A co-leader of Advanced Micro Devices’ central engineering group said that the company was quite satisfied with its first so-called accelerated processing unit – a chip that features both x86 processing core as well as graphics processing core – code-named Llano.

“We are quite happy with what we are seeing so far and believe that ‘Llano’ is really going to demonstrate the power of AMD’s two strengths: x86 CPUs and GPUs. The current schedule is for 2011 introduction so it is still early, but because we are using an existing CPU core for the first product and not making big changes in the memory structure right away, we feel quite confident about where we are with Llano,” said Chekib Akrout, corporate vice president of central engineering at AMD.

So far the information about Llano has been quite sketchy, but in case the details are summarized, the APU will seem to be quite an interesting solution for entry-level market: it will feature up to four Shanghai/Phenom II-class cores; 4MB of L3 cache; PC3-12800 (DDR3 1600MHz) memory controller, possibly, with some tweaks to better serve x86 and graphics engines; DirectX 11 graphics core with third-generation universal video decoder; PCI Express 2.0 bus for external graphics cards. What is even more interesting is that Llano appears to be a monolithic chip combining both x86 and graphics cores.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...or_Design.html