Llano sans GPU. AMD Athlon II X4 631

There is no L3 cache, and unlike the AM3 athlons, no L3 cache can be unlocked: the llano silicon simply has no L3. Llano is infamous for its lack of overclocking headroom. I am all for low-TDP powerhouses, but this is essentially a A8 missing half of its silicon. It doesn't even have a lower TDP than other llano A8s even though half of the chip is locked.
 
The Unlocked A8s should be interesting, will probably walk all over the FX-41xx chips.
 
KazeoHin said:
There is no L3 cache, and unlike the AM3 athlons, no L3 cache can be unlocked: the llano silicon simply has no L3. Llano is infamous for its lack of overclocking headroom. I am all for low-TDP powerhouses, but this is essentially a A8 missing half of its silicon. It doesn't even have a lower TDP than other llano A8s even though half of the chip is locked.
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http://www.anandtech.com/show/4478/asrock-a75-extreme6-review-and-desktop-llano-overclocking/4

See last paragraph and L3 does not necessarily make it that much worse especially if you have ridiculously high clocked RAM to minimize TLB penalties.

Beware of a multiplier bug though:

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=153186

Max on the A8 seems like ~3.6 (1 GHZ!) dunno what this clocks though. This is definitely interesting.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+II+X4+631+Quad-Core
 
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AntiSocialMunky said:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4478/asrock-a75-extreme6-review-and-desktop-llano-overclocking/4

See last paragraph and L3 does not necessarily make it that much worse especially if you have ridiculously high clocked RAM to minimize TLB penalties.

Beware of a multiplier bug though:

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=153186

Max on the A8 seems like ~3.6 (1 GHZ!) dunno what this clocks though. This is definitely interesting.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+Athlon+II+X4+631+Quad-Core
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A ghost multiplier! never heard of that...

I'm all for llano. I think versus the major strike-out that is FX/Boredozer; Fusion A8 is a home-run. I can't wait for the black edition chips, or chips that introduce more cache.
 
Apparently this is a broken A6-3650 with the graphics disabled due to GloFo schenanigans.

I wonder what the true TDP is since graphics is gone?
 
luk1999 said:
There's some interesting chinese review:
http://cpu.it168.com/a2011/0927/1252/000001252333_all.shtml
Overclocked results are pretty good, thanks to "Lab Burst Mode" option.
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Wow, thanks for the link. I guess it is the GPU that's holding their clock back, which makes sense. This is very interesting. A Stars chip running at 4.4Ghz looks like a good upgrade for my old Deneb at @3.5Ghz. The upgrade is relatively cheap as well.

Price of that CPU and Mobo combined is $189.92 on newegg and it should easily beat bulldozer in single threaded disciplines without using a half of kilowatt.
 
wow! thanks so much for posting the chinese review! im going to get a 631 now. I was afraid these chips wouldnt overclock any good since the a8-3850/a6-3650 seem to run into a wall at 3.6ghz.

if this chip can reliably overclock past 4ghz it might be amd's best value CPU.
 
I'm not sure if iGPU is problem here. Here's A8-3850 (with "Lab Burst Mode" enabled):
http://itbbs.pconline.com.cn/diy/14043491.html
It's probably suicide run only, but... it looks very promising. I'm pretty sure that "Lab Burst Mode" is required for good overclocking. I've try to ask ASRock about this function... Maybe they know more about it.
 
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holy crap. then id get an a6-3650 combo deal -- i actually want the GPU but not if it limits overclocking.
 
Based on the translation, he says the 631 reached 4.4ghz on air cooling and stock voltage. thats a huge difference, the reviewers that reached 3.6ghz on llano they had to go up to like 1.5V and hit a wall at 140mhz fsb. with this lab burst mode, ive seen screenshots of 170-198mhz FSB. 5ghz a8-3850 sounds SWEEEEET to me!
 
Um, the FM1 socket has a bug where multiplier can be adjusted without effect on the processor above a certain point. You can make it say 4.0 or even 5.7 but it isn't running that high. Wait for the bios update that fixes it.
 
No, he provided benchmarks at 4.4ghz showing a HUGE increase in performance, almost double
 
Does the FSB base freq OC on the X4 and A8 also OC the NB and PCI-E? Seems you could run into serious problems with your discrete graphics as a result. I'm tempted to try just for fun at $190 mobo+cpu but I'm skeptical this OC is going to work well when the graphics card comes into play.
 
AntiSocialMunky said:
Just buy the MSI board specified.
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That doesn't really answer my question. Tom's showed that OC'ing the A8 resulted in SSD drive not being identified anymore, which makes sense since all the buses run off the same base clock frequency. None of the tests in those china articles ran a benchmark that used a discrete graphics card.
 
larkin said:
That doesn't really answer my question. Tom's showed that OC'ing the A8 resulted in SSD drive not being identified anymore, which makes sense since all the buses run off the same base clock frequency. None of the tests in those china articles ran a benchmark that used a discrete graphics card.
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The chip has no GPU on it, it's disabled. If they didn't use a discrete graphics card how did they see the results of the tests? I don't think the uncore is affected by the base frequency of the CPU, that would be pretty bad. I think problems Tom's experienced may have to do with power draw. Llano is limited to 100w TDP. This is where "Lab burst mode" comes into play, to remove that ceiling.

Also without a GPU, Llano uses very little power. Most of the 4.4Ghz+ overclocks people are reporting have been done with default voltage levels. Someone even reported a 5Ghz OC.

I would have given this thing a try but I decided I wanted to play with a hackintosh instead. (2500k build is in the mail)
 
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weren't the Chinese testers using an A8, which is the same silicon, but with the GPU working 100%?
 
I read both of these websites.

4.4ghz was an athlon 631 FM1 (26x multipler) on stock voltage / air cooling. 170x26
4.98ghz was a8-3850 (default 29x multiplier), this same cpu reached 4.75ghz on stock voltage (190x29)

to get overclocks over 3.8ghz you need a motherboard with "lab burst mode" which seems to be the MSI a75ma-g55 even other MSI boards dont seem to have it from what i can tell...

again, they are using FSB only to achieve these overclocks, not changing the "ghost multiplier"
 
softprdia said:
recently, an overclocker used an engineering sample of this processor to break the 3D Mark Vantage and 06 world records for integrated graphics.

The new accelerated processing unit will be known as the A8-3870 Black Edition and, thanks to its 3.1GHz base frequency, it will become AMD's fastest APU to date, surpassing the current 2.9GHz clocked A8-3850.

In order to achieve the two 3DMark world records, the AMD APU had to be overclocked from its base clock speed around 3.9GHz, which enabled it to score 11822 points in 3DMark 06 and 7386 points in 3DMark Vantage.

According to Chew, the overclocker who set these world records, the chip has the potential to go over 5GHz, but the motherboard's BIOS kept interfering with the engineering sample APU.
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the apu was crapping out just shy of 4 gig. if you were using one with a discrete gpu and liquid nitrogen 5gig might be attainable.
 
How about Two of these graphics-less Llanos on one packege ala Kentsfield and have an 8-Core CPU? A 4.4Ghz OC on this is no joke, and will probably walk all over the FX-4100.
 
If they found way to reliably clock them >4 Ghz that makes them very good cpus
 
Rauelius said:
How about Two of these graphics-less Llanos on one packege ala Kentsfield and have an 8-Core CPU? A 4.4Ghz OC on this is no joke, and will probably walk all over the FX-4100.
Click to expand...

The Prescott Menace
The IPC Wars
Revenge of the Core2s

A New K10
Sandybridge Strikes Back
Return of the FX

meh.
 
Don't get me wrong, I think AMD expanding the FM1 socket to entry-level enthusiasts is a great idea! However, the only real ''CPU" on the platform is the same exact IPC and clock speed of the top-range APU. If they were to die-shrink the phenom arch onto 32nm and put them on FM1 or develop a dedicated Stars CPU without half the silicon wasted on a gpu, I may consider buying an FM1 system, just for kicks.

The other option is to beef up the llano arch and release a BE A8 (which, from what I've read, is right around the corner). With the 'whyBotherDozer' performing like it does, the "trinity" arch is looking less appealing. We all know that 4 Phenom/Stars cores kicks the shit out of 2 BD Modules.
 
KazeoHin said:
With the 'whyBotherDozer' performing like it does, the "trinity" arch is looking less appealing. We all know that 4 Phenom/Stars cores kicks the shit out of 2 BD Modules.
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Trinity is supposed to have 2nd generation BD cores(Piledriver). Which we can hope they have been tweeked enough to actually give pretty decent performance, we'll see though. Honestly wish we could get a stars cpu on am3/am3+ though.
 
Fantasyalive said:
Trinity is supposed to have 2nd generation BD cores(Piledriver). Which we can hope they have been tweeked enough to actually give pretty decent performance, we'll see though. Honestly wish we could get a stars cpu on am3/am3+ though.
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+1
i was pretty much going to write the same thing till seeing this post.

currently have a Asus CHV with a PII555 (was supposed to be a placeholder for BD, not going to happen now) in it.

after the BD reviews, seriously considering dumping my CHV with EK (EN) chipset block attached and putting cash towards SB-E/X79(2011) hardware.

now if they released a 32nm 'stars' core for AM3+ (with 2 cobbled together -8 core, as someone mentioned earlier - just like my old q6600), i'd probably hang on to my Asus CHV.
this would be a decent 'save face' option for AMD until they can sort their BD issues. if not to improve the IPC then at least fix to power draw to improve clocks to make up the difference.
 
So $180 for the MSI board mentioned in the Chinese site and CPU. That sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than bulldozer at this point if the overclocks can be duplicated. Hell, I almost want to sell my x6 and AM3+ board and give it a shot.
 
I went for it, newegg parts got in today. Will let you all know how if the results can be at all replicated.
 
Just so you guys know, you'll have to do the not 'Live Updater' utility which I think is manual. The Live update may corrupt bios. The Chinese guys had issues with it if you look at the comments on some Chinese sites and a guy had issues with it on the Anand post I made for this.
 
larkin said:
I went for it, newegg parts got in today. Will let you all know how if the results can be at all replicated.
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I did too. I sold my AM3 setup this weekend. got athlon 631, msi a75ma-g55 and 8gb ddr3 1866. *fingers crossed this lab burst mode works*

Though i forgot to order a better cooler , so my overclocks will be limited for now anyway.
 
buttons said:
I did too. I sold my AM3 setup this weekend. got athlon 631, msi a75ma-g55 and 8gb ddr3 1866. *fingers crossed this lab burst mode works*

Though i forgot to order a better cooler , so my overclocks will be limited for now anyway.
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This could be really interesting!

A Llano core at 4.4Ghz is ~4.7Ghz on a PhenomII due to the combination of some sore optimizations and the larger L2 cache.

At 4.98 it's like a 5.3ghz Phenom II...

Too bad these things aren't unlocked, or I'd get one in a heart beat.

You'd probably be able to clock them high enough to REALLY blow bulldozer away. They could be the new budget superchip.
 
Does anyone else find it amusing that the Athlon II X6 631, a Llano chip at 2.6Ghz with a disabled GPU, is selling for MORE MONEY on Newegg than the A4-3400, a Llano chip at 2.7Ghz WITH a GPU? :p

Newegg definitely knows :p

edit
Never mind, the cheaper one is dual core. I misread it :p

Why on earth is an A4 prefix dual core and an A8 prefix quad core. This naming scheme sucks.
 
I find it funnier that this Budget Llano can utterly decimate the 4-Core FX-4100 in every aspect.


Zarathustra[H];1037900728 said:
Does anyone else find it amusing that the Athlon II X6 631, a Llano chip at 2.6Ghz with a disabled GPU, is selling for MORE MONEY on Newegg than the A4-3400, a Llano chip at 2.7Ghz WITH a GPU? :p

Newegg definitely knows :p

edit
Never mind, the cheaper one is dual core. I misread it :p

Why on earth is an A4 prefix dual core and an A8 prefix quad core. This naming scheme sucks.
Click to expand...
 
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