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The A8-3800’s list price is $129, ten bucks less than the A8-3850’s.

Fortunately, AMD also promised to release 65W versions of Llano for the desktop eventually, and we looked forward to those as a potentially smarter choice with more of a natural fit in some parts of the market.Ī look at the underside of the A8-3800 and the Socket FM1 mechanism that holds it In short, Llano wasn’t terribly attractive when it moved too far from its original mission as a low-power solution for highly integrated systems like laptops. Llano retained its advantage in graphics horsepower over the Intel IGP, but we had trouble seeing the value proposition of a 100W chip whose primary attraction was somewhat nicer integrated graphics than the 65W competition-especially when a cheap video card would provide better graphics than any IGP. Worse, the A8-3850’s four CPU cores were still notably slower than the Core i3’s dual cores, especially in single-threaded applications. As a result, the first desktop Llano, the A8-3850 APU, had an outsized power envelope of 100W-5W higher than the Phenom II X4 840 it ostensibly replaced (which was made on an old 45-nm fabrication process) and worlds apart from the competition, the 65W Core i3-2100.

The CPU cores needed a big clock frequency boost in order to compete with Intel’s desktop Core i3 processors, and to get there, AMD had to raise the chip’s operating voltage substantially. When AMD attempted to migrate Llano’s competitive formula onto the desktop, though, the road got bumpy. In all, the mobile A-series APUs are an attractive alternative to the latest from the Intel juggernaut-no minor achievement these days.

Intel’s competing Core i3 processors have two fast cores, and Llano’s quad cores give it nearly comparable CPU performance, while its Radeon IGP runs circles around Intel’s rather anemic graphics. Llano silicon combines four relatively low-speed CPU cores with an integrated Radeon graphics processor, and AMD focused lots of attention on making sure the chip only sips power at idle, to prolong battery life. When they first hit the scene this summer, we thought AMD’s new A-series APUs-more commonly referred to in certain circles by their code-name, Llano-were a nice fit for laptops.