AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTOffice Performance at 3 GHz
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
Looking at the subtests for Photoscan, Carrizo's biggest hiccup was in the first stage which loads images into memory and attempts to identify and compare similar points in the photograph and its location relative to the object. This requires a significant amount of memory management, and Carrizo loses 17% in the first stage to Kaveri. Stage 4 gets a bump with Carrizo over Kaveri, enough to bring it back over Trinity and Richland, but overall the Carrizo part is still 6% down.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
Similar to Dolphin and 3DPMv2, Carrizo's microarchitectural changes help with CineBench 15 as well. Kaveri appearing on the same level as Trinity/Richland for single threaded is as expected, with the better multithreading handling coming through in the second test.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Typically we expect something like video conversion to be memory intensive, especially with codec decone/encode, however the base microarchitecture gives Carrizo an 8% lead and a 9% lead over Kaveri in our low quality and double UHD tests.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
However, with x265. both Kaveri and Carrizo perform similarly.
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TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
carrizo is gimped because it's a bulldozer product. AMD should have stuck with k10 cores on their APUs.Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Unless they axed BR in favor of non-APU Zen and bring Raven Ridge early 2017.Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
They were nice in 2014.We should have a nice 20nm 768SP APU in 2015 with a full L2 cache Excavator and fully mature 896SP 20nm early this year.
Remember the A8 3870K? That APU was a damn monster only hold back from being godly cause of their sub 3Ghz cpu speed, what we had after?
400SP VLIW5 2011 --> 384 VLIW4 2012 --> 384VLIW4 2013 --> 512SP GCN 2015 --> 512SP GCN 2016
Intel improved way faster (non "e" + edram igp's are near A8 level from being utter trash when the A8 3850 was release).
serendip - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Still not attractive when a cheap Pentium kills it on single-threaded performance, which is what matters in real-world usage. AMD needs to make tablet chips to take the place of Intel Atoms. I'd love to have a 2W TDP APU with double the performance of Atom GMA graphics and similar single-threaded performance.One can dream...
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
AMD powered surface 4 (non pro model) with LTE would be perfect.Too bad AMD abandoned that market. They had a good thing going with their cat cores, but they let that line wither on the vine.
leopard_jumps - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review ! You should include Intel i7 for comparison . Here :http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_x4...
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
The latest microarchitecture from AMD based on the x86 instruction set was given the codename Excavator, using the fourth generation of AMD's Bulldozer cores, called Carrizo cores.' - Can someone explain that to me? Or are we saying these are Excavator Bulldozer Carizos??Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Fourth generation Bulldozer-style cores, named Carrizo.The architecture type/family is Bulldozer, this version/generation is called Excavator, and this specific kind of core is called Carrizo. The mobile version is called Carrizo-L, I think?
If you, or anyone you know, bought an FX-8350, they bought a second-generation Bulldozer product, and it was called Piledriver. Anyone who bought the A10-5800K also bought a second generation Bulldozer product, but it was called Trinity. Both of these were Vishera, since they were second-generation.
Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
No.The 1st APU platform featuring piledriver cores was called Trinity,
The 1st and only desktop FX platform featuring piledriver cores was called Vishera.
Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
This is correct: I confused, and swapped, Piledriver and Vishera.Both the A10-5800K and FX-8350 were Piledriver, but they were Trinity and Vishera, respectively.