That’s a mighty long list of capabilities consolidated into one piece of silicon, almost a system on a chip rather than a CPU surrounded by many helpers.īy integrating so many pieces together, Llano follows a trajectory for CPUs established long ago, when they first incorporated floating-point units. This one chip incorporates a whole host of elements, many of which used to reside in other parts of a PC: up to four traditional CPU cores, a north bridge, a DDR3 memory controller, a bundle of PCI Express connectivity, a moderately robust Radeon GPU with an associated UVD block for video acceleration, and a pair of display interfaces. Cache sizes, clock speeds, and performance have grown over time, as well.Įven so, the sheer scope of AMD’s new processor-code-named “Llano” and creatively dubbed an “accelerated processing unit” (APU) rather than a CPU-may cause you to do a double-take. In recent years, we’ve watched the CPU rise from a single core to two, four, and even more.
We know this in our bones by now, in various ways, whether it’s watching ever more functionality get crammed into smart phones or the constant drumbeat being sounded for, well, the constant drumbeat of Moore’s Law. Computer chips become more complex over time.
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