AMD's A10-5750M Review, Part 1: The APU and Radeon HD 8650G Performance
by Dustin Sklavos on June 28, 2013 12:00 PM ESTGaming Performance
While I've included the Enthusiast level benchmark results in Bench, it's worth noting that Richland is still nowhere near powerful enough to handle gaming at 1080p and 4xMSAA. AMD's A10-5750M APU has two primary jobs to complete with the IGP isolated: it has to be faster than Trinity and faster than Haswell. The former is easy enough, but Haswell is more of a moving target. The only reprieve AMD seems to be getting on this front is the unusual rarity of GT3-enabled parts in the market.
Interestingly, while Richland is consistently faster than Haswell and Ivy Bridge, often by a healthy margin, it actually trades blows with Trinity. This could be the result of either a difference in drivers or the newer version of Turbo Core being tuned to favor the CPU more aggressively. My reason for suspecting Turbo Core is boosting the CPU more frequently than the GPU is this: Skyrim and StarCraft II are both frequently CPU-limited, and both produce the largest jumps in performance from the preceding generation. Without more Richland-based notebooks to test it's going to be hard to ferret out what's going on, if this is just specific to the GX60 or if mobile Richland's turbo core really does skew more aggressively towards the CPU.
Impressively, Richland is able to produce substantial gains on Trinity in our CPU-bound benchmarks, vaulting Skyrim and StarCraft II into the realm of playability even at our Mainstream settings. Depending on the games you play, Richland could be a major improvement on the last generation.
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FwFred - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
I am very interested to see 28W Haswell GT3 vs. 37W Haswell GT2 vs. 25W/35W Richland, and 17/19W Richland vs 15W Haswell GT2/GT3.Gabik123 - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
Why not boot camp a 2013 macbook air to show Richland performance against a GT3 HD5000?takeship - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
Or just post the Tomb Raider - Value number from that review. ~28fps. This is really a chip in search of a market. Richland can't replace a discrete setup except at the margins, and has lost it's DX11 leg over Intel as well. Battery life was not mentioned for a reason. I'm very curious Dustin, what the performance of the MSI looked like before you populated out the last RAM slot. It seems that most OEMs would rather save the few dollars rather than even deliver baseline performance with these chips. Also, is there any chance at all that the Richland ULV line will get a review from Anandtech sometime in the future?xTRICKYxx - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
Battery Life was omitted because the laptop came with a 7970M. A 100W GPU is going to skew the results.wcg66 - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
The APU is a good niche for AMD. These gaming numbers are pretty impressive IMO given the cost versus the Intel competition. I hope the continue to improve to the point that they can offer midrange discrete graphics card performance in a single chip (say Radeon 7790 levels of performance.)mikk - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
desktop Haswell is a jokeI would say Dustin Sklavos is a joke. Bad reputation for Anandtech.
nathanddrews - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
While a bit harsh for a professional review, it's not wrong.superjim - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
^ thissolarisking - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
Actually I'm glad he put that in there. Somebody's telling it like it is. I was a little surprised Anand seemed as pleased as he was with the first Haswell performance article.claysm - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
I agree. Desktop Haswell is a total snooze. There's no upgrade incentive whatsoever from IVB or even SNB in my opinion.