AMD Llano APU mobile platform benchmarks

WITH ITS RECENT LAUNCH of Llano Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) chips, AMD achieved much more than just producing a quad-core PC CPU with a tightly integrated GPU. It created a base for a whole new generation of processors where the CPU and GPU can directly share memory and jointly execute a single program, with the graphics processor becoming a sort of math coprocessor to the main processor, like the 8087 was to the 8086 some 30 years ago.

There is still some way to go before we see the full benefits of that approach. Let's see how the new AMD platform performs in some of the common benchmarks. Here we have an OEM test unit with a Llano APU, made by Compal. Sleek and black but kind of big and wide, the unit is a typical midrange notebook you see these days in shops, without knowing what is inside just by observing the outside looks.

Part of the reason for the 'common look' is that it has one of those terrible productivity-wasting 16:9 movie LCD screens now shotgun enforced on all notebook vendors by a combination of greed and stinginess on the part of Far Eastern display panel makers. Why can't these PC makers be like Apple and demand what they want, as major customers? I think it's a time for a new LCD plant somewhere in China that will be flexible enough to follow customers' demands, not dictate.

Back to the hardware, the test system has the most powerful 35W mobile Llano, the AMD A8M-3500 unit, which has a full internal GPU with 400 shaders as well as highest frequency setting, at 1.5 GHz plus all the Turbo speed ups to 2.4 GHz for its four 'improved Phenom class' CPU cores with separate 1 MB L2 caches each. Top end notebooks can have a 45W Llano flavour, the A8-3530MX, with a 1.9GHz to 2.6GHz CPU speed range, but the same 444 MHz GPU core clock.

There is also 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory, as well as - guess what - a second graphics engine, a 'Turks' mobile HD5500 GPU with 512MB of memory sitting on an internal PCIe adapter! Now this is interesting, as we can test both of these, or even each, one at a time. The combined 'crossfire entity' was called HD6620, a specific number for the combined APU and outside GPU.