In 2006, AMD acquired the graphics company ATI for $5.4 billion. Shortly thereafter, AMD announced an initiative codenamed Fusion. The goal of this initiative is to a CPU and GPU into what is called the Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). Products from this initiative are due in 2011. The Bobcat core will focus on 1 watt to 10 watt products. A netbook is an example of a product that might use the Bobcat core. The Bulldozer core focused on 10 watt to 100 watt products, which could show up in laptop computers and personal desktop computers.
The Llano APU is not going to be built on either the Bobcat or Bulldozer platforms. Instead it will be built from up to four 32nm Phenom II-like cores. Llano will use a new socket (AM3r2) and will use DDR3 for memory. None of this is really new, as we have covered the LLano platform before. However, today Guru3D has some more information regarding LLano, along with some platform pictures.
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.
