The Llano Desktop Preview: AMD A8-3850 CPU & GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Pretty Much an Athlon II X4
As we found in our look at mobile Llano, the A8 isn't impressive as a general purpose x86 microprocessor. In general the chip is somewhat faster than the Athlon II X4 635 and I'd say it performs more like a 645 based on the numbers I've seen here. Again, nothing to be impressed by but if you're building a value gaming PC it may not matter.
Note that heavily-threaded applications actually favor the A8-3850 to the Core i3 2100 (its most likely target based on pricing rumors) thanks to its four cores. They may not be as efficient as the i3's cores, but you sure do have more of them. We have been discussing this tradeoff with AMD for quite a bit over the past couple of years. You lose out on single-threaded performance but you do gain better performance in heavily-threaded workloads. I had assumed that Turbo Core would partially solve this with Llano but 2.9GHz is going to be the fastest SKU AMD offers and it doesn't ship with any turbo enabled.
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Akv - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
What is called "serious gamerz" is 0.01% of users, but 99.99% of review websites visitors.Hence the eerie tone of most articles like "so can it do gaming or not" totally out of context when price, consumption, heat, technical elegance should be the matter.
The fact that an IGP that can do perfect bluray, perfect architectural or medical simulation, perfect graphic editing can be labeled "insufficient for serious users" is itself a subject of philosophical wonder, especially when you realize that what the "serious users" do is shooting at ridiculous zombies in extremely ugly environments.
jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Spot on!I think the issue is that AMD is listening and looking at what 99% of real world users actually use and need and catering to that.
Intel on the other hand have been totally blinded to follow the rants and needs of the 0.01% that read the review sites and their prices/power levels have gone up accordingly.
Its really only AMD's stubborn and baffling refusal to advertise to the masses that they obviously covet so much that holds them back.
Get enough TV ads up there and folks will be just as happy to ask for an AMD chip as an Intel especially when they find the AMD box is $100 cheaper.
If you dont advertise then its your own fault that you arent selling as much as the guy that does.
Exodite - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Given that both Intel's and AMD's IGP solutions are currently good enough for everything up to mainstream gaming I can't really see why AMD are doing a better job?Llano is obviously not fast enough to allow more serious work and the weaker per-core performance is going to be a drawback for most mainstream users who do browsing and word processing as their main tasks.
Llano seems to be lacking a significantly improved memory and cache system to truly make it shine, at least as far as GPU performance with 400 SPs go.
veri745 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Are you serious? I can browse and do word processing on my ancient P4. Per-core performance doesn't matter for what the *vast* majority of users do on their computers. What kind of "serious work" requires something beefier than an Athlon II X4?And think a minute before you say "video encoding/transcoding", because soo few people actually do that, and those that do know what they need.
norwayishot - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Gotta agree with 'veri745', mainstream users will not notice the performance difference.A 5 year old processor is just fine for your average PC user.
jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Yeah I've always felt that as soon as CPUs reached dual core to stop the eggtimer appearing with more then two windows open, that was it.The "need for more power game" ended for most folks at that point.
Customers just dont give a damn about CPUs on modern PCs. The thing that really wows them is show the the difference between a mechanical HDD and a SSD.
Now that they notice.
Seikent - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I think that an upgrade from an old pc (P4 for example) does have a noticeable impact on web browsing, text processors and so on, because these program are hungrier than before, but when you get certain amount of power, the bottleneck goes to the hard drive. So if you're browsing using a SB or a llano cpu, it wouldn't matter very much.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Good folks at Anandtech, is there any chance one of you could get an interview with the Marketing Dept Head at AMD and ask them exactly what is their strategy for getting into the hearts and minds of the general computing public?The dont seem to be bothering thats all.
nickb64 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I would guess they don't bother a whole lot because most people don't know or give a shit what the difference between Intel and AMD is. I know my mom and my sister don't. All they really care about is whether their computer can be used for email, browsing, and maybe occasional light photo/video editing with something like Windows Movie Maker or Photoshop Elements.jabber - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
No thats note quite my point. As you say if mum and dad dont care but they only know of Intel due to them appearing on TV adverts 5 times a night which one will they go for?The Intel, cos they've never heard of AMD. You wouldnt buy a car and many other goods from a company you never heard of.
But you only have to get slight recognition and folks will be okay with it.
If you dont try you'll never know.