A Short Review Of The Amd Llano Cpu Series

I had a home theater PC and server that ran on an ancient Athlon 64 3200+. Wanting more power, better modern features and the ability to expand to meet the demand of next generation video codecs I set out to find something better and something built in this decade. I looked at a few things, lower end Intel Sandy Bridge processors, repurposing a dual core Sandy Bridge laptop CPU in an expensive ITX motherboard, and also AMD’s low end all in one APU the E-350. I was fond of the E-350 for a while, it was a dual core 1.6ghz CPU with a low end DX11 graphics chip built in, all in one piece on an mATX motherboard and it didn’t even need a fan. But you still couldn’t upgrade it. If that CPU wasn’t enough, the whole motherboard had to be pulled out. Then I started looking at the AMD Llano APU series.

Wow. For a long time integrated graphics meant ‘It does 2D only basically, otherwise it totally sucks’. Intel made improvements with Sandy Bridge to make a mostly workable integrated graphics processor solution but with Llano, AMD has clearly won the show for now. What is Llano? They’re all-in-one CPUs or ‘APUs’ (Accelerated Processing Units) as AMD calls them. Their cores are on par, but more power efficient as a Phenom II core and there’s a low to mid-range AMD Radeon HD 6000 series graphic chip built in. I ordered the A6-3500, which features a tri-core CPU at 2.1ghz and a Radeon HD 6530D with 320 stream processors built in. What does that mean? The CPU isn’t exactly super-fast, but with that GPU it can do better at gaming than my i7 2630QM (2.0ghz quad core) that I have in a laptop. Sure, the Intel laptop has far more CPU power, but when things are a matter of CPU and graphics, the Llano wins out. The other advantage? While something like the Intel i7 2630QM cost me $180, used, on eBay, the A6-3500 cost me $69 brand new. Yeah, $70 for a decent CPU with decent gaming graphics. And I got one of the cheaper ones. The A8-3850 features a quad core at 2.9ghz, including a Radeon HD 6550D with 400 stream processors built right in and it’s only $100. It’s basically a complete lowerish mid-range gaming rig in one chip for $100. When you consider that cost, it’s a pretty remarkable piece of kit.

I went with the A6-3500 because it has lower wattage and was cheaper, I’m building a home theater PC to, at best, emulate Sega Dreamcast games and stuff on an HDTV. It won’t be playing Crysis 2 anytime soon. Being an integrated graphics solution, it does demand system memory to be used for graphics memory and so the speed of your system memory has a notable impact on your gaming performance. Up to 20% in some tests that other reviewers have demonstrated. As a bonus, you can even use a discrete PCI-E graphics card from AMD and pair it with the integrated graphics chip using AMD’s CrossfireX, allowing even the graphics can be affordably supplemented into something more powerful. (You can of course just disable the IGP and use just the discrete card too of course)

For a quick comparison, I benchmarked my AMD A6-3500 against the Intel i7 2630QM in 3D Mark Vantage and the A6-3500 won out with a score of P2465 vs P1842. It’s no monster gaming machine, but even this $70 proc would easily play Valve games or Civilization 5 without major difficulty.

So in conclusion, this CPU isn’t winning any CPU benchmark awards and its graphics aren’t winning any awards either, but when the AMD Llano series is considered for what it costs, it’s actually a pretty amazing piece of hardware. I’m using a desktop Llano, but if someone wanted a ‘decent’ gaming laptop for not a lot of money, I’d argue that a mobile Llano would be the way to go.

In addition, I’d like to add that Llano is fairly feature rich as well. Using a Gigabyte A75-D3H, which uses the A75 chipset I got the following features: PCI-E x16, x4 and x1 slots, plus three classic PCI slots. Native USB 3.0 support. Six native SATA3 ports. Onboard VGA, DVI and HDMI with audio. Onboard Gigabit 1000mbps Ethernet. Support for up to 64GB of RAM using 4x16GB sticks. (That’s pretty rare RAM size still, but even my Sandy Bridge P67 chipset mobo can’t do more than 32GB) As well as the rest of the standard features you’d expect on a motherboard. Pretty great for a board that cost me $80 on sale, and came with a $10 mail in rebate.

is this an ad or a review?

it's pretty clear that if you have $200 and want to play TF2 or Civ5 your options are pretty much limited to something like Llano. But for those people they can live with Skullgirls on a cheapo Xbox 360.

The reality is more about how now that home computing is mostly on laptops, PC manufacturers are really behind the curve on integrating discrete graphics solutions into laptops. We are only seeing it with 2012 offerings when ultrabooks finally meet mid-range GPUs.

for media PCs, you can probably live with much less (a roku is how much again?)

AMD still makes processors? :V

Entry level discrete graphics are dead. Between AMD's Llano and Trininty and Intel's HD4000 there's no need for them. While graphics performance between the two GPUs will probably be pretty comparable, Intel's processing power and power consumption will continue to blow AMD away. The 22nm process is just too good.

It never was alive to begin with.

But they do make entry level discrete graphics for industry solutions, so the need is there, just not for consumers (i should know, I rock a lenovo with an nvidia 300m at work).

The problem is more that until recently if you wanted mid or high end discrete you had to get a 17" laptop that weighted a billion pounds and 5 minute battery life, since it's just a desktop in disguise. exaggeration aside i want some 13" with real muscle!

Not necessarily. It'd depend on the format. I also have an AMD E-350 based Zotac AD02 which is fine for 8bit h.264. I'm watching 1080p stuff on it in my living room right now. 10bit h.264 is another animal and it's become all the rage in the scene. There's no hardware acceleration for 10bit h.264 currently so any such decoding must be entirely done on the CPU. While 10bit support is in ffmpeg and the CCCP, XBMC which I primarily use only has that version of ffmpeg in it's nightlies and not the stable version. There's no chance in hell that this little 1.6ghz dual core will decode 10bit 1080p and later today I'll be testing out 10bit 720p on the box, but I'm not optomistic.

The A6-3500 on the other hand, should be able to tackle 10bit 1080p on the CPU without issue. (Granted a lesser Llano should be able to do the job too) Then we have HEVC, which while only on horizon, will likely be decoded on the CPU before there's some form of hardware acceleration.

...Unless OpenCL or similar 'generic' code on a GPU for video decoding happens. I suppose that's not certian but within the realm of possibility, huh?

Well, using v12 Alpha 1 of XBMC, 10bit 720p is just allllmost playable. The occasional frame dropped but not a great deal. It might stop dropping frames if the the implimentation gets just a bit more efficent.

This post has been edited by DJ_Izumi on May 28 2012, 03:00 PM

While they might have, it's no longer necessary. (I don't know why, but we'll go with it) Any entry level discrete graphics solution would be about on par with the integrated solution starting with ivy bridge, so it doesn't make sense to make them. Mid level and upper/professional cards aren't going anywhere though.

My 15.4" hp laptop had some real muscle when I first bought it, but you needed to give the fan adequate space to throw out that heat, because man it got hot. I don't imagine the newer cards are any cooler than it was.

You're not going to see real muscle in a 13" laptop because they're generally really thin and you'd have some major heat issues.

This post has been edited by TheWinkel on May 29 2012, 09:27 PM

I think that what we're more seeing with Sandy/Ivy Bridge and more so with Llano is a new balance of power between CPU and GPU. Time was, anything that wasn't high end got terrible onboard intel graphics. You basically had machines that could game and those that flat out couldn't. Now when we see a scale of GPUs go up with the CPUs, you can easily have a midrange laptop that also features midrange graphics.

I mean, the AMD E-350 APU isn't remarkable, it's a dualy 1.6 with like 80 stream processors in it's DX11 Radeon chip. It's a low end piece of kit but my roommate still manages to play MineCraft on it. (Still kinda suprised that that's playable on that thing...)

My laptop, preupgrade, was a 2.3ghz Sandy Bridge with HD 3000 graphics. It could still do Portal 2, but before Intel started attempting these halfway decent graphics this would have been impossible. Sadly, with my upgrade to the quad core 2.0ghz with Sandy Bridge, my frame rates and benchmarks havn't moved an inch. The HD 3000 is still pretty weak so it's a huge bottle neck even with a CPU that's like 90% faster.

So I think the balance of power, without breaking the bank on discrete mobile graphics is something that's changing the game.

by balance of power you mean you buy a crappier cpu and put the savings into a better gpu

i don't really think it's anything "magic" as much as AMD just have a better GPU business they can leverage.

it's just for certain software.

optimizing for intel's chipset used to be a dumb thing to do until HD 3000/4000.