Llano is finally launched and unfortunately it took AMD a year long delay to make this happen. Many chaps did reviews of the reference Sabine platform and you can see here how AMD A8 3500 M is doing against Core i7 and Core i5 second generation.

Since Llano has a CPU which is a tweaked K10.5 core shrink to 32nm, you cannot expect miracles in terms of CPU performance, and Intel clearly wins any CPU intensive tasks. It can beat Intel's quad cores in games, but only if these are not matched with Nvidia or ATI discrete mobile chips.

AMD claims 150 design wins, its personal record for a mobile platform, and naturally it all starts with HP and it will likely follow by Dell going Llano. AMD notebooks will end up cheaper than Intel’s, but not that much cheaper to make a decisive difference, and there are not too many mainstream customers that will buy AMD notebooks simply due to the fact that they will get DirectX 11 and play some games faster than Intel.

The sad part is that this is AMD's best mobile chip and it cannot come even close to Core i7 quad core second generation, aka Sandy Bridge, mainly due to the lengthy delay. The scary part is that Ivy Bridge comes in the last month of Q1 2012 or first month of Q2 2012, and naturally you can expect even better performance.

AMD will counter Ivy Bridge with Trinity, a new Fusion core based on Bulldozer. According to AMD, Trinity should end up about 50 percent faster than Llano, but it is doubtful this will be enough to stand toe to toe with Ivy Bridge. Of course, a lot will depend on the price/performance ratio, but in terms of sheer CPU performance it is highly unlikely AMD can catch up with Intel next year or beyond.