The AMD Llano Notebook Review: Competing in the Mobile Market
by Jarred Walton & Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:01 AM ESTApplication Performance, Round One: PCMark 7
If the battery life was a pleasant change of pace, general application unfortunately remains a weak spot for AMD. Remember that Llano uses a tweaked K10.5 architecture for the CPU portion of the core, and while L2 cache per core is doubled relative to the previous generation quad-core Phenom parts, clock speeds and IPC (instructions per clock) still appear much lower than what Intel offers. I had hoped to see Turbo Core come into play here, which makes the comparison with Toshiba’s A660D a good starting point. That notebook has a Phenom II X4 P920 (quad-core 1.6GHz) with HD 5650M graphics, so the Llano A8-3500M has very similar specs.
Before we get to the graphs, let me make a quick note that not all laptops have been tested in all applications/games. Most of the systems have been shipped back to the manufacturer, so our newer benchmarks are going to have omissions (e.g. PCMark 7). In the gaming charts later in the review, we’ll have even more omissions, and many of the slower GPUs/IGPs will only be tested at our “low” settings.
With that out of the way, let’s start our application performance comparison with PCMark7, our only all-inclusive benchmark for laptops right now. We’ve run all of the benchmarks suites in the hopes of providing a better look at overall performance; however, outside of the “Computation” suite all of the tests have a storage element. That means any system with an SSD (like the quad-core SNB unit) will boast a massive advantage over the competition. The Computation suite also has an interesting footnote in that it supports Intel’s Quick Sync for video encoding, which again gives SNB systems a massive performance advantage. You can read more about the specific suites in PCMark 7 in their whitepaper. We’ll also have two results for Llano going forward: one for using the fGPU (6620G) and a second for using the dGPU (6630M).
And here’s our first hint that Llano may not be the homerun so many were hoping to see from AMD. All of the SNB laptops are still a healthy step up from Llano in overall PCMarks—the K53E leads by 43%, and systems with quad-core SNB are faster still. Llano might appear to at least surpass the previous generation Arrandale i5-520M in Dell’s E6410, but the storage subsystem in that laptop is a particularly slow 160GB HDD and that skews the results. Then again, the overclocked Arrandale i3-380M in the ASUS U41JF falls short of Llano, so AMD is at the very least competitive with Arrandale.
Since we’re not on a level playing field as far as storage, we won’t comment too much more here, but I do have SSD-based testing complete for four of the notebooks, and once I’ve swapped in an SSD for Llano we’ll have a follow-up article. Let’s move on to application testing round two, where we’ll look at some tests where we eliminate the storage bottleneck.
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Shadowmaster625 - Monday, June 20, 2011 - link
Can you try setting the affinity manually so that it has to use only one core? I notice that even though I'm running only one thread, that thread will jump around to all my available cores, making them all look like they are running at 25%. Maybe by the time AMD's turbo kicks in, the thread is already moved to another core.GullLars - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Looking forward to the re-test with an SSD.IMHO all machines over $600 meant for general purpose use in 2011 should include at least a 32GB SSD of Indilinx Barefoot performance or better.
My laptop from 2007 with 2,2GHz C2D and a 32GB Vertex (retrofitted in 2009) still wipes the floor with new $800+ laptops with HDD-only for general use.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Having played with a bunch of laptops using 64GB SSDs, they all feel snappier, though of course it doesn't help with gaming frame rates or CPU computations. Still, I have to say that 64GB isn't big enough for me. If you can get a 32GB mSATA SSD and some sort of SSD caching, and then have a main 500GB HDD, that would be the sweet spot. If you're going SSD-only, I need at least 120GB, and for anything that can run games I'd want 240GB. (By the time I install most of the games I'm currently interested in playing on a regular basis, I easily fill up a 120GB drive.)Anyway, I'm swapping in the SSD now and will start testing during the week, with the follow-up article hopefully ready next week. I've got DC SNB, Arrandale, DC Phenom II, E-350, and now Llano for the article. Anything else you want to request before I call it quits? I've still got the XPS L502x and an AMD K625, but I figure the five laptops are a reasonable representation of what's currently out there. (Note that I have currently focused only on IGP equipped laptops.)
Boissez - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Results with/without DDR3 RAM would be interesting as it seems RAM speed is a bottleneck.Boissez - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
dang... That should have been with/without DDR3 1600 Mhz RAMBrian23 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Application compile benchmarks. ;-)Cloudie - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
The battery life has exceeded my expectations although battery life is a low priority for me when buying a laptop. As long as it gets 4 hours or so at idle is fine by me.Both the GPU and CPU performance has disappointed me somewhat but on the plus side I was not aware until now that the APU being tested was a 35W version, I simply assumed it was the fastest 45W one. Hopefully the CPU perfomance will be just that little bit better on the 45W APUs. And OEMs better get out some decent compact systems with this in... I'd say 13-14" chassis will do me just fine.
just4U - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
If they can get this priced out in a $600 laptop with all the bells and whistles... It will sell. Looking locally (and online) decent gaming laptops start out at about $800. Looking at the numbers it's more then acceptable I think. Profit has to be in there though for AMD.. If their not turning an acceptable profit on each chip then... it will be a wash.duploxxx - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Looking at the recent preview of anandtech on the desktop Liano part and the increased performance from DDR1333 to DDR 1866 i would like to see what it would bring on a Mobile platform. Afterall LIano mobile does support ddr 1600http://www.anandtech.com/show/4448/amd-llano-deskt...
Germanicus - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
1600 MHz DDR3 - lets make this accurate, since Llano can utilize it.Thank you.