AMD is looking to steal some thunder from Intel's Sandy Bridge processors with its upcoming Llano APUs and has set some bold shipment targets for the new parts, according to a report on DigiTimes. Citing anonymous industry sources at motherboard manufacturers, the site claims that Llano will make up for 40% of AMD's total CPU shipments in Q3, with around 3 million units shipping to retailers and OEM partners.
Although an official launch date has yet to be announced, the company is widely expected to start selling the new processors later in the summer around June or July. The company already shipped about three million Brazos CPUs for netbooks and budget notebooks during the first quarter of 2011. Apparently, the platform's low price compared to Intel's offerings helped it gain many supporters and that's expected to be the case with Llano as well. Asustek, Gigabyte and MSI have all reportedly prepared several different motherboard models designed specifically for Llano.
But besides the competitive pricing, Llano should also offer similar performance as Intel's same-grade products. According to the latest reports the initial desktop lineup will debut in July with five A-series models, including four quad-core chips in standard and low-voltage variants as well as a lower end dual-core part.
AMD might tackle the mobile segment first. Back in March, the company's director of the client technology unit Godfrey Cheng started showing off the multi-tasking capabilities of mobile Llano, taking a shipping Intel Core i7-2630QM Sandy Bridge mobile processor and comparing it against a quad-core A8-3510MX in a series of graphics-focused tests.
In a recent video (posted above) that same mobile chip was also compared favorably against the Intel Core i7-2600 desktop processor with Intel HD 3000 graphics, but again the tests are focused mostly on GPU performance.