Event Coverage

AMD Fusion - A New Era of Computing Coming Soon!

By Vijay Anand - 20 Oct 2010

The Sabine Platform (with Llano APU)

The Sabine Platform (with Llano APU)

Moving up the ladder for more performance, the Sabine platform is targeted at the performance-mainstream crowd who dabbles in more content creation activities and would like to have close to mid-tier discrete GPU performance. Answered by the Llano APU that will come in Q2 2011 (a quarter after the Zacate and Ontario), its CPU core is actually a derivative of the existing Athlon II processors and will be available in both dual and quad-core variants. The GPU portion is better equipped, possibly a Redwood-variant graphics engine (essentially a Radeon HD 5500 / 5600 series class). This would be really interesting to benchmark when it does hit the market.

Key touch points of the Sabine platform with the Llano APU. "Lynx" is just the desktop equivalent codename for the mobile-oriented Sabine platform.

Here's a closer look at the Llano APU. Not much detail revealed at this level unfortunately. Note that the Fusion APUs still require some sort of hub controller on the motherboard, aka, chipset.

The requirements that make up the 32nm Llano APU, which is also AMD's first power-gated CPU. Hopefully this would mean a more power efficient APU that's able to shut down unused CPU cores completely like the modern Nehalem derivative cores in Intel's lineup currently.

The first Llano APU 32nm SOI wafer held up by Chris Cloran, Corporate VP and GM of AMD's Client Division.
 

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