AMD recently presented its first Fusion APU circuits in the form of Ontario and Zacate, but unlike these mobile processors it has a more powerful mid-range APU in development. Llano is expected to launch for the summer and according information that is said to come from AMD the integrated graphics processor will perform on par with Radeon HD 5600.
Turkish Donanimhaber has published information on AMD’s coming Fusion processors that according to the site comes from AMD’s own documentation. This time the information focuses on AMD’s desktop platform code-named Lynx, which is expected to launch sometime around June-July 2011.
Two to four cores with 32nm Silicon-on-insulator technology
The heart of the new Lynx platform will be the new APU Llano that is made with AMD’s new 32nm SOI technology. Llano is a CPU that targets the mid-range segment and is considered the replacement for the current Athlon II series where we find models with 2 to 4 cores.
The cores are based on the AMD K10.5 architecture, but has with the “Stars” code name been overhauled severely compared to K10-based Phenom processors. Llano will bake in large portions of the northbridge into the processor package and beside a PCIe 2.0 controller, dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory controller and 1MB L2 cache per core we also find a powerful graphics processor.
| Llano with 4 cores | Llano with 3 CPU cores | Llano with 2 CPU | |
| Node | 32nm SOI | 32nm SOI | 32nm SOI |
| CPU | 4 Stars CPU cores | 3 Stars CPU cores | 2 Stars CPU cores |
| GPU | Beavercreek DX11 | Beavercreek DX11 | Winterpark DirectX 11 |
| L2 cache | 4MB | 3MB | 2MB |
| Power consumption |
95 watt TDP | 95 watt TDP | 65 watt TDP |
DirectX 11 graphics threatening the mid-range segment
According to the information that was published the CPU performance of Llano – as expected – will be comparable to that of current Athlon II and Phenom II processors. A dual-core Llano APU will offer CPU performance on par with Athlon X2 250 or e.g. Intel Core 2 Duo E6500. The integrated graphics processor is up to 4.7 times more powerful than the GPU found in Intel G41.
Beavercreek twice as fast as Sandy Bridge?
If we look at a quad-core Llano APU performance improve noticeably and here AMD’s processor will threaten both Athlon II 640 and Core i3-540 in CPU performance. Even more interesting is the integrated graphics processor that will be powerful enough to deliver performance on par with AMD’s discrete graphics cards of the Radeon HD 5550-5600 series. This means AMD’s Beavercreek GPU, that is used in the quad-core Llano circuits, will be near twice as fast as Intel HD Graphic 3000 that is found in Sandy Bridge.
When AMD launches its Socket FM1 platform this Summer the new Llano processors will also get support for Turbo Core 2.0 for better dynamic performance improvements and energy saving functions. AMD doens’t comment on the performance of unreleased prodcts and even we should consider this with a punch of salt it feels like Sandy Bridge was just the beginning of the evolutionary ladder of integrated GPU performance.
