First Look: AMD's New A-Series Fusion Processor Review Discussion

The team at NotebookReview.com got an early look at the latest generation of AMD's "Accelerated Processing Unit" (APU) technology and we've reviewed a prototype notebook. The FUSION of a traditional CPU and a graphics processor (GPU) onto a single chip promises better multimedia performance and battery life. Does it live up to the hype?

Read the full content of this Article: First Look: AMD's New A-Series Fusion Processor Review

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• AMD "Zacate" APU First Look: Hands On with the Brazos Platform

 

Very thorough write up. It seems AMD is betting heavily that graphics performance is more important than overall processing performance to some buyers, there's definitely a niche there as I often see the question pop up in this forum "what's the best cheap gaming laptop", and I think laptops with these AMD APUs will be the answer in the summer when they're released. However, I don't know how well the average non-techy buyer is going to understand the complicated marketing and selling points. Certainly HP / Dell and whoever else puts these APUs in their products will have to do a better job marketing and providing a sales pitch than those AMD slides you posted!

 

Do you guys still have the system available? In other reviews it seems like Turbo Core is not doing much of anything so I was wondering if you could try running some single-threaded benchmarks with the 6630 enabled so we know the IGP is idle.

 

Thanks, Andrew. You hit the nail on the head as to why I'm always conflicted about doing pieces like this here on NBR. On one hand, I find it VERY interesting and I know a lot of our readers will be interested in this type of coverage as well, but at the end of the day the majority of notebook buyers only care about what they can get their hands on.

As you said, the success or failure of AMD's new A-series APUs will largely depend on the notebook manufacturers like HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc. who put these APUs in laptops that people can buy. More importantly, it's the notebook manufacturers who spend the most money marketing their products (and the benefits of those products) to buyers.

The tech-heavy coverage matters to hardware enthusiasts and early adopters but average Joes and Janes are more concerned with the price of the laptop in question and whether it does the things they want it to do.

I think a lot of people will be impressed with the real-world multimedia and gaming capabilities of these new notebooks with A-series APUs but if you only look at PCMark scores then this technology might not be too appealing.

I also REALLY wish AMD came up with a less confusing branding structure for the different configurations of Radeon HD dual graphics.

abaddon4180, I'll be glad to run some additional tests you asked for but it might take a while since everyone on our staff is currently tied up with other reviews. I'll be sure to post results in this thread when I have them.

 

Thanks, jerry. Things like Cinebench single, R10 and 11.5, and SuperPI would be great if you get the free time.

 

Great writeup as usual, Jerry. The bottom line that you made at the end is pretty much in line with what I had in mind: price will continue to be of great importance to AMD. If they are able to hit a lower price point with the same or even better general/multimedia performance over Intel's offerings, AMD may have a winner.

Does 1600MHz RAM make that much difference in graphics performance over the stock 1333MHz RAM? While some users with Intel SB CPUs reported some gains in graphics performance with Kingston HyperX memory, others reported very minimal differences. It'd be interesting to see a comparison between the two in AMD's A-series processors.

 

It's nice to see amd actually competing in the laptop space. a year or two ago they generated a lot of heat and had bad battery life. They were a little cheaper though. So that meant the only reason to buy them is if one was on a tight budget.

Now Intel has some decent competition. I hope both companies bring their A games because this means we get better processors and graphics.

 

I should clarify some on that point because there are a couple of A-series chips that only use 1333MHz. The difference between 1333MHz and 1600MHz for the CPU portion of the APU isn't an issue (much like I found when I tested HyperX RAM on Intel notebooks) but the Radeon graphics love fast RAM.

In fact, the biggest real-world difference between the built-in GPU in the new A-series APU and the low-end Radeon discrete cards is the speed of the RAM (DDR3 system memory versus GDDR5 dedicated memory). The GPU portion of the APU will take every bit of speed it can get from the system memory, so you will see a graphics performance boost if you give it that RAM. We saw a 200-250 point spike in the synthetic scores on our test system and the A8-3500M is one of the APUs that technically only supports up to 1333MHz (the A8-3530MX, A8-3510MX and A6-3410MX are the current batch of A-series APUs that have full support for 1600MHz system memory).

 

Llano is the APU on the Sabine platform

 

I'm impressed!
Now... if HP put one of those in the 2760p! Too bad that won't happen anytime soon...
Maybe I missed it, but how was the heat output?

 

They don't have a separate heading for it like usual so I missed it at first, too

 

yeah, go AMD!
but wt* is with that name - "APU" ?? I know that this is marketing, "A" associates with AMD and so on...
but still - w*f ?? "CPU" for me sounds cooler (and it is de-facto technical term) and when I hear "APU", I think not about processing unit, but about that guy from Simpsons!

 

Just finished reading Anand's article about Llano and, yes memory speed have quite big effect on performance.

 

Not to nitpick, but "6690G2" does NOT work with 3Dmark06. Asymmetrical Crossfire requires DX10 or above, which 3Dmark06 does not support. The 3Dmark06 result is most likely for 6630 alone.

That being said, I doubt we will see many Llano laptops with discrete GPU, though. It gives only limited benefits for its added price and complexity. I cannot see many manufactures taking this route.

 

Good review. I'm mildly optimistic about this.

Mr. Mysterious

 

I'm sold solely on the temperature claims of this review. I've owned several notebooks that were advertised as high performing machines, but in actuality have always resorted to using reduced power settings because of temperature concerns. What is the point of owning high end intel cpu if after 30min the cpu throttles because of high temperature? The possibility of running my notebook as it was designed all day without worries of throttling or high temperature is enough for me.

 

Check out the performance increase base on memory speeds.

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/llano/review/desktop/ddr3scaling-16x10.png

 

Definitely know what RAM I am getting now. That is an average performance increase of about 25% from 1333 to 1866

 

It would be nice to know the battery sizes in those comparison laptops.
When some are much larger the the little 58Whr in your Fusion sample, it's pointless to compare lifetimes as if they are a function of the processor.

 

Good point. The ones NBR used,

Inspiron 15R - 434 minutes - 90Whr battery
U31JG-A1 - 406 minutes - 83Whr
E305-S1990 - 368 minutes - 67Whr
AMD A8-3500M - 336 minutes - 58WHr
A665-S5176 - 236 minutes - 48 WHr

To take a page out of Anandtech's book just do relative battery life (min/Whr)

Inspiron 15R - 4.82
U31JG-A1 - 4.89
E305-S1990 - 5.49
AMD A8-3500M - 5.79
A665-S5176 - 4.92

 

Accelerated processing unit is ok for a name by me. What else could they call it? Cant keep calling it the same name as that wouldn't make sense.

megsti simpsons ? lol

 

I just wanted to point out that mobile Llano's do not support DDR3-1866 only up to DDR3-1600 with A8-3510MX and A8-3530MX.

 

I gotta pay more attention. I could have sworn I have been reading 1866 support for those two. The A6-3410MX supports 1600, too, for the record

 

Instead of on par, I would say the A series APU is pretty damn good in battery life compared to the rest on the battery life in its category. It's just that the whitebox laptop had the second smallest battery out of all the laptops on the list.

 

Maybe it's part of their marketing strategy?

 

ha ha, good one !

 

I could not help but notice that they compared it to the M11xR1 and not the M11xR3. Quite a bit of diffrence there, but compared to a Intel GPU that's a great improvment.

It's about there were some good GPU's in the lower price lappy's.

Now we know about AMD's new fabrication plant in India?