We’ve written a lot about AMD’s first Llano CPU lately, but time was scarce on each occasion, and we’ve somehow failed to look at it from the practical side. In the meantime, another CPU from the series came out, as did a new motherboard signed by ASUS, so we thought we might as well profit from the occasion and really get to know the capabilities of the new chip. As we already know, Llano is a quad-core APU which comprises integrated graphics and the controllers from what used to be the northbridge. The specificity of the new APU is that the CPU cores and the integrated GPU share a lot of electronics, which means that this is not merely placing several chips into a single piece of hardware, but truly creating a symbiosis between various elements contained within; Llano is the first product to combine the CPU and the GPU in this way.
These new APUs are similar to the well-known Athlon II X4 CPU in that they lack L3 cache and have similar frequencies overall. Therefore, they aren’t a step ahead in raw performance, but a technologically advanced replacement for previous solutions. The model A8-3850 which we’ve already reviewed works at 2.9 GHz, whereas A6-3650 has had its multiplier reduced by 3, ticking at a solid 2.6 GHz. Although the first Llanos are manufactured in 32 nm, which suggests low consumption and heating, these models have a declared TDP of an entire 100 W. Practice has shown, however, that neither heating nor consumption actually reach those levels, whereas the average consumption is significantly lower.
The integrated graphics core is a bit weaker than the one seen in A8-3850. It has a lower frequency (443 MHz instead of 600 MHz), but also fewer stream processors (320 instead of 400) and texture units (16 instead of 20); however, the solution itself still vastly overpowers any competing solutions, as well as AMD’s integrated GPUs from the previous generation. The integrated GPU continues to use system memory, but since the new APU officially supports DDR3 RAM on clocks up to 1866 MHz, the penalty for this sort of solution is not as bad as the ones suffered by earlier chips.
