SCIENCE

AMD has showcased for its ecosystem partners the first public demonstration of the forthcoming AMD Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) codenamed “Llano”, designed for notebook, ultrathin and desktop PCs. AMD demonstrated the accelerated single-chip processing muscle of Llano by simultaneously processing three separate compute-and graphics-intensive workloads.

“The serial and powerful parallel processing capability of the Llano APU has the potential to make OEMs and consumers re-think their computing experience,” said Chris Cloran, corporate vice president and general manager, client division, AMD. “The experience potential of Llano is truly incredible, and the demos we showed today on stage provide a glimpse of what this processor is capable of delivering in sleek form factors with long battery life. Everything consumers love about their digital lifestyles today – social networking, gaming, consuming and creating media – can be enhanced with Llano, enabling a more interactive, vivid and immersive experience.”

The Llano APU demo showed three compute-intensive workloads simultaneously on Microsoft Windows 7, including calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places, and decoding HD video from a Blu-ray disc. Running concurrent to the CPU and HD video playback applications, Microsoft’s nBody DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS (as reported in the application) a relative measure of the available capacity to post-process video during playback, play a DirectX11 game, or assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application. The demonstration represents a preview of Llano’s raw compute power enabling new levels of experience computing that AMD aims to bring to mainstream PC users in 2011.

Held annually in Taiwan, the AMD Technical Forum & Exhibition is an ecosystem partner event that focuses on addressing the world’s most complex technology challenges, and spotlighting technology breakthroughs. Exhibitors span academia, hardware and software industries, fostering a healthy, open ecosystem for the AMD Fusion family of APUs.