Introduction

I'm quite a fan of the Fusion platform; I've built myself a really nice little HTPC for my room based around the AMD Brazos platform using the wonderful ASUS E35M1-I Deluxe Motherboard. Today we see the next level of Fusion, introduced to us in the form of the Llano platform and the Lynx APU. The Llano platform is what AMD hope will become the mainstream platform to use; based on what we saw from the Brazos platform we have to say that there's a good chance they're heading in the right direction.

As good as Brazos was, it wasn't the most powerful platform; it has its uses in the form of Netbooks and low end Laptops from a portability point of view and from the desktop side of things it's a great platform for the home theater segment. If you wanted something to use every day for work, though, you'd probably find yourself not having quite enough power on tap.

That's where the Llano platform steps in; this follows a much more traditional method when it comes to the platform side of things. While the Brazos platform for desktops had the APU embedded into the board already, the Llano platform consists of that typical motherboard and CPU which is now APU, or Accelerated Processing Unit.

Today the Llano platform launches with two motherboard chipset series - the A75 and cheaper A55 options and two APU series - the A8 and A6. We're going to cover both and today we'll be starting off by looking at what the A75 and A55 offers us.

Once we've done that, we'll move into the APU side of things which is of course where the guts of the Llano platform is, because the APU can do so much more than traditional CPUs that we've come to know and love.

Once we've kind of looked at the new A-Series APU line-up, in a while we'll get a bit more specific with the A8-3850 we have on hand today before we get into the really fun stuff and start overclocking it on our ASUS F1A75-V Pro Motherboard.

Once that's done, it's into the benchmarking side of things and while today most of our focus will be on how the APU handles those more traditional CPU tasks when a standalone video card is installed, we will of course offer a look at what the onboard GPU capabilities of it are. Saying that, we intend to dive much deeper into the potential of the A-Series APU and its graphics performance in a separate article.

Of course, before we get into the benchmarking side of things we will be covering the overclocking potential to see just what exactly the new APU is capable of when we unleash the fury. First, though, let's dive into the A55 and A75 chipsets to see just how they differ and what exactly they bring to the table from a features point of view.