Published in PC Hardware

Llano CPU power inferior to Sandy Bridge

by on22 July 2010
fusion
But the graphics win
Llano is the first real Fusion product, something that we have been waiting for almost five years. When we say real, then we mean that it has the high performance x86 core inside, something that goes neck to neck with current Core i generation as well s Phenom II’s and Athlon II’s.

AMD should show Ontario, a 40nm Atom competitor powered with Bobcat core, in late 2010 with volume shipmets in early 2011. This one does not compete with Arrandale and Clarkdale or Sandy Bridge, Intel's all integrated CPU scheduled for early 2011.

Since Llano is 32nm, it has a new core that is unfortunately based on K10 concepts. The K10 got shrunk from 65nm to 45nm and it looks like that Llano will get this same core, optimized and shrunk once again.

The Llano CPU is in design and performance should get quite close to current dual and quad-core Athlon and Phenom II parts, but obviously there will be some room for improvement, since the transistors will get significantly smaller and the TDP at the same clock should go down.

Sandy Bridge is going to win the CPU performance battle, this is at least what our sources are telling us, but since it has Redwood inside, Llano should win the graphics performance battle. AMD will have a hard time to find enough OEMs to carry its products and enough customers to go the AMD green way, but well informed consumers might go for Llano powered PC simply for its better graphics.

We believe that the performance difference between two CPU cores won’t be mind blowing and that each of these two monolithic CPU and GPU on one core chips will be a good choice. The sad part for AMD is that Intel gets there first as its already showed a prototype of CPU – GPU Sandy Bridge back in September 2009 almost nine months before AMD, and AMD is the one who announced back in 2006 that its Fusion chips are coming.

After Llano, AMD plans to use Bulldozer core in its next generation Fusion, that is probably comming in 2012 if not later.
Last modified on 22 July 2010
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