AMD Demonstrates Fusion APU Codenamed Llano, Next-generation Radeons
At the 6th Annual AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition (TFE) 2010, AMD today showcased for its ecosystem partners the first public demonstration of the forthcoming AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) codenamed "Llano", designed for notebook, ultrathin and desktop PCs.
AMD demonstrated the accelerated single-chip processing muscle of Llano by simultaneously processing three separate compute-and graphics-intensive workloads.
"The serial and powerful parallel processing capability of the Llano APU has the potential to make OEMs and consumers re-think their computing experience," said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, client division, AMD. "The experience potential of Llano is truly incredible, and the demos we showed today on stage provide a glimpse of what this processor is capable of delivering in sleek form factors with long battery life. Everything consumers love about their digital lifestyles today ? social networking, gaming, consuming and creating media ? can be enhanced with Llano, enabling a more interactive, vivid and immersive experience."
The Llano APU demo showed three compute-intensive workloads simultaneously on Microsoft Windows 7, including calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places, and decoding HD video from a Blu-ray disc. Running concurrent to the CPU and HD video playback applications, Microsoft?s nBody DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS (as reported in the application) a relative measure of the available capacity to post-process video during playback, play a DirectX11 game, or assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application. The demonstration represents a preview of Llano?s raw compute power enabling new levels of experience computing that AMD aims to bring to mainstream PC users in 2011.
AMD also confirmed that the upcoming Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 will be available by th eend of the month. Although the company does not allow us to provide specific details about the specifications of the new cards, we present some pictures of them:
Both cards have almost the same size and come with two DVI ports, mini-HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort. The HD 6850 card is equipped with a single six-pin PCIe connector, meaning that its the power-draw is probably below 150W.
"The serial and powerful parallel processing capability of the Llano APU has the potential to make OEMs and consumers re-think their computing experience," said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, client division, AMD. "The experience potential of Llano is truly incredible, and the demos we showed today on stage provide a glimpse of what this processor is capable of delivering in sleek form factors with long battery life. Everything consumers love about their digital lifestyles today ? social networking, gaming, consuming and creating media ? can be enhanced with Llano, enabling a more interactive, vivid and immersive experience."
The Llano APU demo showed three compute-intensive workloads simultaneously on Microsoft Windows 7, including calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places, and decoding HD video from a Blu-ray disc. Running concurrent to the CPU and HD video playback applications, Microsoft?s nBody DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS (as reported in the application) a relative measure of the available capacity to post-process video during playback, play a DirectX11 game, or assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application. The demonstration represents a preview of Llano?s raw compute power enabling new levels of experience computing that AMD aims to bring to mainstream PC users in 2011.
AMD also confirmed that the upcoming Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 will be available by th eend of the month. Although the company does not allow us to provide specific details about the specifications of the new cards, we present some pictures of them:
Both cards have almost the same size and come with two DVI ports, mini-HDMI, and two mini-DisplayPort. The HD 6850 card is equipped with a single six-pin PCIe connector, meaning that its the power-draw is probably below 150W.
