AMD Director of Client Technology, Godfrey Cheng, recently posted an article titled Exposing the Phantom x86 Bottleneck, which calls out how there is a fundamental flaw in most modern x86 processor designs – they focus on “short and bursty” workloads. This was fine and dandy back when users were solely crunching numbers, writing documents or working on databases, but the modern workload is significantly different.
“Software applications have changed how consumers use their personal computers. People are using more modern workloads like 3D graphics, HD video and Internet surfing in a much more prevalent manner. Sure, we all dabble with spreadsheets and word processing once in awhile, but any modern x86 CPU-based PC can handle these workloads with ease. But with these modern applications, the capacity to multitask, improve image quality and enhance power efficiency are much more important than raw x86 performance in determining how good a consumer’s experience is with a particular PC.”
This is where AMD’s Fusion “Llano” processor excels and Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” falls short. While Intel has focused on “improving classic x86 performance”, AMD has “invested much more heavily in graphics, parallel compute and video.” The video below shows AMD pitting their Fusion “Llano” quad-core A8-3510MX mobile processor agains Intel’s “Sandy Bridge” quad-core Core i7-2630QM, while keeping other components equal.
The results are staggering! The Intel system quickly stutters and then comes to a near standstill while consuming the most power, while the AMD “Llano” system screams through all of the simultaneous tests. It is important to note that the benchmarks performed are most likely designed to show the benefits of “Llano” over Intel, but the fact is that this is one of the first true, modern workload tests, to be performed on these two systems simultaneously and AMD comes out on top! Viva la APU!
No word on an official release date, but rumour has it we will be seeing these in early spring 2011.
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