The Llano Desktop Preview: AMD A8-3850 CPU & GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:00 AM ESTIf you haven't gotten the hint, today is all about Llano. The big story is of course Llano's notebook appearance; however, in the coming weeks you'll be hearing a lot more about Llano on the desktop as well. This is AMD's Socket-FM1, the brand new socket that'll be used for desktop Llano parts:
If you read our Computex coverage, the socket should look pretty familiar. Motherboard manufacturers all over Taiwan are busy readying their Socket-FM1 boards for retail release. In fact, there was so much interest in desktop Llano on behalf of the motherboard manufacturers that a number of Socket-FM1 boards and CPUs made their way off the island as Computex ended.
Existing Socket-AM3 coolers will work on FM1 motherboards
By now you may have already seen a lot of information leaked from AMD's Llano presentations, as well as its desktop strategy. In the past few days performance numbers have been revealed as well. While we're hard at work on our full review of AMD's desktop Llano APU, we wanted to chime in with some thoughts on Llano's desktop performance.
AMD isn't ready to disclose pricing or the entire product matrix for Llano on the desktop, but what we do have is the high-end desktop Llano SKU: AMD's A8-3850.
The 3850 has four cores running at 2.9GHz and doesn't support Turbo Core. On the GPU side it has the full Radeon HD 6550D configuration with 400 shader processors running at 600MHz.
Sandy Bridge's GPU performance is the target, but how much better will AMD do on the desktop? Let's find out.
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mczak - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Oh and forgot to add could you please specify the exact specification of the HD5570? The article only says 400 cores at 750Mhz (seems very high for 5570) and misses the memory completely (there are 5570 on the market with pretty much anything ranging from ddr2 to gddr5...). Reference 5570 would be 650Mhz core clock and 900Mhz ddr3 memory.Tanclearas - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Seriously?! Have you even checked memory prices lately?DanNeely - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
newegg typical basely prices for 2x2GB DDR3:1333: $40
1600: $44
1866: $70
2000: $60
anything above 1600 starts to show a binning penalty. (The 1866/2000 prices are not an error, DDR3-2000 is readily available for less than 1866.)
Tanclearas - Thursday, June 16, 2011 - link
Right. So $14 difference changes a $499 system into a $513 system. While I recognize the psychological difference between those numbers, I also know that manufacturers and marketing departments can find ways to trim that $14 from somewhere else and highlight the DDR3-2000 memory, even if they only advertise and run it as DDR3-1866.I would not typically encourage the use of high-speed memory because traditionally it has little to no impact on most real applications. However, Llano changes that when using the IGP.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Here's some additional data to tide you over :)http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/llano/...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Hmm a shortened link, looks like our comment system needs a tweak :)http://bit.ly/kYGkvk
mczak - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
very nice scaling results. This platform REALLY wants at least ddr3-1600. AMD should have only officially supported ddr3-1600 and faster to force the OEMs to not skimp on the memory :-).duploxxx - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
major improvement seen from this increase of RAM speed, can you pls reload ALL benches with this new DRAM?It was clearly mentioned in the AMD slides that memory bandwidth was very important, this might also influence the CF setup a lot.
mczak - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
The cpu benches shouldn't change really, just like older Phenom II you could just as well use ddr2 I bet.It should probably help for CF indeed as it will make the setup more symmetric, but given it barely worked at all I don't think there's much point retrying that without a newer driver version anyway.
plonk420 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
will the final review have 1333 vs 1866 ram?