AMD demonstrates Llano APU - affirms it's on track for mid-2011 release

Armed to take on cheaper Sandy Bridge parts?

After having taking the wraps off its low-power Brazos Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) - the combination of CPU(s) and GPU(s) on one die - earlier this year, AMD demonstrated the Llano APU at its Technical Forum in Taipei, Taiwan.

Llano is the bigger brother of Ontario and will feature in desktop systems from the middle of next year. Hewn from 32nm silicon produced by GlobalFoundries, Llano will integrate four Phenom II-type cores and a beefy DX11 graphics-core on to a single die.

Whetting your appetite, here are a few photographs of a validation board housing a Llano APU.

HEXUS was on hand at a special event in Los Angeles last week - can you guess what it was for? - that showed Llano silicon running the DX11 Aliens vs. Predator benchmark for a few seconds. The demonstration gave us an inkling into Llano's GPU performance.

A rather more impressive demonstration was provided in Taipei, where a Llano chip was shown running a 1080p video, an n-body simulation and a four-thread HyperPi calculation in tandem. Have a look for yourselves.

AMD's Chris Cloran went on to comment that top-line Llano parts will pack in the region of 400-500GFLOPS of performance - split over the CPUs and GPUs. Interesting times ahead.