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 Mobile Test Platform
Similar to our Sandy Bridge Notebook, AMD shipped us a test notebook that likely will not actually hit the market. It’s also early hardware, as we haven’t received anything from the usual suspects, but performance and battery life should be representative of what we’ll see in shipping hardware. There’s still room for BIOS, firmware, and driver optimizations, so if anything we’d expect some scores to even improve from what we’re reporting, but for now we can get a starting point for what to expect from shipping Llano laptops and notebooks. Our test notebook is manufactured by Compal, and we understand there was a very limited production run, so what we’ve got is an existing shell with a new motherboard, slapped together for preview articles. Here are the specifications of our test system.
| AMD Llano Notebook Specifications | |
| Processor |
AMD A8-3500M (4x1.5GHz, 2.4GHz Turbo, 32nm, 4x1MB L2, 35W) |
| Chipset | AMD A70M |
| Memory | 2x2GB DDR3-1333 (Max 2x4GB) |
| Graphics |
AMD Radeon HD 6620G 1GB DDR3 (400 Radeon Cores, 444MHz) AMD Radeon HD 6630M 1GB DDR3 (480 Radeon Cores, 485MHz/1.6GHz Core/RAM clocks) Dual Radeon HD 6690G2 (Asymmetrical CrossFire) |
| Display | 14.0-inch LED Matte 16:9 1366x768 |
| Hard Drive(s) | Hitachi Travelstar 7K500 250GB 7200RPM SATA 3Gbps Hard Disk |
| Optical Drive | Blu-ray/DVDRW Combo Drive |
| Networking |
Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8168/8111) 802.11b/g/n (Broadcom) |
| Audio |
Realtek ALC269 HD audio Stereo speakers Headphone and microphone jacks |
| Battery | 6-Cell, 58Wh battery |
| Front Side | Flash reader |
| Left Side |
1 x USB 3.0 HDMI 1.4a Ethernet VGA Exhaust vent AC adapter port |
| Right Side |
Headphone/microphone jacks 2x USB 2.0 Optical drive Kensington lock |
| Back Side | - |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1 |
| Dimensions | 13.5" x 9.5" x 1.3-1.5" (WxDxH) |
| Weight | 4.78 lbs |
| Extras |
Webcam Flash reader (MMC, SD/Mini SD, MS/Duo/Pro/Pro Duo) USB 3.0 |
AMD equipped this laptop with their highest performance 35W part, the A8-3500M. That gives us four cores running at a nominal 1.5GHz, all 400 Radeon Cores clocked at 444MHz, and the potential for Turbo Core to take the CPU has high as 2.4GHz. Here’s where we run into our first snag, unfortunately: apparently there’s no software currently available that will report the actual real-time core speeds for the CPU or GPU. Turbo Core appears to be working in some cases, but we don’t know how fast the CPU cores are running. We’ll see the results in the benchmarks in a moment, but for now it appears that the Llano Turbo Core isn’t quite as aggressive as Sandy Bridge’s Turbo Boost.
One interesting aspect of the test notebook is that it comes equipped with both the integrated Fusion GPU (fGPU) along with an HD 6630M discrete GPU (dGPU). The 6630M is a Turks core with 480 Radeon cores clocked at 485MHz (well, this GPU is clocked at 485; the specs for 6630M are actually 500MHz), with 1GB of DDR3-800 memory. We'll see what happens when we enable Dual Radeon later.
The rest of the notebook specs are pretty much what you’d expect. The hard drive is a 250GB 7200RPM model from Hitachi, so performance won’t be quite as good as the latest 500GB+ models and it won’t come anywhere near SSD levels. Networking is present and accounted for, with both Gigabit Ethernet and 2.4GHz 802.11n WiFi. The optical drive is Blu-ray capable (despite the DVDRW face plate in the pictures), and there’s even a USB 3.0 port.
We could discuss the build quality, keyboard, and screen quality, but there’s no real point in doing so on a laptop that won’t see full production. The keyboard is the “floating island” style commonly seen in Acer builds, which Compal apparently manufactures, and the LCD is a matte panel for a change (but still low contrast). The overall build quality isn’t bad, but we expect to see better retail builds from Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and others so we won’t spend any more time discussing the specifics of this laptop other than to note that it has a reasonable 58Wh battery and a 14” LCD. Expected pricing is $500 for laptops with A4 APUs, $600 for A6 APUs, and $700+ for the A8 series. Adding a discrete GPU like the 6630M (and thus enabling Asymmetrical CrossFire) should tack on another ~$100.
AMD is quoting “over eight hours” of battery life, but that’s highly dependent on what you’re doing as well as battery capacity. Since that’s going to be one of the major improvements with Llano, we’re going to start there.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
The only way to make sure that Intel's current processors aren't at the top of most charts is to leave them out, particularly on notebooks. If we only look at IGP/fGPU, AMD comes out on top of graphics charts, but is that fair to NVIDIA's Optimus technology that allows dynamic switching between IGP and dGPU in a fraction of a second? The overall tone of this article (apart from the CrossFire section) is positive, but still people look at the charts and freak out because we didn't manipulate data to make Llano look even better. It's not bad, but it's certainly not without flaws.kevith - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Oh too bad.I would like to use a laptop for music production with Nuendo and Win 7.
It actually reqires a little more graphics-musclle than you might think to run an app like Nuendo.
And,up to now, it has not been possible to get both a powerful CPU and GPU in the same machine for the money I have.
So now the fGPU is powerful enough, that's great. But it seems, that the CPU-part of these APU's are too weak.
Øv...
krumme - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
ØhhhJust make sure your computer have 1Gb ram and win xp sp2, Nuendo even runs on single core 2Ghz whatever old shit.
I would save the money and buy a e350.
Heck you could even buy an Atom 510, acording to Anandtech, its just as fast as e350 for the cpu side.
When i think about it. Just do that.
ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
As madseven7 commented correctly, this isn't the fastest Llano CPU. There are 45W parts which perform better. They will have less battery life, but a significant increase in core speed. If you're interested in Llano you might want to wait until they get reviewed.JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I suspect the 45W Llano parts will only have less battery life if you're specifically doing CPU/GPU intensive tasks. At idle, SNB and Llano should both bottom out at similar levels. For example, if you have a 2630QM and a 2820QM doing nothing, they both run at a very low clock and voltage. We'll test any other Llano chips we can get and report our findings, but other factors (BIOS and firmware optimizations) will generally be more important than whether the TDP is 35W or 45W, at least for our particular battery life tests.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I dont get the Cinebench single threaded results. An N660 is about the same as a desktop X2 250/255 on that benchmark. Yet this A83500M scores only 61% of what an X2 250 does. That would seem to indicate that it is only running at 1.8GHz during that single threaded test. Why so low with 3 idle cores? It should be running at 2.5GHz and scoring 2500, or just neck and neck with a P520. Turbo is clearly not working anywhere near as well as it should be.krumme - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Well this is AMD business at work. They are in a constant learning process and have been for the last 40 years.Next time they might consider the following:
1. Dont send some half baked prototypes to the reviewers. Wait fx. 3 more weeks. This is just old Jerry Sanders style.
2. Consider not sending stuff to Anandtech. As anandtech lives from backlinking also, the site needs the new product. And AMD, - and for the sake of the consumers right decisions, can live without 3 similar i7 plus high end discrete gfx, at 1.200 usd at the top of each chart. If AMD dont understand they have other interest than Anandtech - its business for all - they cannot serve their own interest. And its about time they start to earn their own money. They are competing against Otellini not some stupid schoolboy.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Thanks, krumme; always a helpful response. Lenovo has taken this to heart, I'm sure you'll be happy to know, and is not sending any review samples our way. Amazingly, we're still able to survive. And FWIW, if AMD hadn't sent us anything, we'd have had more content earlier through other sources. The only way they can get us to abide by NDAs is by actually working with us.krumme - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Well thank you Jarred. That was an helpfull answer! that explains a lot.I hope AMD gives you attention and work with you in the future, its in all your readers interest.
That means AMD giving you priority, broad access to the right people and more time to do the reviews.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
This is something I discussed with AMD numerous times, and it's one of the reasons we want a utility that will show us true CPU clock speeds in real time. Unfortunately, they don't have anything they're willing to share with us right now. They said they have test units where they can monitor this stuff, but it requires special BIOS hooks and those are not present in our preview samples. In theory, Turbo Core should allow the single-threaded Cinebench result to run up to 60% faster than non-Turbo. Of course, we can't even disable Turbo Core either, so we don't know how much TC is actually helping.P920 is clocked 6.7% higher than A8-3500M, but 3500M has twice the L2 cache and some other enhancements. With 3500M coming in 17% faster than P920, that would suggest that 3500M averages around 1900MHz, but that could mean it runs at 2.4GHz for a bit and then 1.5GHz for a bit, or somewhere in between.
Given the way AMD does Turbo Core (monitoring instruction workloads and their relative power requirements), I think that at least right now, it's not being as aggressive as Intel's Turbo Boost. It feels more like Bloomfield and Arrandale turbo, where you got an extra 2-4 bins, rather than Sandy Bridge where you can get an extra 5-10 bins. Hopefully we'll see refinements with Turbo Core over the coming months and years.