The AMD A8-3500M APU Review: Llano Is Unleashed

[uii]

#1 concern is battery life, #2 is graphics. #3 is cpu. Even old cpus are good enough for most applications these days. So as long as you win in the 2 other categories it doesn't matter that it has old cpu cores.

I wouldn't put this in a desktop at all. But netbooks or laptops its a clear winner. All thought i can certainly see budget desktops using it...i just personally wouldn't buy one.

The refresh with bulldozer cores in half a year or so will just make it that much better. Assuming bulldozer doesn't suck really really bad anyway. But even worst case it should be faster, so that shouldn't be an issue.

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A comment on the article, enthusiasts aren't waiting for trinity, we are waiting for bulldozer to come out to see how it does. Enthusiasts don't care about integrated graphics.

We at least we wont care about integrated graphics until a proper hybrid solution comes out. If/when you can hybrid integrated and discrete graphics and ALWAYS have it be faster, then we will care about integrated graphics.

 

[cleeve]

Enthusiasts don't care about integrated graphics.

Speak for yourself, sir: I'm an enthusiast, and I care about Llano's integrated graphics, especially when it comes to notebooks.

On the desktop, granted, not so much. But on the laptop I can make good use of 'em.

 

[rohitbaran]

Well, the power consumption during gameplay is impressive, everything else seems rather obvious, given the performance of CPU and GPU that Llano is composed of. So, Llano is better for entry level gaming laptops, but that's it for now.

 

[justjc]

I'm a bit surprised about your story lesson about the Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4 battle. After all it was hardly a market that was slow to adapt the new king of processors, that was at fault, but rather Intel that used different means to make sure that they wouldn't consider it until Intel had the Core2Duo ready to launch. Even Intel seems to have admitted to this in the 2009 settlement.

This unfair behaviour no doubt have also played a role in AMDs ability to keep up with Intel afterwards.
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As for the question of pricing HP have issued a press release earlier today showing their suggested pricing across the different categories of notebooks, from the $449.99 HP Pavilion g4 to the top of the line $699.99 Pavilion dv7. The earliest of the models in the line up should hit the market on June 27th and the others during July.
The press release can be found at http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/110614xa.html

 

[Guest]

A bit unfair in my opinion. This is like saying my 48-core opteron server smokes every one of the chips out of the water, but it costs $10k more.

The supposed pricing of A8-3500M is around $500-600, but the cheapest Core i5-2520m I can find on the net is starting at $1000 (NewEgg and Amazon) with a 14" monitor. Core i3-2410m would have been more of a equal comparison since they start at $650 from MSi with Optimus graphics.

Not a fanboy, just stating the obvious.

 

[Guest]

I'd love to hear an official explanation of why the low-end part was the part being reviewed all over the interwebz today. I somehow doubt that was AMD's doing, and if it wasn't AMD's, then whose was it?

The 1.9ghz part was the logical one to review on release day, and it stands to reason that it would perform about 30% better depending on the benchmark, which would make a considerable difference.

As a side note, are the OEMs going to screw AMD like they did with Brazos? They sure dragged their feet getting anything to market last time. By the launch of Brazos, AMD had already reported selling millions of units in the preceding months, and of course, the OEMs would've had engineering samples long before volume shipments. Then about 9 out of 10 products had gimped batteries that only got 4 hours of battery life, other design oddities, etc...

 

[Guest]

Interesting value comment on the first page but unfortunately here in the UK the i3 2100 is more like 150 dollarsUS the Phenom11 955 being sub 140 dollarsUS

 

[joebrewski]

AMD's next-generation processor compared to what, an I5 released 2-3 years ago. Gaming is great, but that's not the target for AMD in terms of financial performance, unless they want to hold a small share of the market. ... and if you're that serious with gaming, you will get a card to make it happen, and not rely on your CPU.

 

[Guest]

Seems like the Turbo CORE simply wasn't turned on... Perhaps it needs more than enabling it in the BIOS? Like in case of Cool'n'Quiet, that you has had to enable in Windows, as well.

 

[Zeh]

I might reconsider buying a notebook.

 

[kyraiki]

Been waiting a while for Llano. Good choice for people who do not need i5 or i7 levels of performance or gamers with a main Desktop rig at home and want a cheap solution for light gaming on the go. Watching a friend play WoW once on Intel integrated graphics was painful.

 

[dukenu]

This APU is a game changer in the tablet, netbook and possibly mid-range laptop market. The combination of battery and video capability is a huge step up in the expanding tablet market and is the most promising area for amd's financial bottom line. I hope to see netbooks disappear as tablets with docable keyboards give consumers slim, lightweight, video-capable portable pc-class devices. If apple doesnt take note, they should: imagine a tablet that can play stutter free, clear and crisp blueray for 4hrs, run windows7 on tablet with a regular MS office Suite, and entry-level gaming to boot...and you begin to understand how significant this is.

 

[wiyosaya]

While I would have preferred that this review be of the new family, i.e., Bulldozer, that part is not out yet.

However, I think this shows some promise. Right now, I am viewing this part as AMD's experiment to get the concept up and running, and it sounds like they have done a good job integrating CPU and GPU on the same die.

I hope, for AMD's sake, Bulldozer puts them back into competition with Intel as far as CPU performance goes. With ATI under their belt, AMD substantially beats Intel by far in the GPU arena.

 

[ProDigit10]

seems like I'm not really impressed with it's graphics performance.
Perhaps I had expected more! At least 1280x800 pix smooth framerates. In fact, I wanted to buy it to game on my 1080p monitor, but I guess I'll go with corei5 and a discrete graphics card instead!

 

[sync_nine]

i dont really care about the embedded gpu on the CPU, its ok if your on battery, but my i7-2630QM and an nvidia gt 550m makes me play all games this year(except metro) on all high settings.
-I guess this CPU would be ok for netbooks or business men, but for gaming you would still need a dedicated card (i.e hybrid crossfire or what ever in this case, embedded+ discrete)
Nvidias Optimus is still better imo, although i believe AMD is also implementing something like that

 

[Why_Me]

I suppose we need to stop suggesting i3-2100 and H67 over in the forums then? Go AMD!

It's a laptop cpu.

 

[obarthelemy]

"AMD’s Stars design is being retired in lieu of Bulldozer" would mean that Stars in being retired *instead of* Buldozer. You want to use "in favor of" in lieu of... "in lieu"

 

[Brownshoe]

According to Tom's various benchmarks, it looks like the A8 performs worse on most tasks that matter than the old Intel Core 2 Duo E8500...so, I think it would be noticeably slower in everyday experience. I mean, relative to the i5 in these tests, things like Adobe and iTunes encoding and Cinebench and WinZip are twice as fast with the i5, or put differently, upwards of 50% slower than then old Core 2 Duo.

 

[Guest]

Why don't people test it with DDR3 1600 memory, it supports it for a reason.

 

[jemm]

Competion is always good for the customers.

 

[f-14]

very interesting laptop solution. big win for college students. no point in using these chips in a desktop they are clearly designed for mobile solutions. this high end AMD chip vs a high end Intel mobile chip was a pretty good comparison. i'm going to be very interested in the pricing points vs. it's Intel counterpart.
i can see apple switching to these chips as soon as the driver bugs are worked out.
over all this feels very much like a prototype chip pushed into market.
there's a great deal of architecture that needs tweaking but given the 35w cap and thermal cap i believe AMD pulled out a remarkable product for the mobile sector despite it needing atleast another year for development. hopefully this is a good start to seeing how much architecture change bulldozer will provide in straightening out the path of the throttling and cpu/gpu compatibility issues.
it's very clear Llano is only going to benefit from a parity of 1:3 or 2:3, somewhere in that range so when that is figured out in benchmarks i'd be interested to see what they are.
in order to get the best from this chip it's going to have to have a great cooling solution tho, something i see being very difficult in a mobile device.
this chip seems mostly an example of what AMD can do with it's current gen tech which overall needs alot of refinement esp. in getting the cpu clock up another full gigahertz to 2.4. i will be expecting to see this on the bulldozer chips with the die shrink.
i don't see chips staying on a 2-D chip with out a shrink to 14nm, but currently if cpu/gpu chips went on a 3-D design structure...... i won't see a need for a die shrink except to reduce power.
here is the gamble in a nutshell:
Intel is banking on computing needs not to change and stay as it is for the work horse of corporations.
AMD is banking on the need and new demand for mobile entertainment which is a sector increasing demand tenfold every year.
Intel would have to follow AMD's lead and aquire Nvidia just to compete, but it's power requirements plus those of an Nvidia chip would be self defeating in cornering the mobile market.
as far as the corporate work horse world, we will see if bulldozer is meant for this market or just a replacement for Llano in the mobile sector.
i would like to see something along the lines of a Llano to bring mobile pc gaming to the mainstream and crush once and forever the consoles.

 

[justjc]

Please tell me where I can find a Notebook with the i5 2520M costing around the $550 we can expect to see this midrange APU in.

Also why no test of the most common task, surfing the web, using GPU accelerated browsers naturally, playing DivX and Flash content? This could nicely be documented with a youtube video of the two contenders. After all how the notebook performs this task might just be the most important thing to most users, after battery life naturally.

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]mayne92[/nom]But I must be an idiot b/c I can and do game on a laptop and don't care to use my clustered-rig 24/7. OK kiddie.[/citation]

Playing games on a laptop is like watching movies on a 14" TV. Crap.

 

[justjc]

[citation][nom]f-14[/nom] this high end AMD chip vs a high end Intel mobile chip was a pretty good comparison. [/citation]

Actually the AMD chip is not the high end, but rather the good midrange solution, which also makes the choice of competitor a bit strange. Expect to see the A8-3500M in laptops prices around the $550 mark, where the cheapest Core i5 2520M offering I was able to find cost around $200 more. Sadly this is just one of the many flaws in this review.

 

[f-14]

i also want to mention i didn't like the test hardware differences (but i was surprised the Llano didn't seem to make that a difference, same HDD/memory/cooler/optical/case/psu or the benchmark is automatically flawed) or some of the test software such as itunes and the bunny video as they are mediocre at best VBR audio and a non-taxing video aren't up to par except as a store demo for people who aren't discerning.
i knock itunes because it's software designed for people who pay $3,000 for the smallest capacity 15 year old laptop hard drive in their mp3 player and $5,000 for an SSD one.