First "real" Llano benches

After reading that review, I think Llano's main selling points will be:

1) Low cost.
2) Good performance.
3) Strong graphics performance.
4) Low power consumption, strong battery life.

Otherwise, it gets slaughtered by Sandy Bridge in CPU tests, and appears to be relatively crippled by lack of fast, dedicated memory for the GPU portion. Good for:

1) HTPCs
2) Laptops
3) Low cost, light gaming rigs.

I guess that's about what AMD wanted, eh? =)
 
Ranari said:
After reading that review, I think Llano's main selling points will be:

1) Low cost.
2) Good performance.
3) Strong graphics performance.
4) Low power consumption, strong battery life.

Otherwise, it gets slaughtered by Sandy Bridge in CPU tests, and appears to be relatively crippled by lack of fast, dedicated memory for the GPU portion. Good for:

1) HTPCs
2) Laptops
3) Low cost, light gaming rigs.

I guess that's about what AMD wanted, eh? =)
Click to expand...

Well, its a hell of a lot better than what they had. This way they aren't getting trumped everywhere. I hope they can get more memory bandwidth somehow in the next fusion iteration.
 
Amazing power consumption figures here

power-consumption.png
 
Poor A8-3500M in the THG review. The CPU performance is even worse there. The one APU (APP encoding) benchmark wasn't very impressive either: the i5-2520M software CPU encoding is about as fast as the A8-3500M's 400SP IGP in the longer encoding test. The i5's QuickSync is 3x-4x faster than that.

GPGPU performance in the flagship app is very disappointing.

In THG's tests, The A8 GPU is 50%-100% faster than HD Graphics 3000. That's a little better than AMD's projection. The A8 GPU still looks pretty weak in the mobile version. IOW, I wouldn't buy one to game on, not even with CFX. Any kind of demanding gaming still requires a discrete GPU even with Llano's launch.

sublimestuff said:
Amazing power consumption figures here

http://hothardware.com/articleimages/Item1690/power-consumption.png[/I MG][/quote]As mentioned in the article, media playback and GPU gaming performance per watt are very good. But CPU performance per watt is very mediocre.

The positioning AMD is putting out will probably get a realignment. The A8 is hopeless against SB in CPU performance and SB is somewhat hopeless against the A8 in GPU performance. The A8 will settle in price against the i3, and lower models will price compete against Pentium G. That will also help even out the power consumption numbers.
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llano will have to have really good battery life from a typical 48whr battery for me to consider it.
That will be the only selling point to consider.
But prelim battery life benchmarks don't look too impressive.
If you undervolted and underclocked a SB chip (i don't have one; is this possible now?) to amd's turtle speed, you could probably get comparable battery life too.

at the $400-500 level, where laptops sell the most, we can't have our cake and eat it.
if you're making movies, amd's turtle cpu is not an option.
if you're playing games, intel is a subpar option, but amd 6480G will be subpar too.
I expect intel HD3000 to keep up with the lower end neutered amd igp.

At this price point, graphics shouldn't even be a consideration, since games will look ugly as shit from either intel or amd.
What's that saying about the special olympics?........ you can be a bit faster, but you're all still retarded..... applies here.

so in the end, at the 400-500 level, cpu power still counts for a lot, and intel still seems to have the best overall package.
 
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dr.kevin said:
But prelim battery life benchmarks don't look too impressive.
Click to expand...
It looked pretty good to me, although there were probably more efficient SB specimens available than what was tested in a couple of reviews. I think it's a good idea to wait for a real production A8 laptop to test how realistic price tradeoffs affect battery life like the production SB laptops used.

Anyways, from the couple of reviews that posted idle/load data, the A8 test platform used up to 40% less power than the production i5-2520M laptop at idle, and 20% less power under load. The load test can be misleading however because both laptops are not doing the same amount of work in a CPU stress test. Ignoring that, even though it's somewhat important :p, a Llano laptop if it can match the test platform should have good battery life for "typical use." IMO, CPU performance isn't there for the A8 to challenge i5 (or possibly even higher i3 models), but battery life is looking impressive. Above anything else, that's a huge win because older K10-based laptops had horrible battery life.

OTOH, A4 and A6 performance is likely abysmal vs very low end SB mobile chips and AMD won't be pushing out those review samples any time soon.
 
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I use my laptop for mostly office applications but it would be nice to be able to play some games on it. Given that, and I would love to not have to pay more than $500 for a laptop, I would love to have had this option when I was shopping for a new one. I already did the DTR thing once and unless I'm on the move all the time it's not worth it, I have a desktop for serious gaming.

In fact, for the price of a serious gaming laptop I could put together a gaming desktop with a lot better performance and buy a llano laptop for the best of both worlds.

95% of the time my laptop sits in the living room under the couch and I use it to browse the web while watching tv. It stays plugged in while it's there so battery life isn't a big deal. It does everything I need it to do and only cost me $300, but I would have had no trouble paying an extra $100 to get some gaming out of it. I can play some games on mine with the integrated graphics, but this would have let me play at an acceptable frame rate at least.
 
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