a thread with some good info and user experiences which, in part, helped me with my decision:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hp-pavilion-notebooks/588705-dv6-now-shipping-amd-llano.html

Personally, the price point was perfect for me given the specs. I think it is a great value and saved hundreds over a similarly spec'ed sandy bridge setup. Sure, I don't have the fastest cpu on the market, but frankly, have no need for it.

Will post more impressions later as I have a chance to spend time with it.
 
LOL_Wut_Axel said:
It's not Athlon II X4 level. Even the slowest Athlon II X4, which is EOL, is clocked at 2.6GHz, while the fastest mobile Llano A8 APU is clocked at 1.9GHz, 700MHz lower. Because of that, it should be around 30% slower if we take higher IPC into account.
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You forget that Llano has turbo. The A8-3530MX can turbo to 2.6GHz.
 
Zap said:
You forget that Llano has turbo. The A8-3530MX can turbo to 2.6GHz.
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Except it, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be working in 90% of single-threaded scenarios. Perhaps a problem with the BIOS that AMD gave to reviewers is to blame? Just look at all the reviews and you'll see what I mean.

Even then, it's not really much use for anything. The only application which will benefit greatly if implemented right is audio encoding since all recent games take advantage of three or four threads.
 
Is that Best Buy system the only Llano system available currently? Any chance that the lowest-end systems with no dGPU and smaller displays will be under $400? I'd rather my friend get one than a netbook.
 
As soon as AMD gets their own version of Quicksync, I'll be on board. Until then it's not hard to find deals on SB+dGPU for ~$700
 
LOL_Wut_Axel said:
It's not Athlon II X4 level. Even the slowest Athlon II X4, which is EOL, is clocked at 2.6GHz, while the fastest mobile Llano A8 APU is clocked at 1.9GHz, 700MHz lower. Because of that, it should be around 30% slower if we take higher IPC into account.

It being clocked this low is gonna be a performance detriment in CrossFire, even if it's with two mainstream GPUs.
Click to expand...

I'd have to disagree. Reasons:

1. BulletStorm, clock scaling, Radeon 6970

2. Anandtech's Bench, athlon x4 2.3ghz (scroll down, gaming @ 1680x1050 is not a problem)

3. Anandtech's Bench, Phenom x3 8450 2.1ghz

Usually cpu-intensive games like starcraft II or new pc-only title such as the witcher 2 will be bottlenecked by the cpu, but pc-only titles will put a much larger stress on the gpu so they're really out of the question for a budget notebook. And I have a friend who play starcraft II with a phenom x3 8450 2.1ghz and a hd4850 @ 1680x1050 at medium settings and the game is smooth 99% of the time.

Also, you'll need more gpu horsepower as monitors' resolution go north of ~720p (or if you plug your notebook to an external display), and this seems to be where the industry is headed.
 
doron1 said:
I'd have to disagree. Reasons:

1. BulletStorm, clock scaling, Radeon 6970

2. Anandtech's Bench, athlon x4 2.3ghz (scroll down, gaming @ 1680x1050 is not a problem)

3. Anandtech's Bench, Phenom x3 8450 2.1ghz

Usually cpu-intensive games like starcraft II or new pc-only title such as the witcher 2 will be bottlenecked by the cpu, but pc-only titles will put a much larger stress on the gpu so they're really out of the question for a budget notebook. And I have a friend who play starcraft II with a phenom x3 8450 2.1ghz and a hd4850 @ 1680x1050 at medium settings and the game is smooth 99% of the time.

Also, you'll need more gpu horsepower as monitors' resolution go north of ~720p (or if you plug your notebook to an external display), and this seems to be where the industry is headed.
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Kinda sad that you wasted your first post using invalid arguments, but here goes nonetheless:

1. The Athlon X3 8450 cannot be included in the comparison because, not only is it being benchmarked with older games, but it uses the K10 architecture instead of K10.5. Because of that, it has 10% lower IPC than K10.5, or 15% lower than the new K10.5 revision in Llano. The performance detriment for the 8450 in new games will be huge, especially when we're talking 1280x1024 and 1680x1050 since they're more CPU bound.

2. I just checked at AnandTech Bench for a comparison between the Athlon II X4 635 (2.9GHz; a tiny bit slower than A8-3850 due to lower IPC) and the Athlon II X4 605e (2.3GHz) and my suspicious were confirmed: in all the four games FPS were cut by more than 10%. In FC2, in particular, it made the difference from being mostly playable to barely. Now take that and apply it to the A8-3530MX and the difference will be around 15% less FPS.

3. Most games are CPU bound 1280x1024, and in some cases until 1680x1050. Since these are the target resolutions of Llano, it is very important to avoid a CPU bottleneck so that it can keep the GPU fed with data.

4. In Bulletstorm you can see there is a clear and marked difference in min FPS between 2GHz and 2.5GHz and 3GHz, and almost no difference beyond that.

Even the 3530MX is already CPU bottlenecked. Introducing another GPU into the equation is only gonna worsen it.
 
LOL_Wut_Axel said:
It's not Athlon II X4 level. Even the slowest Athlon II X4, which is EOL, is clocked at 2.6GHz, while the fastest mobile Llano A8 APU is clocked at 1.9GHz, 700MHz lower. Because of that, it should be around 30&#37; slower if we take higher IPC into account.

It being clocked this low is gonna be a performance detriment in CrossFire, even if it's with two mainstream GPUs.
Click to expand...

This GPU is repeatedly compared to the discrete GPUs were were using to play Oblivion and Half-Life 2 Episode 1 in 2005/6. Think of the processors we were pairing with those dGPUs. Were those games severely bottle-necked by the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64/X2 systems we were running then? No. They were almost always GPU-limited. If even a modern Atom CPU is faster than an average P4 in 2005, this CPU is a world better than those.

Anything bottlenecked by the CPU wasn't adequate for the GPU anyway.
 
CZroe said:
This GPU is repeatedly compared to the discrete GPUs were were using to play Oblivion and Half-Life 2 Episode 1 in 2005/6. Think of the processors we were pairing with those dGPUs. Were those games severely bottle-necked by the Pentium 4 and Athlon 64/X2 systems we were running then? No. They were almost always GPU-limited. If even a modern Atom CPU is faster than an average P4 in 2005, this CPU is a world better than those.

Anything bottlenecked by the CPU wasn't adequate for the GPU anyway.
Click to expand...

With only one GPU it's only a slight bottleneck. With two, it may become significant.
 
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