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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Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Look at all the graphs on page 4. Then try and guess how much thought was put into deciding which graph should be at the top of the page.basket687 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
You declared that the GPU performance of Llano is on par with the HD 6450, but all discrete graphics cards were tested with an i5 2500k which is vastly superior to Llano in CPU performance and that is an important consideration (especially that games can be pretty CPU limited at the low resolutions you used), so I think that you should test discrete cards with a CPU more comparable to Llano in order to reach a more accurate conclusion.norwayishot - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Good point - I would think its around a 10 fps difference if not more...Seikent - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
yep, the i5 2500k costs way more too.Taft12 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Dick-waving is far more important than grammar or missing a few words!StormyParis - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I was exaggerating a bit. 21.5", 1680 LCD are $120; 26 inchers are around $300.Hey, you just made me realize my monitors are actually more expensive than the PC connected to them (E-350, 4GB, 650GB) ! I always overspent on screen s and keyboards, and underspent on PCs... Must be a quirk, sorry to have overgeneralized.
The iPhone 4 is 960x640, which is indeed not as much, but not that far from 1024x768.
seapeople - Friday, June 17, 2011 - link
It doesn't matter how cheap xxxx resolution monitors are when the user is just going to set the LCD to 1024x768 anyway so everything "looks bigger".When your vision isn't that great, it's a choice between big and fuzzy and small and fuzzy, and I've seen many people choose the big and fuzzy option.
You think they'd just get better glasses or something...
StormyParis - Tuesday, June 28, 2011 - link
Windows 7 has decent font / icon scaling. It allowed me to move my parents' ancient 21" IBM CRT from 1024x768 to something much higher, while preserving icon and text size. It looks much nicer.I had gotten that CRT specifically to be able to use a low resolution / bigger text/icon size without the ugly jaggies of a down-scaled LCD. Now, if it ever finally dies, I now I'll be able to replace it with an LCD. The thing is around 10yrs old, and just won't quit.
harshw - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Hope Ganesh gets to do his usual, thorough analysis of the integrated GPU especially w.r.t HTPC applications. I have an aging E5200 on a G45 board that I'm itching to replace. But had to hold off on Brazos, I think the E-350 and its GPU is a tad underpowered. Let's see what the 6550 is capable of ...frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Yet another disappointment from AMD. I see a place for this chip in the notebook market where power saving, space, and lack of upgradability dominate. If the price is right you could have a low to mid price laptop with decent CPU and GPU performance.However, to me the desktop part is a total disaster. The highest clocked chip cant even make 3ghz and there is not turbo mode. The only reason this chip can be a success is if they can sell it for the same price as the Athlon II X4 chips. Then you would get the same CPU performance with better graphics.
Otherwise, just buy an X4 640 and put in a discrete card.