Buy a cheap graphics card and get a free attached CPU, Llano's mixed results

Subject: Processors | June 30, 2011 - 12:20 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: lynx, llano, igp, amd, a8-3850, 6550d, 3850

Long story short, the new AMD A8-3850 simply can't compete with Intel's SandyBridge processors as an x86 CPU but as an integrated GPU it is better than anything we or The Tech Report have seen before.

The actual story is far more complicated for the Llano true quad core processor. On the CPU side of the APU equation, it can handle the Core i3-2100 which is it's closest competition on the majority of multithreaded tasks, though it falls behind on single threaded applications. The price war is also on AMD's side as you would need to pair a discrete GPU with the i3-2100 in order to match the graphics performance. The other very important are where AMD falls is power consumption; sure at idle it uses very little power but when operating at full speed it consumes almost as much power as an i7-2600.

On the GPU side we see better gaming performance than anything else out there, assuming you stick to DX10 and DX11 games as DX9 games can have some issues with Llano. That holds especially true of Hybrid Crossfire, as when Ryan paired the A8-3850 with discrete Radeon cards he ran into difficulties in some games. You can read about that in his full review.

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"AMD's "Llano" APU makes a compelling proposition as a laptop chip, but its position on the desktop is more precarious. Read on to find out why—and whether it can overcome that hurdle."

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Processors