AMD Now Shipping Quad-core Llano APU to OEMs

We already have a taste of AMD's Fusion with the current entry-level, but very capable APUs on the market. The integrated graphics solutions give netbooks a new sort of power at a price that wasn't before possible.

Now AMD hopes to apply the same kind of practice to high performance applications. Today the company confirmed that it has commenced shipments of Llano, a 32nm quad-core A-Series APU with built-in graphics that can hang with some of the discrete options available today.

Just because the chips are shipping today doesn't mean that you'll get them tomorrow. They're being sent out to OEMs right now so they can be packed in systems.

"When we say we are shipping production units of any part for the first time, the next question I inevitably get asked is how does AMD define 'production'?" wrote Phil Hughes, Senior PR Manager at AMD. "When we talk about production here at AMD, it refers to the units that will ultimately be in the systems that our OEM partners will ship to retailers or end-customers."

Hughes continued in the blog post, "Now of course, I can’t speak for exactly when each of our OEM partners will ship systems, that’s a question for them, but as our Chief Financial Officer and Interim CEO Thomas Seifert mentioned on his Webcast today, 'Customers are very excited about Llano coming to market and we will look forward to seeing our “Llano”-based systems in the market this quarter — the second quarter.'"

AMD once again highlighted its comparison with Sandy Bridge with the video below. Of course, the real test starts once we get one of these into our review team's testing lab.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • agnickolov
    And we the readers are anxiously waiting for the reviews too!
    Reply
  • joytech22
    I know that these are just Phenom II's with a GPU on-die but they really should have paired BD with the GPU instead.
    Reply
  • bluekoala
    Sounds very exciting. I might upgrade this phenom 9500 to something like this if it favors much better performance at lower power consumption and heat out put.
    Reply
  • aznshinobi
    Being 32nm and all, how are the overclocks? Granted the ones we'll see are the OEM models. But MSI did announce their 8xx boards to have AM3+ support, Tom's you should take the chip out and stick it in an MSI 8xx board and give us a review w/ overclocks and all.
    Reply
  • Sihastru
    There's something fishy about the Intel driver in the comparison, it's 8.15.10.2276, that is a 32bit driver on a 64bit OS (?). Also the driver is VERY old, the latest Intel driver for windows 7 x64 is 15.​21.​12.​64.​2321.

    This looks more and more like last year's comparison between the Zecate APU and the mobile Intel i5 platform. AMD was destroying Intel in those tests, but when it came out, Zecate could barely compare to the Atom D510/D525.
    Reply
  • Destroysall
    So is this going to have a socket all on its own? Or can it be used on an AM3 socket board?
    Reply
  • THEfog101
    SihastruThere's something fishy about the Intel driver in the comparison, it's 8.15.10.2276, that is a 32bit driver on a 64bit OS (?). Also the driver is VERY old, the latest Intel driver for windows 7 x64 is 15.​21.​12.​64.​2321.This looks more and more like last year's comparison between the Zecate APU and the mobile Intel i5 platform. AMD was destroying Intel in those tests, but when it came out, Zecate could barely compare to the Atom D510/D525.
    I'm pretty sure that Driver version (8.15.10.2276) is dating back to the era of GMA950/965's.
    Reply
  • ThisIsMe
    Wow some interesting comments so far. So just to help clear things up a bit here...

    These chips are for mobile devices. They will maybe be found in laptops, netbooks, or tablets. These are not intended for a desktop. As a matter of fact, you will probably not even be able to find these for purchase on their own, but will instead have to purchase them pre-installed in a device (or system) of your choosing.
    Reply
  • enewmen
    joytech22I know that these are just Phenom II's with a GPU on-die but they really should have paired BD with the GPU instead.That's in the next generation Llano if you can wait a year.
    THG doesn't seem very impressed since the Sandy Bridge is already a very fast CPU. But, what's exciting for me is getting desktop size descrete GPU performance in an integrated GPU size package. This means I can do real work and play modern 3D games on a netbook/smal notebook. Try doing that on a Atom or Sandy Bridge with integrated graphics.
    There will be desktop Llanos also, but I don't care as much about those.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    Count me out for now.
    Reply