AMD Llano questions

Hey all, I've been reading up on AMD's new Llano processors, and they look very appealing. I'm hoping to buy a new laptop around June/July-ish, however I'm mainly interested in ultraportable, 12-13 inch laptops.

Basically, I want something light that boots fast, and can do some relatively heavy gaming. I was very interested in the new dm1z from hp (it has the E-350 fusion processor), but I'd like something with more power than that (it would be awesome if I could play Mass Effect with good framerates). I've looked at the m11x, but it's just really chunky for what I need it for.

Anyway, my real question is this: does anyone know if Llano may be built into any 12-13 inch laptops? I know it has been stated that Llano is meant for "mainstream" laptops, but I'm not sure if that excludes UP's. I was really anticipating the release of Llano, as I assumed it would give me that boost in graphical prowess that I wanted in something like the dm1z. Are my hopes unrealistic?

 

The best iGP in Llano is equal to a Radeon 5650/6550M so you won't be able to do "heavy gaming" on it but you should be able to run most games including recent ones on medium in 1366*768. There will certainly be 13" llano laptops but maybe with a slower GPU, idk.

Anyway I'm leaning toward a Llano laptop myself because on paper they will offer excellent value for the price. If OEMs don't give AMD the finger and there's a decent supply I really don't think that your typical [Sandy Bridge + mid-range graphics] laptop can compete on price, and the added CPU power is a weak argument imo. Nevermind Sandy Bridge's HD 3000, it'll look like a bad joke next to it. If all goes well they should have excellent battery life too. I suspect intel might have to seriously reconsider their margin. I'll have a future proof laptop that will occasionally take a game or two on the go without budging and use the money saved to buy a gaming desktop rig.

 

No one knows what size notebooks Llano will be put into right now but if I had to guess I would say that it will be put into at least someone 13'' notebooks. Maybe not the most powerful graphics, which is about equal to the 5650 as mentioned, but something better than Intel integrated graphics.

 

If you want something that boots fast, get a laptop with a solid state drive -- the processor is almost never the bottleneck for system startup.

At the typical display resolution of an ultraportable, Mass Effect is not a very demanding game. My old laptop, with an 8600M GT GPU and a T9300 CPU (2.5GHz Core2Duo), ran it perfectly at 1280x800 with all settings maxed out. An E-350 wouldn't work because the CPU is too weak, but almost anything else should be good enough at 1366x768. Even the Sandy Bridge graphics are adequate (see here for Mass Effect 2 which is basically the same thing).

Probably. We don't know a lot of things about Llano yet:

• Battery life
• Price
• Performance (particularly at the low end which is likely to go into ultraportables)
• Thermal properties

I would guess that there will be some variant for thin and light laptops, but I'm not sure that it will be as powerful as you want. It depends on how much work AMD did to revise the rather old and inefficient K10.5 architecture that is in their current laptops and desktops.

Why? AMD is doing what it has always done since the release of Core 2: selling lousy CPUs with decent graphics cheaply. Intel makes its high margins either on laptops where even its graphics are way overkill (i.e. business laptops) or on high-end laptops which feature both a good CPU and a good GPU (a discreet one, from either Nvidia or AMD).

At any rate, I don't think AMD is expecting considerable revenue out of Llano until the second half of this year. For Q2 2011, it expects its revenue to be "flat to slightly down" compared to Q1.

 

They're not "lousy" CPUs, that's what intel would like the typical consumer to believe. Sure, they don't perform as well in computing but they're good enough for everything I, and in fact most people might throw at a laptop (I expect slightly better performance than Core 2 duo). When you consider Llano it should come down - to me - to these 2 questions :

What can you do on a Sandy Bridge laptop (without a decent discrete GPU, that might set you for at least $150-200 more to achieve similar results) that you can't do on a llano laptop ? Nothing. What can you do on a llano laptop that you can't do on a Sandy Bridge laptop ? Quite a lot of stuff actually, and certainly more to come.

 

I am an AMD fanboy and there processors are lousy, when compared to Intel. But I agree that they are enough for most people.

 

Thanks for the responses! I'm hoping that maybe HP will make something similar to the dm1z with Llano. Then I'll probably just replace the hard drive with either a momentus XT or SSD

 

What can Intel cpu's do better than AMD ones?
Seeing how I work with 3ds Max and cpu intensive programs to begin with, Intel would be my choice.
I'm looking to reduce the time needed to create those renders after all, not keep them on the same level as I do now.

I quite like AMD's products, but even I can see that their cpu's simply cannot compete with Intel in computational department for cpu intensive programs.
Heck, you also have games which will suffer from a slow cpu even if the gpu is the baddest on the block (effectively limiting the overall performance).

AMD definitely needs to get off their rear ends and show some results with their product to at least somewhat close the gap.

On the other hand, if they can tip the scales somewhat with this new release, then it will be better for us in terms of prices.

 

Hopefully that will change when we start to see AMD APUs based on the Bulldozer tech, until then Intel will rule the high end computing part of the notebook range.

 

Well, I not too familiar with AMD processors but recently got an interest when AMD announced they would be supporting USB 3.0 in upcoming processors.
I was wandering if the Llano quad core processors will be equivalent or (almost) equivalent to SANDY BRIDGE quad-cores if so I would consider getting a notebook with Llano.

Question will Llano quads be put in 17 inch notebooks? because from what I am reading it doesn't sound like it.

 

No they won't be equal. They'll suck in the CPU department compared with Sandy Bridge. But they'll be decent for many tasks if your regular use doesn't involve any specifically CPU-intensive apps and they'll be cheap too. Most new notebooks already feature 1 or even 2 USB 3.0 ports so the "official support" is not something to be so excited about.

The real thing will be Bulldozer based APUs (called "Trinity" on roadmaps) expected for 2012. Problem is by then intel should move to 22nm with Ivy Bridge. AMD's biggest problem is to keep up with intel's rythm of new manufacturing process or new arch approximately every year, they just don't have the R&D capacities & finances.

 

You cant compare quad core Sandy Bridge to AMD Liano APUs by CPU performance alone.

They are in two seperate price classes.

What you get in Liano is decent computer power with great integrated GPU performance at low prices.
My guess is that SB Intel i3 without extra GPU would maybe stay in the same pricerange.

We just gotta wait and see what the thing will cost.

 

I think the talk about CPU performance is a relic of the past. Someone already mentioned that CPU is rarely the bottleneck these days, yet people still talk about it like it's important.

It isn't.

It's just that hardware enthusiasts have been so used to shopping by CPU specs for the past decade that we still measure these things. The reality is that only a handful of us could really use a fast CPU and the rest of us just think we need it.

Efficient GPU is the most important component in a laptop. A few YouTube vids here and there, a couple flash sites a few minutes at a time and BAM! 2 hours less battery life. If AMD gets similar efficiency on Llano vs. Zacate, that means long lasting and lightweight notebooks are coming.

Almost everyone visits YouTube and Flash sites on a daily basis. Less than a quarter of the people need to crunch big Excel sheets, encode videos, compile programs, seti@home, etc. If you need to do these things, then absolutely, do not buy an AMD APU. But most of us don't do these things or, at least, not regularly.

 

Substitute "GPU" in place of "CPU" in your top sentence and you get what's happening in the bottom two. You don't need a fast GPU for YouTube, Flash, watching a movie or anything else mainstream -- in fact, even Sandy Bridge is overkill. Yes, an efficient GPU is important, but for the purposes of everyday usage, every laptop made in the past couple of years has one. The main scenario where Llano will dominate Sandy Bridge is high end 3D gaming for games not bottlenecked by the CPU. Other than that, the differences will be restricted to specialized programs that very few people use (far fewer than those who use CPU-intensive software).

 

I don't agree with you 'sugarkang'.
For people like me who use CPU intense programs such as 3ds Max, processor performance is paramount because the engines in those programs are using the CPU to render out images, and not the gpu.
GPU based rendering is still in it's infancy.

And even for games, you will be able to notice a measurable difference in gpu performance if one cpu is weaker by say half (or more) than it's counterpart.
The gpu will benefit to some degree from the cpu (which can become the bottleneck in games for example).

But, getting back to the cpu issue... if you are rendering large animations, then a 30% difference in cpu performance will result in huge time differentials down the line.

For general tasks though, more powerful cpu's aren't really needed, and AMD with it's current lineup can easily match Intel while retaining a lower price-tag, and that's the only area they can compete in for the time being.
But, to be honest, Intel simply goes past that due to better marketing and coverage.

 

I think Sugarkang's point was that most people don't use CPU intensive programs.

 

I'm rooting for AMD, but their plan as of late: "Always One Step behind Intel" isn't really panning out for me. As someone has already mentioned; by the time "Bulldozer" comes out to compete with the i-cores, Intel will have Ivy Bridge out [3rd generation i-core], and will have 22 nm Haswell around the corner [then 16 nm Rockwell 1 yr after that].

However, when it comes to lowend machines (which I am searching for; commuting laptop), I would consider AMD over Intel due to the "bang-for-buck" factor.

Cmon AMD! Go back to the early Athlon XP days when you could hang with Intel.

 

What Sugarkang is saying isn't that AMD will be on-par with Intel offerings. He's saying they'll be good enough, and cheap to boot.

 

yep and I agree, however I do use some cpu intensive programs, so cpu is more important to me than the gpu, and I still game

 

And I, personally, don't need a CPU anymore powerful than a high-end C2D/lower-end Core I. Llano will give that and graphics performance of a mid-range card with, hopefully, good battery life/thermals and for a low price. That is exactly what I am, and many others, are looking for in a notebook.

 

i'll always be running a intel cpu + amd GPU on my main gaming laptop


but i'm seriously considering an apu for a tablet like the msi windpad or maybe a ultra portable i just hope the cpu and gpu bundle will be good enough to run games like sc2 on min-med

 

Most people do "work" with MS Office. I don't need to open Word any faster. Bring on the LLANO!

 

and others make the ''office''