For the laptop market, AMD today officially launched the AMD A-Series Fusion Accelerated Processing Units codenamed “Llano” and “Sabine” mobile platform.
The Llano/Sabine combo is designed for use in mainstream notebooks and delivers high CPU performance, discrete-class graphics, and long battery life, AMD says.
AMD’s new Fusion APUs are based on 32nm production technology and incorporate up to four CPU cores and up to 400 GPU cores with DirectX 11 support. As same as the earlier released “Zacate” E-series and “Ontario” C-series lower-end APUs, the Llano has a dedicated HD video decoder.
The CPUs on the new APUs can run in Turbo mode with higher clock frequency of select cores, competing against Intel’s TurboBoost technology.
According to AMD, the A-series APUs for notebooks deliver up to 400 gigaflops of computing performance and more than 10:30 hours of battery life. However, that run time is achieved on a system with a 6-cell 62.16Whr battery in Windows Idle mode. Under the GPU and CPU intensive 3DMark 06 workload, the battery lasted 2:58 hours.
The new laptop platform includes support for switchable graphics combining APUs’ integrated GPU and a dedicated video card, as well as HDMI 1.4a, DisplayPort 1.1, USB 3.0, and support for multi-display setups.
Here’s a list of known AMD A-series Llano laptop-use parts:
Top of the line:
– AMD A8-3510MX quad-core at 1.9GHz (2.6GHz Turbo) with HD HD 6620G 400-core graphics, 4MB cache, and 45W TDP
High-end:
– AMD A8-3500M quad-core at 1.5GHz (2.5GHz Turbo) with HD HD 6620G 400-core graphics, 4MB cache, and 35W TDP
– AMD A8-3510MX quad-core at 1.8GHz (2.5GHz Turbo) with HD HD 6620G 400-core graphics, 4MB cache, and 45W TDP
Mid-range:
– AMD A6-3400M quad-core at 1.4GHz (2.3GHz Turbo) with HD 6520G 320-core graphics, 4MB cache, and 35W TDP
– AMD A6-3410MX quad-core at 1.6GHz (2.3GHz Turbo) with HD 6520G 320-core graphics, 4MB cache, and 45W TDP
Entry-level:
– AMD A4-3300M dual-core at 1.9GHz (2.5GHz Turbo) with HD 6480M 240-core graphics, 2MB cache, and 35W TDP
– AMD A4-3310MX dual-core at 2.1GHz (2.5GHz Turbo) with HD 6480M 240-core graphics, 2MB cache, and 45W TDP
There’s another entry-level part that is actually E-series Llano:
– AMD E2-3300M dual-core at 1.8GHz (2.4GHz Turbo) with HD 6370 160-core graphics, 1MB cache, and 35W TDP
The first laptop maker that has announced Llano-based notebooks is HP.
The first reviews of the AMD Llano mobile-class APUs have been already posted by AnandTech, Hexus, PC Perspective, Tom’s Hardware, and others.