AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview

Desktop Llano APUs, like the A8-3850 we’ll be looking at here, will use AMD’s FM1, 40mm x 40mm, lidded packaging as opposed to the FS1, 35mm x 35mm, lidless packaging of the mobile variants.

 
AMD A8-3850 APU In The Flesh

While the APUs look very similar to current Phenom II and Athlon II processors from the top, thanks to the similar lid / integrated heat spreader, they use a completely different pin configuration and also a different socket. Desktop Llano APUs have 905 pins on their underside; socket AM3 Phenom II and Athlon II processors have 939 pins.

   
AMD A8-3850 CPU-Z and GPU-Z Details

The AMD A8-3850 APU has a default CPU clock speed of 2.9GHz. As we’ve mentioned, it is four x86 cores each with 128 KB L1 Cache (64KB Instruction, 64KB Data) and 1MB of L2 per core—no L3 cache is present. Current Phenom II processors have similar L1 configurations, but only half the L2, plus a large 6MB L3. The larger L2 should help mitigate the loss of the L3, along with some other improvements to the cores. The 32mn “Stars” derived cores in Llano have improved schedulers and branch predictions units, along with some other low-level tweaks that result in an approximate 6% improvement in IPC performance over current-gen Phenom II processors.

There’s not much to see with regard to the integrated Radeon HD 6550D GPU core in the GPU-Z screenshot that we haven’t already talked about. To reiterate, the GPU core runs at 600MHz and has 400 shader ALUs arranged in 5 SIMDs.