The AMD Llano Notebook Review: Competing in the Mobile Market
by Jarred Walton & Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:01 AM ESTIntroducing Mobile Llano
Anand has provided our coverage of Llano’s architecture and he’ll have a preview of desktop performance, but he’s leaving the mobile coverage to me (Jarred). At a high level, the breakdown of Llano is really quite simple: take a K10.5 series CPU core (dual- or quad-core), pair it up with a DX11 capable GPU core similar to AMD’s Redwood line (5600/5600M or 6500M), and then mix in power gating and Turbo Core; bake everything in a 32nm process and you’ve got Llano. Easier said than done, of course, as K10.5 parts previously used a 45nm process while Redwood used 40nm, so AMD had plenty of work to do before they could realize the simplistic overview I just described; the result is what matters, though, so let’s break out our spoons and see how the pudding tastes. Here’s the overview of the mobile A-series APUs launching today.
| AMD A-Series Fusion APUs for Notebooks | |||||||
| APU Model | A8-3530MX | A8-3510MX | A8-3500M | A6-3410MX | A6-3400M | A4-3310MX | A4-3300M |
| CPU Cores | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| CPU Clock (Base/Max) | 1.9/2.6GHz | 1.8/2.5GHz | 1.5/2.4GHz | 1.6/2.3GHz | 1.4/2.3GHz | 2.1/2.5GHz | 1.9/2.5GHz |
| L2 Cache (MB) | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| Radeon Model | HD 6620G | HD 6620G | HD 6620G | HD 6520G | HD 6520G | HD 6480G | HD 6480G |
| Radeon Cores | 400 | 400 | 400 | 320 | 320 | 240 | 240 |
| GPU Clock (MHz) | 444 | 444 | 444 | 400 | 400 | 444 | 444 |
| TDP | 45W | 45W | 35W | 45W | 35W | 45W | 35W |
| Max DDR3 Speed |
DDR3- 1600 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1600 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1333 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1600 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1333 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1333 DDR3L- 1333 |
DDR3- 1333 DDR3L- 1333 |
There are two different power envelopes for Llano right now: 35W and 45W. The former models end with an M while the latter end in MX. Don’t let the relatively high TDPs fool you, as similar to Intel we’re looking at maximum TDP while idle and low-load TDP will be far lower. Based on battery life, it appears that the entire test notebook consumes around 7.42W at idle. By comparison, a slightly larger dual-core SNB notebook consumes around 7.68W when idle, so we’re very close to parity at idle. As noted earlier, all APU models come with 1MB L2 cache per core, and Turbo Core allows for cores to clock up to higher values under the right circumstances. That could prove important, as clock-for-clock K10.5 cores can’t hope to keep up with Sandy Bridge, and Sandy Bridge parts are already clocking significantly higher.
On the CPU side of the equation, there are currently only dual-core and quad-core parts, so tri-core appears dead (or at least MIA for now). The other part of the APU is the GPU cores, and here there are three options. The A6 and A8 APUs are both quad-core, but A6 has 320 Radeon cores clocked at 400MHz compared to 400 cores at 444MHz—so the 6620G is potentially 40% faster. A4 APUs trim the GPU further, with 240 cores clocked at 444MHz, and they’re the dual-core parts. The 6620G could be up to 67% faster than 6480G, under the right circumstances. As Anand mentioned, right now all of the A-series APUs are coming from the “big Llano” die, but in the future we’ll see the A4 production shift to “little Llano” instead of using harvested die.
Vision and Radeon Branding
For 2011, AMD is simplifying their Vision branding with Llano, skipping the Premium, Ultimate, and Black modifiers and instead referring to the APU. Vision E2 refers to the dual-core E-series APUs, while the A4, A6, and A8 lines correlate directly with the A-series APUs. The Radeon brand continues as an important asset, so there will be sticker options to promote quad-core and dual-core CPUs with Radeon graphics. What about the Dual Graphics, though?
With the integrated GPU finally able to approach the performance of midrange mobile GPUs, AMD is making a return to hybrid CrossFire (IGP and a dGPU working together), though the official name is now apparently “Radeon Dual Graphics” or just "Dual Graphics"; we’ve also heard it referred to as “Asymmetrical CrossFire”, and we’ll use any of these terms throughout this article.
We first saw an attempt at hybrid CrossFire with the HD 2400 and the 790 chipset, and later that extended to HD 3400 cards, but it never really impressed as it was limited to desktops and you could still get far better performance by spending an extra $10 to upgrade from a 3400 to a 3600 dGPU. The 6620G fGPU is several times more powerful than the old HD 4250 IGP, making CrossFire potential useful, especially on laptops where the power savings from shutting off the dGPU are very significant.
With Radeon Dual Graphics, AMD introduces more brands. The various Fusion GPUs (fGPUs) only work in CrossFire with specific discrete GPUs (dGPUs)—nearly all of the 6400M, 6600M, and 6700M line are eligible—giving rise to several new Radeon names. If you start with a base of a Radeon HD 6620G and add a Radeon HD 6770M to it, the resulting combination is now called a Radeon HD 6775G2. Pair it with a 6750M and you get a 6755G2. The entirety of the list is depicted in the slide from above. For now these names are just going to be listed on the notebook spec sheet, the drivers themselves will report the actual GPU you have driving the panel you're connected to. AMD is still working out the right way to expose these names through software to avoid confusion.
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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