It appears that Advanced Micro Devices has gotten around to unleashing the Llano accelerated processing units, officially named A-Series, which address the needs of both the desktop and mobile segments.
The past few months have seen no shortage of leaks, reports and speculations surrounding the Llanoseries of AMD processors with integrated graphics.Now, it seems that all remaining mysteries have been dispelled, as the Sunnyvale, California-based company has made the official launch.The cores are more or less identical, in performance, to the ones used by existing AMD CPUs, while the built-in GPUs are, naturally, DirectX 11-ready.In fact, the newcomers promise to deliver more than satisfactory computing and graphics performance, all the while staying at a low enough power consumption that it is possible to build laptops that last for over 10.5 hours on a single battery charge.“The battery life of the AMD A-Series APU is a huge leap forward and will surprise many consumers and commercial customers,” said Chris Cloran, vice president and general manager, Client Division, AMD.“And the supercomputer-like performance will give people some revolutionary capabilities, like real-time image stabilization –taking out all the shakes and jitters in those hand-held videos on the fly, while you’re watching.” A-Series Llano APUs are built on the 32nm manufacturing process and will show up in over 150 desktops and notebooks, the latter being more numerous. Systems should start showing up as soon as the ongoing month (June, 2011).“The AMD A-Series APU represents an inflection point for AMD and is perhaps the industry’s biggest architectural change since the invention of the microprocessor,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Products Group. “It heralds the arrival of brilliant all-new computing experiences, and enables unprecedented graphics and video performance in notebooks and PCs. Beginning today we are bringing discrete-class graphics to the mainstream.” The dual-core and quad-core units range from 2.3 GHz to 2.6 GHz, have 2 MB or 4 MB of cache memory and HD 6400, 6500 or 6600 series graphics. They consume 35W or 45W.
