First Shots of AMD Llano, Socket FM1 in the Wild

By Marcus Yam
published

That's the APU... not of the Kwik-E-Mart.

Earlier this week, we learned that AMD was shipping finished Llano APU products to its OEM partners. They're not moving out in retail boxed form yet, as OEMs get the first crack to make machines around them.

"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 added that customers should expect to see product within the next few months.

These quad-core parts are AMD's answer to the more performance-oriented desktop crowd, and it seems that at least one person out there managed to get their hands on an engineering sample.

The pictures you see here were found on a Chinese site. For those who were wondering what kind of socket that Llano would use, it appears that it'll be FM1.

Marcus Yam
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.
59 Comments Comment from the forums
  • 11796pcs
    So these are the next generation I'm assuming. Cool.
    Reply
  • reprotected
    Aww. Too late. I bought a Core i5 2500k. Now I'm sad.
    Reply
  • kenyee
    What in the world is an FM1 socket?
    What happened to the AM3/3+ standard sockets?
    Reply
  • zepfan_75
    How could this be the for the " Performance Oriented Croud" when it is 2.4 GHz? That better be good archetecture or Amd is again, going to be creamed by the Intel lineup.
    Reply
  • Kryan
    they're STILL using pins? really? Slowly i'm beginning to wonder if product designers have brains...
    Reply
  • Nexus52085
    kenyeeWhat in the world is an FM1 socket?What happened to the AM3/3+ standard sockets?It is strange, but I thought llano was for laptops, not desktops. Maybe I was wrong.
    Reply
  • pelov
    zepfan_75How could this be the for the " Performance Oriented Croud" when it is 2.4 GHz? That better be good archetecture or Amd is again, going to be creamed by the Intel lineup.
    Apparently it's an engineering sample, and generally those are void of the real clock speeds and TDP of the real production chips that the consumer market sees.
    Reply
  • HighPies
    zepfan_75How could this be the for the " Performance Oriented Croud" when it is 2.4 GHz? That better be good archetecture or Amd is again, going to be creamed by the Intel lineup.
    I also thought llano was going in laptops, if it is then a quad core cpu with a intergrated gpu / FPU (whatever it is lold) at 2.4Ghz sounds like it is for the performance oriented croud.
    Reply
  • kokin
    9282935 said:
    How could this be the for the " Performance Oriented Croud" when it is 2.4 GHz? That better be good archetecture or Amd is again, going to be creamed by the Intel lineup.

    2.4ghz at 0.394v is quite an achievement though, especially for laptops. I'm sure my PhenomII x4 B55 needs somewhere around 1.3v-1.6v for that speed and will probably be slower clock for clock.

    I don't think the new APUs will really take the performance gap unless they can be highly overclocked like Sandy Bridge.
    Reply
  • Camikazi
    hurrdurrHoly shit you people are downright retarded. Llano APUs are for laptops.http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20110315134650_Initial_Desktop_AMD_Llano_Lineup_Will_Include_Five_APUs_Documents.html
    Looks to me like they will be for desktops too, so who's retarded now?
    Reply