AMD Releases Two Llano Based Athlon II X4 CPUs

AMD has quietly released two Athlon II X4 CPUs, the 638 and 641. These are based on Llano (i.e. Stars+/K10.5 architecture) but lack an integrated GPU. The socket is still FM1, just like in normal Llano CPUs. Here's a quick rundown of the chips.

Specifications of AMD Athlon II X4 638 and 641Model638641Core/Thread Count4/44/4Base Frequency2.7GHz2.8GHzL2 Cache4MB4MBTDP65W100WPrice$81$81

There is nothing extraordinaty in these chips. We are looking at relatively low-end SKUs in terms of price and performance. It's good to keep in mind that a discrete GPU is needed because these SKUs lack integrated graphics, so that will potentially raise the total system price.

The usage of the Athlon II brand with Llano isn't actually a new thing as the first such SKU, Athlon II X4 631, launched back in August. This is quite similar to what Intel is doing; AMD is saving the A4, A6, A8, and FX brands (their rough equivalent of Intel's Core i3/i5/i7) for midrange and high-end chips, and reusing their older Sempron and Athlon brand names (e.g. Intel's Celeron and Pentium) with lower-end SKUs.

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ASUS F1A75-M Pro Review - Micro-ATX Llano at $110

Llano is still selling strong for AMD, as shown by the relatively recent reports of representing a major aspect of their CPU profit margins. Building on our Llano and A75 review base, ASUS gave us the opportunity to look at their F1A75-M Pro motherboard - e-tailing at the time of writing for around $110.  Here at AnandTech we have reviewed other offerings from ASUS in A75, in full ATX from the F1A75-V Pro, and the mini-ITX F1A75-I Deluxe.  This time, it's the turn of micro-ATX.  Read on for the full review!

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ASRock A75 Extreme6 Review and Desktop Llano Overclocking

The AMD A8-3850 Review: Llano on the Desktop

Desktop Llano Motherboards: The ASRock A75 Extreme6 Preview

The AMD Llano Notebook Review: Competing in the Mobile Market

Testing Different Memory Speeds on AMD's A8-3850 Llano APU

Legit Processor Reviews

Memory Performance on AMD's A-Series APU

Last month Legit Reviews reviewed the AMD A8-3850 'Llano' APU and our article looks like it was well received by our readers with the exception of one thing.  We've had a number of readers write in saying that it was great that we tested this platform with 1866MHz memory, but they are building budget systems and want to use 1333MHz or 1600MHz memory. It is true that we didn't look at performance numbers of AMD's A-Series APUs on the A75 chipset at 1333MHz, 1600MHz and since this platform is very budget friendly we see this as a valid point.

Legit Reviews does not want to ostracize any of our readers and pride ourselves on our no-BS straight forward and honest reviews, so we went back to the drawing board to get you the performance data you need before ordering in a new platform. We'll be using the Gigabyte GA-A75-UD4H motherboard for testing again, but since we updated the BIOS to version F3 we re-did all of the performance numbers as we did see improved performance with the new BIOS.

We also got a few questions about how the platform handles 16GB of memory and if there are any stability issues with running all four memory slots fully populated. We've seen performance gains with all the memory slots full on AMD platforms in the past, so we'll be looking at 2x4GB and 4x4GB performance as well in our test results. Not too many people will be running 16GB of memory on the Llano A-Series APU, but we found no issues in doing so with G.Skill Ripjaws

So, to reiterate what our goals are for this article one more time:

• Benchmark 2x4GB memory kits at 1333MHz, 1600MHz, 1866MHz to find performance differences


• Benchmark 2x4GB versus 4x4GB to see if filling all the memory slots impacts performance


• See if we have any issues running 16GB of memory 

This should be easy enough, so let's take a look at the test system and get right to the performance numbers.

Next Page - The Test System

AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Llano APU Review

IGP performance world record smashed on overclocked GIGABYTE Llano motherboard

TweakTown.com have published an article and video where they have our forthcoming A75M-UD2H motherboard pushing AMD’s latest Llano APU to achieve an incredible P6281 points in 3DMark Vantage (performance mode). TweakTown is claiming this overclock as a world record for an integrated graphics processor, further ramping up the buzz of expectation regarding AMD’s eagerly anticipated Llano APU platform launch later this week. We’ve put a lot of work into making our new Llano-compatible AMD A series boards the ideal base for these new Accelerated Processor Units, or APUs, so of course we’re totally chuffed to see a record-breaking overclock on one of our boards at this early stage.

 “You may have seen this type of configuration before, but not like how you are going to see in the video above. We managed to overclock the AMD CPU from its default clock speed of 2.9GHz all the way up to 3.6GHz (150 x 24) using an FSB of 150MHz. In turn this also overclocked the DX11 Radeon HD GPU within the AMD APU from a core clock speed of 600MHz to 900MHz. This is really impressive and we even saw Crysis 2 running at 720p at around 40 - 45 frames per second and from a system without a video card (strange to look at, actually), that is rather good.” – TweakTown