David Wong - Wells Fargo
 
With your current schedules will Llano appear in systems and ramp before the Bulldozer desktop and server ships, or after the Bulldozer desktop and server ships?
 
Dirk Meyer
 
Before.
 
David Wong
 
Llano will be before? Okay, and just a clarification on something you said earlier. Did you say that desktop processor revenues grew sequentially in the quarter?
 
Dirk Meyer
 
Yes.

"Production shipments of Llano, our 32nm APU, are planned to occur in the first half of next year," said Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer of AMD, during his recent conference call with financial analysts.
 
Up to the middle of 2010 the Sunnyvale, California-based chip designer convinced the world that it would ship to customers code-named Llano chips with high performance x86 cores and advanced DirectX 11 graphics in late 2010. But then the company said that the 32nm SOI process technology - jointly developed by AMD, Globalfoundries, IBM, - had been too immature to produce commercial yields. Due to low yields, AMD had to delay the roll-out of code-named Llano product, as some reported, until the second half of the year 2011. Meanwhile, AMD's claim causes some optimism.

Quite a lot is known about Llano processor, which is a part of Sabine platform. As reported earlier, AMD Llano accelerated processing unit (APU) will have four x86 cores based on the current micro-architecture each of which will have 9.69mm² die size (without L2 cache), a little more than 35 million transistors (without L2 cache), 2.5W – 25W power consumption, 0.8V – 1.3V voltage and target clock-speeds at over 3.0GHz clock-speed. The cores will dynamically scale  their clock-speeds and voltages within the designated thermal design power in order to boost performance when a program does not require all four processing engines or trim power consumption when there is no demand for resources. According to sources familiar with the matter, different versions of Llano processor will have thermal design power varying from 20W to 59W: high-end dual-core, triple-core and quad-core chips will have TDP between 35W and 59W; mainstream chips with two of four x86 cores will fit into 30W thermal envelope and low-power dual-core Llano chips will have 20W TDP. Llano will be made using 32nm SOI process technology.

Still DirectX 11
 
AMD’s soon to launch first ever 40nm Ontario CPU is going to appear in the compact nano ITX form factor. It is originaly designed for notebooks, netbooks and the like, but Fusion parts will get to the nano ITX format as well.
 
HTPC customers will definitely be excited about this one as Ontario supports graphics with DirectX 11 support, UVD 3.0 decode engine, 1080i and 1080P HD as we well as VC1, H.264 and MPEG-4 full hardware supported HD player. This all fits in 120x120 mm motherboard and it comes with an HDMI connector and even boards with two HDMI connectors are possible.
 
Such board will only have place for DDR3 SODIMM laptop memory slots but it is still quite impressive to pack anything DirectX 11 capable in such a small form factor. The chipset of choice is codenamed Hudson and it brings SATA 3 or 6 depending on the chipset and USB 2.0 in its cheaper iteration. More expensive boards might get USB 3.0.
 
Ontario can get embedded version as well and it should settle with 9W TDP. At this TDP, you still need some low RPM fan but you will get a very power efficient platform.

At a recent press event in Los Angeles, Legit Reviews got a a chance to take a look at an AMD development platform that was running an early revision of AMD's Llano Fusion processor. This is the first time that one of AMD Llano Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) have been seen outside an AMD test lab so it looks like they are coming along nicely

"AMD’s Llano is the industry’s first foundry product with High-k Metal Gate (HKMG), so it is an important proof point of our ability to deliver this new technology. Our 32nm HKMG technology ramp is currently in early production at Fab 1 in Dresden and we are making continued progress on ramping the process in support of AMD’s 1H 2011 customer commitments."

AMD exec VP confirms
 
One of AMD's key executive vice presidents has confirmed that Ontario and Zacate Fusion cores are scheduled to launch at CES 2011.
 
Rick Bergman, AMD Products Group Senior Vice President & General Manager informed several AMD partners about the schedule and the processors have already been sampled.
 
They are fully functional and run on production clock speeds. As far as we can tell, that speed is 1.6GHz for Zacate at 18W TDP and this sound be enough for small form factor desktops, all-in-one PCs or the notebook market.
 
AMD is also “meeting its Q4 production schedule” and it is comited to announce OEM systems based on Ontario (single core 9W TDP) and Zacate (dual core 18W) at CES 2011.
 
Systems are expected some 30 days after announcement, so you should be able to buy Fusion by early February 2011.

AMD's Chris Cloran says its 500Gflops
 
It was interesting to hear Chris Cloran,  AMD’s Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Computing Solutions Group and Client Division, at AMD to talk about the graphics performance of AMD's upcoming Llano APU.
 
He didn’t say much, but he told us all we needed to know. In his small presentation from the 6th annual AMD Technical Forum and Exhibition at Taipei, Chris told the world that Llano’s is capable of about 500 gigaflops. You can check his short speech here.
 
He also mentions that Llano APU (Accelerated Powering Unit) comes in mid 2011 and that it can play 1080p Video and render 32 gigaflops od pure calculation on five pipes simultaniously even when AMD deliberately hang four CPU cores from helping in the calculation.
 
A 500 gigaflops is just a tad less than you get today from ATI Radeon HD 5570 at 650MHz, as this graphics card scores 520 GigaFLOPS.
 
Back in September we did tell you that AMD is using a mobile version of Redwood, or something that scores close to 500GigaFLOPs, here. It turns out that Mobility Radeon HD 5730 based on Redwood and Madison LP core scores 520 GigaFLOPs and this looks to be the core inside of Llano. We at least know that we can expect performance similar to Madison or Redwood core as well as DirectX 11.
 
You can also check the Radeon hD 5570 specification and the GigaFLOPs score here, and Madison LP Mobility Radeon HD 5730 scores here.

. It turns out that Mobility Radeon HD 5730 based on Redwood and Madison LP core scores 520 GigaFLOPs and this looks to be the core inside of Llano. We at least know that we can expect performance similar to Madison or Redwood core as well as DirectX 11.

AMD Fusion : il y aura bien des cartes mères Mini iTX
 Y'a plus qu'à
Carte mère
 
Lors de notre rencontre avec AMD en marge de l'IDF, nous avions demandé si des constructeurs seraient libres d'utiliser les processeurs de la génération Fusion pour les intégrer à des cartes mères miniatures. Il nous avait été répondu que oui, bien qu'AMD ne prévoyait nullement de proposer le moindre modèle de référence.
 
AMD Fusion IDFEt d'après certaines de nos sources, des constructeurs travaillent d'ores et déjà sur des produits au format Mini iTX, exploitant la plateforme Brazos, avec une connectique maximale. De quoi faire rêver tous les amateurs de PC de salon, surtout que la partie graphique serait estampillée Radeon HD 6000.
 
Reste à voir de quoi elle sera capable dans les faits, mais elle devrait réussir à facilement trouver sa place entre les produits à base d'Atom et d'autres tels que la fameuse GA-H55N-USB3 de Gigabyte. Mais c'est sans doute NVIDIA et ION qui devraient le plus pâtir de cette nouvelle concurrence, que nous avons d'ores et déjà hâte de tester au labo.