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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bnjiman - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - link
@seapeople: which version of Excel/processor are you using? Using Excel 2008 on XP I can agree with your experience using a core 2 duo @ 3ghz - in fact I had IT write an executable to open Excel on one CPU only and diabled multi thread calc. However using a Core I5 laptop 2.7ghz quad core with Office 2010/Win 7, spreadsheets that would take ten minutes to update are done in thirty seconds. I appreciate there will be a single threaded performance delta but I don't feel this accounts for such a radical improvement; perhaps the multi threaded suport is getting better as well.psiboy - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
8 watts difference in a desktop? Ooooohh I'm gonna cry....psiboy - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
14 years doesn't mean dick if you suck at it... on the other hand you might be good at it...quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
That's the big factor here as well. It would be nice to see a comparison please.quiksilvr - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Apologies, I saw the explanation.8steve8 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
curious about power consumption.disappointing that amd seems so far behind in performance per core.
Lots of software (still) have components that require single core performance.
8steve8 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
the igp looks nice though, funny the people who care the most about that won't be using it. Still nice though.TrackSmart - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Agreed. This isn't an exciting release for the desktop computer realm, where there's lots of spaces and small power saving differences don't matter much.HOWEVER, for HTPCs, All-In-Ones, and Small Form Factor systems, the new Llano APUs might be a hit. Of course, that's an admittedly small (but growing) market.
mino - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
This is a godsend for any OEM customer. Anybody who can't see that must be blind.jjj - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
wish you had at least a few numbers for higher res gaming.