AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTPower Consumption
Intel has a full process node advantage when you compare Ivy Bridge and Trinity, as a result of that plus an architectural efficiency advantage you just get much better power consumption from the Core i3 than you do with Trinity. Idle power is very good but under heavy CPU load Trinity consumes considerably more power. You're basically looking at quad-core Ivy Bridge levels of power usage under load but performance closer to that of a dual-core Ivy Bridge. AMD really needs a lot of design level efficiency improvements to get power consumption under control. Compared to Llano, Trinity is a bit more efficient it seems so there's an actual improvement there.
Of course on the processor graphics side the story is much closer with Trinity being a bit more power hungry than Ivy Bridge, but not nearly by this margin.
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delirious7 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
also forgot to mention that one ivy bridge pentium has been out for a while now. the G2120. it is retailing for $100 on newegg.bill4 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
"Can easily upgrade down the line" pretty much misses the point imo.Theoretically, this thing might be for casuals who are never going to upgrade, or people who need to pinch every last penny, or people who want a general purpose machine that isn't a total dog when they wanna game now and again, etc.
LancerVI - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
THIS^^^I agree 100%. Trinity is perfect for a great kids/wife general use computer. Websurfing and minecraft or wizard 101.
As long as they stay off my machine, we're good!
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Yes, but you shouldn't expect people who didn't even read the conclusion to the article to pay any attention to what you have to say here. :(parkerm35 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
$70 will get you a nice GT630 which is slower than the 7660D! And then when it comes to threaded tasks, you will be left waiting an eternity. Nice plan....ac2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Actually I said "That puts a $50 saving towards...", I certainly didn't say that would be the total price!Highly threaded integer tasks are a rarity for me so...
CaptainDoug - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
why'd you pick a GT630? there's a 6670 for $65 that's roughly twice as powerful as the GT630. It would end up being like 35% more powerful than a 7660D.Jamahl - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Did you see how far the Pentium was behind in multi threading? It will not beat the A10 in gaming in most cases but feel free to waste money on a dual core if you want.mattlach - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Multithreading is still mostly irrelevant in most Games.Yes, there are a couple of games that support it pretty well well (Battlefield 3, Civilization 5) but the vast majority of games out there are still of the "load one core 100% and load a second (and possibly third) core 15-20%" variety.
In these circumstances two fast cores are going to beat 4, 6 or 8 slow cores almost every time.
It's not about IPC, and its not about clock speed. It's about the combination of the two. Per core performance is still king, and I don't think this is going to change any time soon due to the difficulties involved in writing good multithreaded code, and Amdahls law.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law )
bji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Yeah, but aren't *PC's* irrelevant in most Games?