AMD has started shipping Llano to partners and is ready to launch the new Fusion architecture in June/July. AMD intends to ship 3 million Llano circuits in Q3 and it will supply 40% of the total sales of processors, says Digitimes who talked to motherboard manufacturers.
AMD’s first Fusion APUs Ontario and Zacate took the market by storm and became a grand success as the circuits ate up AMD’s notebooks shares and now make up 50% of the total sales in the mobile sector, after only 3 months which is incredibly fast for the IT industry. The company puts the same hope in Llano, and also motherboard makers believe Llano will be the comeback after many years as the secondary option.
According to the sources AMD hopes to ship 3 million Llano circuits in Q3 this year, which would make it responsible for 40% of AMD’s total processor sales. Several companies have said, for months now, that it believes Llano will affect the PC market substantially, and the same sources stick to that Llano has a good chance of increasing AMD’s market shares from ~20% to almost 30% in 2011.
Asus, Gigabyte and MSI has multiple motherboards ready for Llano, and then Llano will deliver enough and balanced CPU/GPU performance to force Intel to lower prices of its products. AMD’s 28nm APUs Krishna and Wichita that will replace Zacate and Ontario has taped out and will launch this year as planned.
Exactly how fast Llano really is and how much it will help AMD is really hard to say before we have had a chance to test it, but in this leaked video AMD displays the coming Llano A8-3510MX for notebooks with four cores at 1.8 GHz / 2.5 GHz Turbo Core with 400 shader processors and 45W TDP, against Intel Core i7 2600K from the desktop segment with a TDP at 95W.
AMd focuses heavily on the graphics performance, which is certainly powerful. On the other hand we don’t get a good picture of the CPU performance, but with the Phenom II background it will most likely not be as impressive, although still decent.
What matters the most for consumers remains to be seen, but AMD believes it has found the right concept to reach a broader audience.
