You need to understand that Xbit Labs is Pro Intel and Anti AMD no matter what reality shows in benchmarks or user experiences. That isn't going to change no matter how good AMD products are. Llano is a perfect example of a reluctant admission that AMD's APUs are far superior for mainstream users.

Just ignore the hate and use good judgment when spending your hard earned money. If most people had a moral compass they'd never buy an Intel product IMO, but few people exercise good judgment and many are easily misled.

Intel has done everything imaginable to illegally crush AMD and remove consumers rights to better quality and lower priced X86 CPUs. Intel has been convicted on three continents of anti-trust crimes. They have been convicted twice in the U.S. for tax fraud. If you did this as a tax payer - you'd go to prison but not Intel execs...

Now Intel is trying to beat more violations of anti-trust laws on a technicality. Hopefully ethical consumers will vote for a level playing field and justice when they spend their money.

http://www.theinquirer.ne...ntitrust-claims-dismissed

Thank you for the link. If only more people would read it, and understand something from it would be great.

It's funny you don't see Xbit Labs touting Intel's criminal activity weekly. Maybe it's because Intel is such a fine corporate citizen... or NOT?

Yah see it too, and commonly disregard the news.

Could it be Because Intel has better Processor than AMD, Since First Release of Intel Core 2?

Are you kidding me? I thought the conclusion was quite favourable to AMD. These APU's are only good if you want to play games, and if you're serious about that you'll get an Intel CPU and a discrete card anyway.

No this is not true. The whole point of a desktop APU is for entry level performance at a good price point, which you can't get with a discrete CPU/GPU combo.

I'm not mocking you but what big hungry cpu apps you want to run on a low end system???

For a HTPC, media ripping might be an area where you'd care. Intel has significantly lower energy consumption for x264 (50% worst case, > 100% best case). Don't have numbers for energy consumed using QuickSync, but the numbers are likely better. For the task of watching video, there's really no difference.

I'd like to see AMD competitive again, but Intel upped the ante in the post P4 timeframe and AMD appeared to standstill. Intel has the advantage of it's own fabs and manufacturing technology. Ivy Bridge is looking very good with respect to energy efficiency. AMD's Trinity is going to be based on Bulldozer, a part that has poor energy efficiency and poor cache performance, so it's hard to see how AMD catch up in this game.

The likely battle is now between ARM systems coming up from the low-end and Intel coming from the top. I've not seen anything from AMD at ISCA (or elsewhere) that convinces me they have anything to counter Intel or the ARM world. Five years and they are a smaller company making discrete GPU parts or become an ARM licensee like NVidia.

You folks have missed the whole point of this IGP review. This is a comparison of entry level desktop IGP solutions which have a much lower price point than a discrete CPU/GPU combo. AMD actually excels substantially in this area and will continue their dominance with Triniy which increases IPC by ~20% and IGP by ~30%. It's system performance and price that mainstream consumers care about.

AMD's APUs are a significant new market segment and product that will eventually power most mainstream desktops as it is more cost effective, more energy efficient and fully capable of performing all PC operations that mainstream consumers desire.

In short AMD is redefining the laptop and mainstream desktop markets and their APUs are even being used in servers now because they offer better overall performance for many applications. Enthusiasts level desktops will be the only X86 segment left that uses discrete CPU/GPU combinations for the next few years. After that I suspect APUs will replace discrete CPU/GPU combos as APUs are simply a better design choice.

AMD offers excellent performance per dollar, but they are not selling them at this price for the benefit of the consumer. AMD can't charge top-dollar because they don't have the performance to merit the premium. Energy efficiency has caught some consumers attention, but if you do the math, Intel is 30-100% more efficient at compute intensive tasks.

AMD have a better IGP, but Intel's IGP works fine in similar scenarios and for the niche that care about GPU performance both IGPs are poor. The AMD APU is not strong enough to merit a premium in the market.

I hope your views of Trinity hold true, but Trinity is based on Bulldozer and the TDPs for this part are a generation (or two) behind the equivalent Intel SandyBridge parts. The micro-benchmark performance of Bulldozer doesn't appear to be compete with Phenom (see http://www.xbitlabs.com/a.../amd-fx-8150_8.html#sect1.) Trinity is going up against Ivy Bridge. Most of the media believe Intel's 3D transistors and 22nm process are going to offer significant power savings and greater IPC compared to SB. Unless Intel has manufacturing issues, it's hard to see AMD capturing significant share.

For a Llano system, Is the IGP able to make a significant contribution in a system with a significantly more powerful GPU (e.g. Radeon 6850)? Is there any data for this? Naively it seems the additional complexity in workload partitioning, the disparity in GPU compute power, and GPU data sharding might produce worse overall performance. Anand found mixed results on this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4476/amd-a83850-review/6

Is there any evidence of the superior transcoding quality of the AMD parts? What tools use it?