WE‘RE STILL AT least a couple of months away from AMD’s Ontario announcement and even longer from Llano, but some very early performance figures have tipped up online courtesy of, well, distributed computing. To be more precise details of various distributed computing apps being tested on AMD Llano and Ontario systems have appeared on BOINC or the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing if you prefer.
BOINC is a non-commercial middleware for various distributed computing programs such as SETI@home and several other less famous ones. The site is listing details of AMD engineering sample CPUs which are listed as AMD64 family 18, model 0 stepping 0 and AMD64 family 20, model 0 stepping 0 which is meant to be AMD’s upcoming Llano and Ontario APUs.
The Llano APU is listed as having three CPU’s, although this would be cores rather than actual CPU’s and the Ontario is a dual core. The Llano system is kitted out with 8GB of RAM, but we’re fairly certain the 1MB of cache listing is somewhat off target. The Ontario system has 2GB of RAM, but 230MB of that seems to be taken up by the GPU. Again the cache listing is odd, at 448KB. It’s possible that the cache is per core rather than for the entire CPU, as that makes sense judging by other CPU listings on BOINC and L3 cache doesn’t appear to be taken into account.
It’s hard to draw any real conclusions from the numbers, as the clock speeds for the two CPUs aren’t listed. Without knowing that it’s hard to compare the processors to current products in the market, but the Ontario is looking a lot more “ready” than the Llano. The only numbers on offer is measured floating point and integer speeds in million ops/sec, The Ontario comes out with 1,351 million ops/sec for floating point and 3,047 million ops/sec for integer performance running Windows Server 2008 of all things.
We also managed to dig out some numbers for the same CPU running an unspecified version of Linux with kernel 2.6.31.5 and here the floating point speed is slightly lower at 1,330 million ops/sec, but the integer performance went up slightly to 3,120 million ops/sec. This compares quite favourably to Intel’s dual core Atom 330 which only manages 871 million ops/sec for floating point and 2,249 million ops/sec for integer.
The triple-core Llano processor on the other hand doesn’t seem to be performing nearly as well as it should as it has a floating point performance of a mere 1,196 million ops/sec and an integer performance of 3,711 million ops/sec. It’s worth taking into account that this is most likely a very early sample and isn’t running anywhere near full speed. It’s no point comparing it to anything either, as the numbers aren’t going to impress anyone at this stage.
If nothing else, this does show that AMD has working silicon of both the Ontario and Llano processors, although as mentioned, Ontario seems to be a lot closer to a finished product at this stage than Llano. Ontario should compare favourable to Intel’s CULV mobile processors, although we doubt Ontario will beat Intel’s ultra low power Core iSomethingmeaningless processors on anything but price, but sometimes that’s enough to be a winner.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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