Sources close to AMD tell Digitime of the company's plans to release 6 Llano-series desktop APUs in Q3 2011, with 5 more following in Q4 2011, in its effort to take on Intel's Sandy Bridge.
AMD should be unveiling its 32nm A-series Llano APUs at Computex Taipei 2011, the sources continue.
Llano the code name for AMD's Sandy Bridge rival-- with the A-series chips carrying dual- or quad-core processing units, Radeon HD 6000-series graphics chip and dual-channel DDR3 memory controller. They are also meant to have power-saving features, including power gating and the shutting down of graphics processor blocks.
Analysts believe Intel's Sandy Bridge chips to have superior CPU performance (together with a capable graphics processor), but also say AMD's Llano should handle graphics-intensive tasks better.
What will customers be going to go for? Depends what they require-- some might say that the PC consumer market is going towards lower-end laptops, in which graphics hardware matters less; with Llano chips carrying more capable graphics hardware, one can expect AMD to market them as providing a price advantage (since customers won't require the purchase of additional graphics hardware).
Nowadays graphics hardware is not only used for gaming and high-end tasks-- even the latest versions of internet browsers IE, Chrome and Firefox offload internet video tasks to the GPU.
The wait for official announcements should be interesting, either way.
Go AMD to Launch 6 Llano APUs in Q3 2011 and Another 5 in Q4 2011 (Digitimes)
