The AMD Llano Notebook Review: Competing in the Mobile Market
by Jarred Walton & Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:01 AM ESTAMD’s Llano Platform: Contending for your Mobile Dollar
When we first heard about Llano, it sounded like a good idea but we had concerns it might be too little too late. Core 2 was already beating AMD in the mobile sector, and since then we’ve had Arrandale and then Sandy Bridge. What was once a performance and battery life deficit has grown to a gaping chasm, and returning yet again to the aging K10/K10.5 architecture—which is a reworking of K8—felt like AMD’s mobile platforms were going to continue their history of stagnation. This is an important sector as well, as many businesses are shifting to completely mobile PCs and laptops are now outselling desktops. What we get with Llano is in some cases better than we were hoping for and in others not enough, but make no mistake: Llano is really all about the mobile sector.
The power and battery life optimizations are the best evidence of this: Llano offers roughly triple the battery life of the previous generation Danube platform, all while providing similar to superior CPU performance and a dramatic upgrade to graphics performance. From that perspective, Llano is a clear win for AMD, allowing their less expensive notebooks to finally offer competitive battery life with superior graphics. If you do a lot of complex CPU calculations (and you can’t or won’t switch to GPGPU computations), Intel’s Sandy Bridge processors are still faster than Llano, often times by a large amount. However, not everyone needs a quad-core Sandy Bridge notebook for $1000+. That’s where AMD hopes to come into the picture, offering a viable entry-level gaming notebook that can handle all the other mundane tasks you might want for under $700.
What we can’t really comment on is how gaming potential and performance will scale up and down with the rest of the Llano lineup. The A8-3500M is very likely one of the best A-series offerings, with the full 400 Radeon cores and four CPU cores. The A6 series has similar quad-core clock speeds, but the fGPU is trimmed down to 320 cores and the clock drops from 444MHz to 400MHz—so the HD 6520G provides 72% of the compute power of the 6620G we’ve looked at today. In a similar vein, dual-core processors aren’t completely dead yet, as Intel continues to prove with their i3/i5 series parts. Unfortunately, with the A4 Llano parts you get higher clocked dual-core with only 240 Radeon cores—the 6480G has 60% of the compute power of 6620G. If the fGPU is largely bandwidth limited, the drop in computation performance may not matter, but where the A8-3500M can generally handle medium detail 1366x768 gaming, A6 will likely require a few lowered settings to hit 30FPS and A4 will mostly fill the role of minimum detail 768p gaming.
The other interesting takeaway with Llano is that Brazos has just become far less interesting for many of us. Double the performance of Atom still isn’t enough, and now it’s only a bit more money to double or triple CPU performance while gaming (graphics) performance is two to four times faster than E-350. I’m pretty much content to say that I have no interest in Atom—even Cedar Trail—outside of tablets and smartphones, and Brazos while better is in a similar position. Those who like 10” netbooks are welcome to disagree, but that’s really the only stronghold where Llano and Sandy Bridge can’t quite compete—and Intel is even encroaching on that market with their new Ultrabook platform. Intel looks set to leave Atom out of the laptop race going forward, shifting it to tablets and other fanless designs, and Llano looks set to push Brazos into a similar niche. That’s fine with me, since in a couple more years we’re likely to see performance equal to or better than today’s Llano on tablets and smartphones.
As usual, your choice of laptop will once more come down to deciding what you really want/need. If you want maximum performance with reasonable battery life, Intel’s quad-core Sandy Bridge parts matched with NVIDIA’s Optimus-enabled GPUs are the best way to get there, but you’ll pay quite a bit more for the privilege. If you’re willing to forego battery life, Sandy Bridge with discrete-only AMD or NVIDIA graphics will power the fastest notebooks you can currently find, but they’re bulky, heavy, and expensive. It’s when you start talking about moderate priced laptops that Llano becomes important.
Some people will try to tell you that AMD will sell you more CPU cores than Intel for a lower price, but unlike desktop parts, mobile Llano cores don’t clock high enough to consistently outperform dual-core Intel processors. Even in heavily-threaded benchmarks where quad-core CPUs can shine, dual-core i5 processors are still typically 30% faster than the A8-3500M. Instead of selling you more CPU cores for less money, what AMD is now selling is substantially better graphics for less money. Home theater enthusiasts might find a use for such parts as well, but really the purpose of GPUs is simple: they’re for playing games. Until and unless GPGPU can take off and provide some killer apps, businesses and non-gaming folk alike will be better served by Intel’s processors—unless you want to save $100 to $200.
If you’re after a good all-around laptop for $500-$600, Llano should have just what you need; and for gaming, it will likely power some of the best sub-$700 gaming capable laptops you're going to find right now (short of fire-sales and refurbished laptops). For those interested, the only viable gaming notebook (e.g. with at least HD 5650M/6530M or GT420M/520M GPU) we can find for under $700 with an Intel CPU is the MSI CX640 at $650. Hopefully we'll see Llano offerings drop into the sub-$600 range with A8 APUs.
Now if you want to have your cake and eat it too, the APU to wait for would be Trinity. Due out somewhere in the 2012 - 2013 timeframe, combine a Bulldozer derived architecture with AMD's next-generation GPU architecture and you've got Trinity. Third time's the charm, right?
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jollyjugg - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
Anand,you are making such a big deal of performance between Intel and AMD machines. Most of the folks who buy laptops are not looking to a super computer level performance which matters a lot in the server world or may be even desktop world. They are looking to buy a laptop which has good performace, good battery life and are more affordable. For the kind of applications most of the people use (internet surfing, listening to musing, watching youtube, watching movies, playing solitaire etc etc), thre will hardly be any difference between the offerings from both manufacturers. The fact that you are comparing performance and battery life and rather sneeringly say that if you want a machine which is 100-200 bucks lower then you should go for Llano machine at the cost of less performance makes me see black here. Why is cost not a big deal for you. How can you absolutely say that intel performance/$ and Battery life/$ is better than AMD's metrics. If not for AMD intel will be selling these machines not for 700 but for 1000. So in reality customers see reduced cost from Intel and a further 200 discount on AMD machines. You have to be a bit impartial in your reviews and not make only big deal of performance in portable machines where battery life and cost is also equally important and compare them as such. The fact that Intel's peformance is important win for them over AMD performance is a important one for geeks and enthusiasts like you, but not for comman man in the street. For him bang for the buck is the most important metric in most of the cases. But since your website is a reputed one, whatever you say might influence the opinion of man in the street. Please dont let your or any of your staff's personal opinion cloud their ability to see the bigger picture and tell it as such to PC buyers. Be impartial in your reviews.
A Humble AMD Fan
JarredWalton - Saturday, June 18, 2011 - link
We do our best to remain impartial; if we were partial, we would strongly advocate for or against AMD. When someone calling themselves a "humble AMD fan" talks about being impartial, you've pretty much already shot yourself in the foot. I'm not an Intel fan, despite what many would like to say. Right now, Intel simply has the better processor. AMD now has the better all-in-one design if you value graphics performance, but in order to give AMD the win you have to declare GPUs as being more vital than CPUs. Right now, outside of gaming, we're missing the killer apps to make that true.What we said here is that AMD is competitive with Llano, and they are, but the pricing is really the big question. We *guess* that you might get AMD laptops for $100 to $200 less than Intel, but that's being generous. AMD says the laptop used in this review should have a target price of around $800 (because it has the 6630M in addition to Llano). At that price, this is not a clear win for AMD--not even close. Yes, Intel would be priced differently if AMD didn't exist, but you can't judge the quality of a product by what would happen if it disappeared. "Duke Nukem Forever would be an amazing game if no other FPS titles had come out in the past 15 years!"
For $800, ASUS already has the U41JF with similar graphics performance and better battery life (mostly because of the larger battery, but that's still important). Besides the MSI CX640 (i3-2310M with GT 520M for $650), there are five other laptops at Newegg that have Optimus graphics and Arrandale CPUs for under $750 (and in terms of performance, Llano is still slower than Arrandale on the CPU side). For $900, you can get a Samsung laptop with i7-2630QM and Optimus GT 540M. Dell's XPS 15 can be had with an i5-2410M and Optimus GT 525M for $800. That's what AMD has to compete with, and right now every one of those is significantly faster than Llano, offers better graphics performance than the Llano IGP, and battery life is similar or slightly worse.
Last year when I ripped on AMD's laptops for having okay performance with horrible battery life, AMD fans tried to tell me battery life didn't matter. We were looking at 2.5 hours with Athlon II/Phenom II compared to 5+ hours for Arrandale, and it "didn't matter" because people just wanted what was cheaper. Now we're looking at 6-7 hours battery life for Intel compared to 7-8 hours for Llano, at a similar price (at least going by AMD's suggestion), and battery life has suddenly become a lot more important. I recognize hypocrisy when I see it....
In summary, once more: Llano is a good step forward, but it will really depend on pricing. It cannot compete at $800. Period. Core i5-2410M is already 30-50% faster on the CPU side, offers similar battery life, and can be had with an Optimus GPU for $800. If AMD can't beat the performance or battery life, the only thing they can do is reduce pricing, so A8-3500M will need to start closer to $600, not $700. The A8-3530XM is the fastest mobile Llano chip, and it's only clocked 27% higher than the A8-3500M, likely with a $50 price premium (at least), so we can't really take that as a potential win either. 3530MX for $700 on it's own (no dGPU) would be reasonable, though, which is why I say that 3500M needs to be at the $650 (or lower) price range.
There's still the matter of getting a good quality laptop, regardless of whether it's AMD or Intel based, and that has been a seriously weak area for inexpensive laptops. Personally, if I were going out and spending my own money on a laptop right now, I'd lean heavily towards business offerings (Dell Latitude, Lenovo ThinkPad, or HP ProBook/EliteBook), just because their keyboards and build quality are so much better. That means I would be paying $1000+ for even a moderate laptop, and at that price it's no surprise that all the business offerings use Intel's CPUs. You can go the other route and buy an okay $600 laptop today, and in 18 months you replace it with another $600 laptop; the only problem is you're stuck with the crappy keyboards if you do that.
If there's any bias in my above statements, please let me know where. About the strongest bias I express is for good build quality and keyboards -- chiclet need not apply. AMD or Intel really doesn't matter to me; the question is who can offer the more compelling package overall, and determining a winner there requires listing out all the various aspects and then making a personal decision. I won't say that a faster CPU is always superior, just as a faster APU/GPU isn't always superior. They're different is all, but looking at the entire market right now the CPU will win out for the majority of users. Remove all the teenagers and 20-somethings from the population, and I'd say gamers (like myself) are less than 10% of the notebook buying population. Even with the younger generation included, I'd still say only 20% of laptops purchased will ever run anything more complex than Facebook games.
mga318 - Sunday, June 26, 2011 - link
Well, we can look at prices now.HP is currently selling their 15 inch dv6z laptop with the same processor as this one for $659 without the additional graphics card. Which means that your statement of these laptops needing to be priced closer to $600 is right on the money for what we're getting. Likewise, HP's upgrade to AMD's fastest APU is precisely what you guessed $50. So that places the A8-3530XM right at $709 without an additional graphics card. HP doesn't say exactly what card they're offering for their $50 and $100 dollar upgrades, but they're both listed as having GDDR5 instead of your DDR graphics card here:
512MB GDDR5 Radeon(TM) HD Dual Graphics [HDMI,VGA]
+$50.00
1GB GDDR5 Radeon(TM) HD Dual Graphics [HDMI, VGA]
+$100.00
So now you're getting the premium processor and graphics card for $809 (assuming you stay with the other standard components, with are 6GB RAM (speed not listed) and a cheapo 500GB 5400 RPM hard drive.
What do you think, Jared, are those competitive enough prices?
mga318 - Sunday, June 26, 2011 - link
*which are (not "with are").choikwa - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
512MB GDDR5 Radeon(TM) HD Dual Graphics [HDMI,VGA]+$50.00
[6400m]
1GB GDDR5 Radeon(TM) HD Dual Graphics [HDMI, VGA]
+$100.00
[6700m]
You can verify these as
choikwa - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
6400m has 160 stream procs6700m has 480 stream procs
rick1725 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Is this place full of Intel fanboys or what? The e-350 is far superior to any Atom configuration available. This has been proved over and over again. Stop flamming and get you head out of Intels overpriced a**strawhat pirates - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 - link
baka...baka...bakaaaa!!! <--- japan language... mention it to you, rick1725!!intel only win on advertising alone ...
the rest? thumbs down for InteLosers!! #boooo ...
and intel is only a theory core ...*core fuck!! there is no definite proof .. :@
FORZA AMD!! AMD till die!!
tuRnitUpsuM - Monday, July 4, 2011 - link
Im typing this on a Samsung nf210 (Atom n550) and external monitor. 4 threads Gig ram ... fold it up throw it in a rugsack. Life is good. Only two things could possibly make it better.1) the above machine (in the header)
2) same form factor but Cortex A-15 chip running off ARMv7-R instructions.
first one to market gets the CASH!!!
technology is a beautiful thing.
SMSAssembly - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 - link
We have the Llano processors for sale,AM3400DDX43GX 4-Core 1.4GHz
AM3500DDX43GX 4-Core 1.5GHz
AM3530HLX43GX 4-Core 1.9GHz
EM3000DDX22GX 2-Core 1.8GHz
Contact Jeff at SMS Assembly for inquiries
Jeff@smsassembly.com