![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , June 14, 2011
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Editor:
- Steve Lynch
- Google +1
AMD's Llano Fusion - A Series APUs
While we have seen previous Fusion APUs, today AMD releases its code named "Llano" Fusion A Series APU processor on the world. The first one of these we get to see is in a notebook and a mere 228 square millimeter of silicon that AMD is counting on changing its balance sheet.
A-Series on the GPU Side
You will surely want to run through this slide deck below as it is focused on what the GPU abilities of our A-Series APU actually are.
As you might expect, DirectX11 is alive and well in our Llano. Anything your 5000 series card can do, it can do, not sure about better though. Beyond gaming, and we are going to get intimate with that in the coming pages, is the video decode and image enhancement abilities of our APU when tied to the correct software. Sadly I did not have the proper drivers to see the AMD Steady Video feature in action while I was testing the unit. The driver did not get to me until after testing was over and we had moved on. What it does is take those crappy shaky cam videos and smooth those out for you. In the demos we were shown, it worked very well but I cannot vouch for it personally.
AMD HD3D is natively supported as well, so get out your glasses and geek the hell right out there on the plane. Just make sure to send us a webcam picture.
Where the APU really starts to get interesting is the Dual Graphics feature. This harkens back to the "Hybrid" feature that we saw from AMD years ago that never truly came to fruition in the market. We are simply "CrossFiring" our on-die GPU with a discrete video card or on-board video solution. This Dual Graphics solution will only be realized between an AMD APU and a AMD GPU. NVIDIA GPUs cannot be currently leveraged with AMD or Intel on-die graphics solutions.
There is a limit as to what you can run in a Dual Graphics situation and we are very likely to see some of this when the desktop Llano lands. Once the discrete GPU starts outstripping the on-die APU by about 1.75 frames to 1, CrossFireX basically stops working at that point.
Dirt 3
The Dirt series has now become synonymous with AMD and the fact is that it runs pretty damn well on an AMD A-Series notebook. There are some interesting slides below, but probably nothing you have not seen before.
What is worth taking a look at is the gaming benchmarks in the last three slides. These are certainly to be taken with a grain of salt but, from what we have seen, the A-series 400 core APU is very capable of pulling off numbers like these. And no doubt that Intel's solution is not capable of DX11.
