AMD demos Llano Fusion CPU handling three tasks at once
updated 01:00 pm EDT, Tue October 19, 2010
AMD shows off Llano processor in full bore test
AMD at its in-house Technical Forum late yesterday showed off a fully functioning example of its Llano Fusion processor (video below). The CPU and graphics hybrid was given a full workload and smoothly decoded 1080p Blu-ray video, calculated Pi to the 32 millionth decimal place and generated particle effects all while using the graphics and general-purpose GPU functions of the chip instead of raw CPU power. A check of the DirectCompute stats saw it running at about 30 gigaflops of combined speed, or multiple times what a regular processor would do.
The Llano design is targeted at desktops and regular-sized notebooks and will have as many as four cores in addition to a DirectX 11 (OpenGL 4.0) graphics core woven directly into the architecture. AMD has promised that the platform will be one of its first 32nm designs and should run significantly faster and cooler than the 45nm hardware it uses today.
AMD's current roadmap still has the first processors shipping sometime in the first half of 2011 and would make it a direct competitor to Sandy Bridge, Intel's own architecture where graphics are on the main chip die.
