The AMD A8-3850 Review: Llano on the Desktop
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 30, 2011 3:11 AM ESTCompute & Video Transcoding Performance
AMD's hope with Fusion is that the GPU transistors will regularly be used for more than just 3D gaming. Today we're still hunting for good uses for GPU compute, but we do have a few benchmarks that we can use to illustrate Llano's GPU compute prowess.
Our compute benchmark comes from Civilization V, which uses DirectCompute to decompress textures on the fly. Civ V includes a sub-benchmark that exclusively tests the speed of their texture decompression algorithm by repeatedly decompressing the textures required for one of the game’s leader scenes. Note that this is a DX11 benchmark and obviously can't run on Intel's Sandy Bridge GPU.
The Radeon HD 6550D performs as expected - it offers performance close to the 5570 and above that of the 6450. Memory bandwidth constraints are less of an issue here apparently as the 6550D delivers 89% of the performance of the 5570.
One area where we can compare the Radeon HD 6550D and Intel's HD Graphics 3000 is in video transcoding performance. For that we turn to ArcSoft's MediaConverter 7 and measure performance transcoding a 15Mbps H.264 encoded 1080p Quantum of Solace rip to a 4Mbps 720p iPhone 4 compatible file:
| Video Transcoding Comparison | ||||
| AMD A8-3850 | Intel Core i3-2105 | |||
| Frames Transcoded per Second | 63.7 fps | 165.2 fps | ||
While the A8-3850 can exploit its GPU cores for transcoding, Intel's Quick Sync continues to be the faster method of transcoding video as we found in our original Sandy Bridge review.
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silverblue - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
So, in other words, you completely skipped over what I posted, especially the comparisons between similarly clocked parts? In that case, you may not recall my saying that comparing to Thuban was unfairly skewed in AMD's favour and that for productivity you'd have to be mad to fork out for a high-end Core 2 Quad that is soundly beaten by Thuban under those very circumstances.I'm not going to spend anymore time on this subject for fear it may cause my brain to dissolve.
silverblue - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
We really don't know how Bulldozer will perform. Superior in some areas, inferior in others, perhaps. Its roots are in the server domain so it probably won't be the be-all-and-end-all of desktop performance. Should handily thrash Phenom II though.That is, if they stop pushing it backwards... if they do it anymore we may as well wait for Enhanced Bulldozer. :/ I can only truly see Bulldozer being a 9-12 month stop gap before that appears, and as we know, Trinity is going to use the Enhanced cores instead of first generation Bulldozer cores, so it remains to be seen how long a shelf life the product will have.
duploxxx - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Ivy Bridge before buldozer, oh man you really have no idea about roadmaps...Server and desktop will be there long time before Ivy, if they don't hurry with Ivy even Trinity will be ready to be launched.
j_iggga - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Single and double threaded performance is most important for games.Bulldozer has no chance in that regard. The only hope Bulldozer has is that it outperforms a quad core Intel CPU with its 8 cores in a fully multithreaded application.
L. - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
GPU's are most important for games, that and a CPU that can feed your GPU's ;)More and more stuff is using 4+ threads, I'd be surprised if the next benchmark from Crytek isn't vastly multithreaded on the CPU side.
We'll see anyway, but the design choices AMD made for Bulldozer are definitely good, as were their multicore designs that Intel quickly copied - for the best.
frozentundra123456 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Are you kidding me??? If Bulldozer is so great why do they keep having delay after delay and are showing no performance figures??HangFire - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 - link
Given the number of Nocona CPU's Intel sold- as evidenced by the huge number showing up on the secondary market right now- Intel server shipments won't die even if they have an inferior product (again).The faithful will buy on.
L., you seem to be betting on a jump for Bulldozer that will exceed that of C2D over Netburst. I'm not sure that's even possible. C2D only lacked a built-in memory controller, and that has been fixed. I'll be happy if BD even matches Nehalem in core instruction processing efficiency.
But I agree the more progress AMD makes, the better the market is for all of us, no matter which we buy.
frozentundra123456 - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
totally agree with your post. Just a weak gpu tacked on to ancient CPU architecture that could easily be beaten by a 50.00 discrete GPU in the desktop.I can see a place for this chip in a laptop where power savings is important and it is not possible to add a GPU, but for the desktop, I really dont see a place for it.
And I agree that Bulldozer is late to the game and may not perform like the AMD fanboys claim. AMD talks a good game, but so far they have not been able to back it up in the CPU area.
jgarcows - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Can you use OpenCL with the Llano GPU? If so, how does it perform for bitcoin mining?JarredWalton - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Yes, Llano fully supports OpenCL -- it's basically a 5570 with slightly lower core clocks and less memory bandwidth (because it's shared). On a laptop, Llano is roughly half the performance of a desktop 5570 (around 40Mhash/s). The desktop chip should be about 40%-50% faster, depending on how much the memory bandwidth comes into play. But 60Mhash/s is nothing compared to a good GPU. Power would be around 60-70W for the entire system for something like 1Mhash/W. Stick a 5870 GPU into a computer and you're looking at around 400Mhash/s and a power draw of roughly 250W -- or 1.6Mhash/W.In short: for bitcoin mining you're far better off with a good dGPU. But hey, Llano's IGP is probably twice as fast as CPU mining with a quad-core Sandy Bridge.