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AMD has a strong naming system for products. The numbers have meanings and partners are not allowed to make up new numbers. There are changes coming to this system we hear.
The new naming system for graphics with second generation Fusion (Llano) will bring a lot of new numbers to the market. It is certainly a different strategy and will get gamers and PC builders talking for a long time.
It is clear that when you put 2 GPUs together then performance will change. Should that change get a new number though? This is a good question. With normal graphic cards, it makes sense for customers to see that they will get two cards so we say Radeon HD 6850 CrossFire for example. The word CrossFire tells you that you have the two cards inside. So what if you put a low/mid card into a PC with Llano Fusion processor?
If the card is a 6450, then help from Llano might add quite a lot to the scores.
The system only has one card, but it is now say 60% faster, so what can you call it to make sense when selling the PC? Maybe it could be 6470 or 6495? Definitely you need to say something in the description, because game performance has jumped up a lot and it would be stupid to stay quiet about such a feature.
When we hear if this is 100% confirmed then you will know too. In meantime here is picture of Llano sample seen first on KitGuru.
KitGuru says: This has been brewing for a long time. When AMD first launched CrossFire mainboards, journalists across the world were asking if the onboard GPU could work in conjunction with add in cards. The problem then was driver-related. With DX9 onboard and DX10 added, there was no way to make the two products communicate. Now that Microsoft has pushed DirectX 12 out to Windows 9, we will have DX11/11.1 onboard graphics for sometime to come, so this makes perfect sense. Great news for the technology press – watching these combo-products being described in advertising by system builders will cause plenty of tension.
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