AMD’s Llano Platform Announced
After a long wait, it seems that the marriage of AMD and ATI has finally conceived a child worthy of their merger. The Llano platform is AMD’s answer to Intel’s integrated graphics, and it has successfully turned heads. AMD doesn’t call the Llano a CPU or GPU, but rather some peculiar marketing term dubbed the “Applications Processing Unit” or APU. It may not be the catchiest phrase, but we all know what it really is and it actually could give the Intel IGP a legitimate challenge.
On the CPU side, the Llano will have a quad core on a 32 nm die. Each core will have 1 MB of L2 cache, and AMD is most likely targeting under 3 GHz for clock speed. Tag that along with with a fully DirectX 11 capable GPU (details not yet revealed) cast on the same die as the CPU with parallel vector hardware, and you get a potential Intel laptop killer.
Sampling will occur in the second half of the year and OEMs will get access in 2011.
Via Ars Technica
