The AMD A8-3500M APU Review: Llano Is Unleashed

Test Setup And Benchmarks

Llano presents us with a number of testing challenges we generally don’t encounter when it comes time to review a new processor or graphics solution. AMD doesn’t have (or at the very least, doesn’t want to share) a tool to report actual clock speeds during operation. So, we have no easy way of telling whether or not Turbo Core is working, how often it’s working or how far it’s accelerating our sample. You’ll remember that when Intel debuted the Nehalem architecture, it distributed a Turbo Boost monitor for tracking the feature’s activity in real-time. AMD needs something similar.

To help us examine this limitation, we’re including benchmarks of a Phenom II X4 at 1.5 GHz and 2.4 GHz, the nominal and Turbo Core limits of the A8-3500M CPU we’re testing today. Not only does this show us if Turbo Core is working, but it gives us an idea how closely the new version of the Stars CPU core compares to Phenom II.

In addition, we’re pairing that Phenom II X4-based system with a Radeon HD 5570. As you now know, this graphics card has the same number of shader cores as the A8-3500M APU, and for our tests, it’s under-clocked it to 444 MHz GPU and 666 MHz DDR3 memory. This allows us to compare APU performance with a discrete graphics card using the same specifications and clocks.

Last but not least, we’re testing a system based on Intel’s mobile Core i5-2520M CPU. This should give us a good idea what similarly-priced laptops based on similarly-priced Intel products can accomplish. Or at least, similarly-priced according to AMD’s not-necessarily accurate estimations.

There are three popular notebook resolutions we’ll focus on for testing games: 1280x800, 1600x900, and 1920x1080. When a particular game struggles with 1280x800, we add 1024x600 as a lower-resolution alternative to see if it fares any better.

Since AMD Dual Graphics only works on DirectX 10 and 11 game engines, we are benchmarking some games more than once, using different code paths in order to see what difference Dual Graphics makes. These games are Metro 2033, F1 2010, and HAWX 2.