Ontario 9w and 18w versions + pics

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by James

Assuming the wafer shot is Llano, we got to about 225mm2.

This causes a problem for me, because at 225mm2, I'd expect more than 400 sp's. A lot more.

A quad core Athlon 2 is 169 mm2, a 5770 with 800 sp's is 170mm2. So that's 339mm2 on 45+40nm. With Llano being on 32nm, a 50% shrink would be...226mm2.

Unless the high speed bus is huge, I can't see Llano "only" having 400 sp's.

I think they've already said each core is 8.9mm^2 so the CPU core & L2 may be even smaller. Design philosophy is very similar to Bobcat it seems.

[BaronMatrix]

Originally Posted by reader

Let me add a little to that. Apologies if this put the comment out of the scope of this thread.

The performance prediction about Llano is probably the wildest game in business at the moment I think. People are generally assuming Llano with a performance very similar to PhII which might very well be the case. But here are some fact.

Its a 32nm process and SOI+HKMG at that. We have seen PhII based 6 cores at 115W TDP and PhII reaching 3.2Ghz at 45nm. We all know what a disaster Ph was originally and how much AMD has improved it incrementally at every revision.

So what would be the increase in clocks due to the new process? Zero because they need the power for GPU or significant?

Clock gating, clock grid design, digital APM and other changes. Mostly they all might hugely change the power equation for Llano core. This might either go to GPU or a real good turbo. Following Charlie's article the clock grid by itself saves 15% power usage straight. The improved with clock buffer/gating whatever they are, I have zero clue to how much their impacts are. The digital APM also makes fine grained and faster turbo on/off possible I would assume which sure is good for a responsive system.

The L1 has been changed for good, L2s are double. It sounds as though their speed and higher clock potential are there. There is suppose to prefetcher improvement and TLB.

So here's the deal. Llano has almost nothing drastic. The clock gating has been done by Intel, the clock grid and digital APM might be a new thing. But as far as a super layman like me understand every single thing has been tweaked a little here and there to squeeze a little more. Understand that its a seriously old core, AMD engineer has worked on this for long years and should know it very well. This might all come down to nothing but I am waiting to be pleasantly surprised and the VP marketing's "Whoa" quote might actually have some substance to it.

I said long ago that Llano was the test ground for 32nm SOI. Because it's the first 32nm SOI HKMG chip and the first SOI GPU, it should be a little slow but BD has none of the exotic combos of Llano.

Ontario has an advantage of being a small synthesizable core that doesn't have to reach 2.5GHz+ clock speeds and the GPU is currently made by TSMC on 40nm.

If anything AMD is smart to drop Bobcat first as it's all uphill from there. I would bet that it won't be long before we see a 28nm Fusion chip with NI guts. Whether it'll be Bobcat or Llano or BD it's a tossup.


The big key to Llano will be that it gets a 3GHz CPU and a 5570-level GPU into the same TDP as the current 945 or 1035T. Plus it'll make for seriously cheap school PCs. Take a Llano, put a 64GB SSD on it with 4-8GB 1866 and you have a machine that will take the world by storm.

[Pablo]

The volume and growth is in mobile and Llano's target has to be mobile esp. when you consider all the power mgmt efforts.

I look at HP Mobile in retail, they've put a lot of effort on discrete skus (mainly 5650) but I can't see that much success because they keep advertising like crazy week after week. Major issue is price, imo.

Now a year later if HP gets 5650 performance for "free" in Llano, not to mention the improved reliability, battery life and quietness, they'll be very happy with this and so will their customers.

Also, if we compare to Athlon II's with 4225 integrated graphics that are selling relatively well right now, will a Llano with 5650 not sell a whole lot better? absolutely.

On the CPU side, AMD is going to quad core. Almost all the currently selling AMD mobile skus are dual core, and Intel too for that matter. A mainstream quad core mobile notebook should do very well, IMO.

Llano is designed to go against SB and while it will not keep up with the CPU side, it could win by offering 4 cores instead of 2. And on the GPU side it will be no contest.

In a nutshell, I have high hopes for Llano as its positioned to take SB mobile head on and win.

[reader]

Originally Posted by Pablo

Llano is designed to go against SB and while it will not keep up with the CPU side, it could win by offering 4 cores instead of 2. And on the GPU side it will be no contest.

In a nutshell, I have high hopes for Llano as its positioned to take SB mobile head on and win.

Intel's focus on HT and what I feel an intentional vacuum created by them makes it very hard to get real 4 core out of them while not going to i7 with 8 HT core. I don't like that at all but in my country I can't even get any AMD, so ...

[BaronMatrix]

Originally Posted by Pablo

The volume and growth is in mobile and Llano's target has to be mobile esp. when you consider all the power mgmt efforts.

I look at HP Mobile in retail, they've put a lot of effort on discrete skus (mainly 5650) but I can't see that much success because they keep advertising like crazy week after week. Major issue is price, imo.

Now a year later if HP gets 5650 performance for "free" in Llano, not to mention the improved reliability, battery life and quietness, they'll be very happy with this and so will their customers.

Also, if we compare to Athlon II's with 4225 integrated graphics that are selling relatively well right now, will a Llano with 5650 not sell a whole lot better? absolutely.

On the CPU side, AMD is going to quad core. Almost all the currently selling AMD mobile skus are dual core, and Intel too for that matter. A mainstream quad core mobile notebook should do very well, IMO.

Llano is designed to go against SB and while it will not keep up with the CPU side, it could win by offering 4 cores instead of 2. And on the GPU side it will be no contest.

In a nutshell, I have high hopes for Llano as its positioned to take SB mobile head on and win.

Speaking of Athlon II, I was going to post about it's meteoric rise. Sony VAIO actually has them which is incredible.

And those same boxes will move "up" to Ontario early next year with even better thermals. AMD is saying up to 8 hours. Imagine taking Bobcat to 28nm SOI with an SOI GPU

I think Llano will drink SBs milk shake and relegate Intel to the Brood. A smore OEMs see Llano, there will be more movement towards it as it allows you to add more HW and keep the price down.


As a comparison, I saw two PCs from IBuyPower on Newegg.

THuban 3.2 8 GB RAM 30GB SSD\2TB HDD dual 5870 $2299
i7 980x 3.33 12GB RAM 40GB SSD\2TB HDD GeForce 480 $2999

The same will happen with Zambezi and Llano where they will smoke Intel on price.

Oh and:

Thuban 3.2 8GB RAM 2TB HDD dual 5970 $2799 (Thuban was the first AMD PC to break $2000 in a few years)

Intel's prices will bite them again as AMD is "taking the bottom out."

[reader]

For AMD one of the bigger thing is that for the first time in a long time even if they fight with price/ratio their chips are going to be smaller than intel hence actually providing very good margin. It would be better for all concern the quicker this new generation of processors come to market.

[Pablo]

If you go to newegg you will find that every *book has 1gb ram and either Windows 7 Starter or XP Home, and 10.1" or less. Like all 63 of them!!!

Recall that *book is an artificial category created by Microsoft and Intel for the reasons we all know - ASUS' EEPC was the first low priced small *book but was using a Linux distro, Microsoft wanted that business so they offered a lower priced OS but only if specs were limited (as above). Nothing wrong with Microsoft doing that but you are creating an artificial market (that has low customer sat.)

For details that are a year old, see http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...s_for_netbooks

Ontario/Zacate may be clock limited in order to meet the CPU portion of those limited specifications - I'm assuming the dual core restriction has been removed but maybe there's been a clock trade-off as well. Anybody know more about this?

[BaronMatrix]

Originally Posted by James

The main problem we have with knowing Llano's performance is not having any clue where the clocks could end up. The 5570 only has 650mhz core and it's hard to believe Llano wouldn't make at least double that on GF's 32nm.

ARM saw 40% improvement going from BULK to SOI and that was 45nm SOI without HKMG. I hold that Llano should GPU clock to 800MHz - 1GHz. Remember there are no DVI ports or VRMs or onboard RAM or anything else you would find on a GPU card.

That should give 10% savings at the same node\process. Besdies, it was AMDs 32nm. They did start it before the spin-off.

[DavidC1]

ARM saw nothing. They claim 40% improvement. They also word it so it sounds like you'll get the power savings with the speed as well.

[Wandrey]

Originally Posted by BaronMatrix

Speaking of Athlon II, I was going to post about it's meteoric rise. Sony VAIO actually has them which is incredible.

I'm wondering if this has anything to do with the FTC settling terms.