Published in PC Hardware

AMD's Llano to have a hard time fighting Sandy Bridge

by on07 September 2010
fusion

Tough nut to crack

AMD's going to have a hard time fighting the 32nm, soon to launch Sandy Bridge. Many analysts and industry insiders we meet over the last few days in Silicon Valley tend to agree on that. Its graphics performance is good enough for basic gaming, and the CPU performance is likely to be better than Llano’s modified K8 quad, K10 looking core.

We don’t even have to mention that Sandy Bridge should be in production as we speak, as Intel should ship this CPU in volumes sometime in Q1 2011. In fact, the company has shown functional samples a year ago at IDF 2009. AMD’s Llano performance will be ok and AMD can put up a nice fight with Intel, especially with prices. The issue is that AMD cannot make that much money running the price war against Intel. You might remember that AMD has more than 3 USD billion in debt and it is not quite making ludacrous amounts of money that would make that debt go away anytime soon.

Next generation Fusion, something that comes after Llano, will have a Bulldozer core and might stand a chance, but it will fight Intel's Haswell 2012 generation so we're not talking about immediate future. AMD’s biggest chance is that Intel will screw up with some new process or CPU transition. Just remember Pentium 4 and the good days for AMD, when they led the market.


Last modified on 07 September 2010
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