When we were cordially invited to AMD’s press event in London to hear more about its plans for the graphics card market we got a bit sidetracked by a deep discussion about AMD’s first processor sporting an integrated GPU. The so called Fusion concept has been talked about for years, but after some more up and close talks with AMD last month we felt closer to launch than ever before. The gut feeling turned out to be trustworthy now that AMD has announced that the first 32nm Llano processors will start shipping out to partners during the first half of 2010.
Llano is the code name of AMD’s first Fusion CPU, but AMD refers to it as an APU, Accelerated Processing Unit. During the ISSCC AMD revealed that it has come such a long way with its 32 nanometers SOI high-k metal gate technology that the first samples of Llano will be shipping out in the next couple of months.
AMD Llano will be quad-core with Phenom II based CPU cores that will also house an integrated graphics circuit with DirectX 11 features. We know nothing about the specifics of the GPU as of today, but AMD has released additional bits and pieces on the CPU portion of the “APU”.
Each core will sport 1MB L2 cache (total of 4MB) and the clock frequencies will be north of 3GHz when the first units leave the factory. As expected AMD will be using its latest core power gating technology. This means that cores can be turned off when not needed, and overclocked automatically when there is room for it with single-threaded applications.
During the first quarter 2011 Llano is set to debut in retail channels and we sincerely hope that performance of both the CPU and the integrated graphics circuit will live up to our expectations. With the new Fusion family we will also see the birth of a new AMD socket, the first in a very long time, but both name and specifications were left undisclosed.
Four cores and an integrated GPU seems like a bit much to me, but good for AMD. I personally would prefer a dual or even tri core cpu with the fastest integrated GPU they could shove on the die and stay within a 125w TDP.
Last I heard AMD was going to use the GPU for a lot more than just graphics 🙂