The AMD Llano Notebook Review: Competing in the Mobile Market
by Jarred Walton & Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:01 AM ESTFusion GPUs: A Long-Awaited Upgrade to IGPs Everywhere
During our conversations with AMD, at one point they mentioned that they prefer not to use the term “IGP” anymore since they consider it a derogatory term. I asked what we should call Llano’s graphics and they said AMD officially refers to it as the “Fusion GPU” (fGPU), so that's what we'll use going forward. Regardless of what we call it, though, there’s no doubt that the 6620G fGPU is a dramatic upgrade to the old HD 4250; in fact, the 6620G should also boast significantly better performance than Intel’s HD 3000…provided the CPU core doesn’t become a bottleneck. Let’s start with 3DMark comparisons to see just where Llano falls. Again, we have the 6620G and 6630M Llano setups tested, but now we’re adding CrossFire to the mix.
I’m including all of the 3DMark iterations to provide a broad view of graphics potential. The latest 3DMark11 release seems to be almost purely GPU-limited, but of course it requires DX11 support and thus many of the other laptops (including Intel’s IGP) fail to run it. 3DMark Vantage’s Performance defaults are about as demanding, and Llano comes out 40-50% ahead of Sandy Bridge’s HD 3000. Of course, Arrandale completely falls on its face in the Performance test, generating a result of just 161, but AMD’s old HD 4250 is only marginally better with a score of 238. Remove some of the demands with the Vantage Entry-Level preset and Sandy Bridge starts to close the gap, with the quad-core 2820QM actually coming out ahead of Llano. Things that make you go hmm….
Things don’t get any better when we look at Asymmetrical CrossFire (ACF) from Llano. 3DMark11 comes in a whopping 50% faster than the 6630M dGPU, or 78% faster than the fGPU. If that performance boost showed up in our games, things would be great, but unfortunately it doesn’t. AMD informed us just yesterday that only DX10 or DX11 games and applications will even work with ACF, so perhaps that explains why we see little to no benefit in 3DMark03/05/06. The Vantage Performance preset shows a respectable 38% increase vs. the dGPU and 68% over the fGPU, but on Entry-Level it’s only 11-14% faster, and in 3DMark03 the dGPU actually scored lower than the fGPU.
If we were to stop our analysis of graphics performance right now, I suspect there would be a lot of confusion. Llano’s fGPU is anywhere from being equal to HD 3000 to 50% faster; Asymmetrical CrossFire is either a boon or a bust. So which is it? This is why we only place a minor emphasis on 3DMarks; let’s get to some actual gaming benchmarks.
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Brian23 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Jarred/Anand,Based on the benchmarks you've posted, It's not very clear to me how this CPU performs in "real world" CPU usage. Perhaps you have it covered with one of your synthetic benchmarks, but by looking at the names, it's not clear which ones stress the integer vs floating point portions of the processor.
IMO, a test I'd REALLY like to see is how this APU compares in a compile benchmark against a C2D 8400 and a i3 380M. Those are both common CPUs that can be used to compare against other benchmarks.
Could you compile something like Chrome or Firefox on this system and a couple others and update the review?
Thanks! I appreciate the work you guys do!
ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
PCMark tests common applications. You can read more details here: http://www.pcmark.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/P...While I would find a compilation benchmark interesting, are you suggesting that this will be more "real world"? How many people would do that compared to browsing, video, gaming? Probably not a lot.
Brian23 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Thanks for the link. I was looking for something that described what the synthetic benchmarks mean.As for "real world," it really depends from one user to the next. What I was really trying to say is that no-one buys a PC just to run benchmarks. Obviously the benchmark companies try to make their benchmarks simulate real world scenarios, but there's no way they can truly simulate a given person's exact workload because it's going to be different from someone else's workload.
If we're going down the synthetic benchmark path, what I'd like to see is a set of benchmarks that specifically stresses one aspect of a system. (i.e. integer unit or FPU.) That way you can compare processor differences directly without worrying about how other aspects of the system affect what you're looking at. In the case of this review, I was looking at the Computation benchmark listed. After reading the whitepaper, I found out that benchmark is stressing both the CPU and the GPU, so it's not really telling me just about the CPU which is the part I'm interested in.
Switching gears to actual real world tests, seeing a compile will tell me what I'm interested in: CPU performance. Like you said, most people aren't going to be doing this, but it's interesting because it will truly test just the CPU.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Hi Brian,I haven't looked into compiling code in a while, but can you give me a quick link to a recommended (free) Windows compiler for Chrome? I can then run that on all the laptops and add it to my benchmark list. I would venture to say that an SSD will prove more important than the CPU on compiling, though.
Brian23 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Jarred,This link is a user's quick how-to for compiling chrome:
http://cotsog.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/how-to-comp...
This is the official chrome build instructions:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-i...
Both use Visual Studio Express which is free.
I really appreciate this extra work. :-)
krumme - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
The first links at the top is sponsored3 times exactly the same i7 + 460 ! ROFL
Then 1 i7 with a 540
Damn - looks funny, but at least it not 1024 *768 like the preview, but the most relevant resolution for the market - thank you for that
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Man what is it with this dumb yuppie nonsense. No I dont want to save $200 because I dont actually work for my money. Hell, if you're even reading this site then it is highly likely that the two places you want more performance from your notebook is games and internet battery life. All this preening about intel's crippled cpu being 50% faster dont mean jack because ... well its a crippled cpu. It cant play games yet it has a stupid igp. Why get all yuppity about such an obvious design failure, so much so that you'd be willing to sneeze at a $200 savings like it means nothing. It actually means something to people who work for a living. Most people just dont need the extra 50% cpu speed from a notebook. But having a game that runs actually does mean something tangible.madseven7 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I'm not sure why people think this is such a crappy cpu. Am I missing something? Wasn't the Llano APU that was tested the lowest of the A8 series with DDR 1333? Doesn't it give up 500MHz-800MHz to the SB notebooks that were tested? Wouldn't the A8 3530mx perform much better? I for one would love to see a review of the A8 3530mx personally.ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Good comment. This is the highest end 35W CPU, but not the highest end Llano. So it gets commended for battery life but not performance. It will be interesting to see the A8-3530MX results for performance and battery life. It would still lose to Sandy Bridge quite soundly on many tests, I'm sure, but it's still a significant difference in clock speed over the A8-3500M..Jasker - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
One thing that is really interesting that isn't brought up here is the amount of power used during gaming. Not only do you get much better gaming than Intel, but you also get much less power. Double whammy.