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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Khato - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Yes there is. Mobile is the primary market for GT3e - there are 3 mobile products with Iris Pro 5200 and only 1 desktop product.kyuu - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Apologies. I actually missed that 47W Haswells were considered "mobile" when I read about it the first time. Still, given the price and TDP disparity, I don't think comparing Iris Pro to Richland is terribly interesting.FwFred - Friday, June 28, 2013 - link
I sure hope 'Part 2' had battery life... an essential part of any mobile CPU review.Frenetic Pony - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
WE never needed Bulldozer to begin with. AMD shot itself in the face with Bulldozer, just after its former CEO hoodwinked the shareholders that stuck with AMD and the company itself by making off with the manufacturing arm in the way of Global Foundries just as he was simultaneously making the entire thing a viable, moneymaking business.WE need Bulldozer gone with, a long time ago. AMD, and thus us, needs a new much less power hungry architecture that can fit into a SOC like structure on the low end and makes Intel stop piddling around on the high TDP end. But unless both Kabini and the PS4/Xbone do very well this holiday season, AMD might not get a chance to produce that.
Still, maybe Qualcomm will be up for it. I could see them even buying out the GPU division if AMD goes under. And their updates Krait this year are perfectly competitive with ARM's new Cortex a15 AND Apple's Swift. Maybe they can just keep getting better. Start to put pressure on Intel from the bottom of the power scale up.
torp - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
But where are the notebooks with *just* a Richland and no discrete graphics?If I get an A10 I'll get it for the 'good enough' performance at a low price using just the integrated GPU.
Does anyone make such a notebook, preferably that's not a piece of crap, build quality wise?
Kalelovil - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
"In this reviewer's opinion, 35W isn't the target, it's the halo. 15W-17W is the target, and while AMD has offerings at those TDPs, they're woefully uncompetitive."True, their 17W offerings are disappointing, but AMD has the 19W A8-5545M and 25W A10-5745M which offer reasonable specifications (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6979/2013-amd-elite-...
Any chance you will be having systems using either of those in for review?
Kalelovil - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Corrected link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6979/2013-amd-elite-...TerdFerguson - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
All the "we need AMD" shtick is getting very long in the tooth. Maybe it wouldn't be so offensive if authors were able to provide some scholarly references to back up the claims that consumers are going to really be hurt by AMDs failure to compete. There are certainly plenty of industries with many vendors where competition isn't a huge factor in pricing, even in the tech sector. I'm nowhere near convinced that AMD should somehow derive credit for Intel's progress, and the baseless whining in this article has done nothing to convince me otherwise.kyuu - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
... I generally dislike being so blunt, but: wow, that's clueless even for someone who's name is "Terd".Pneumothorax - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
Wow... Somebody forgets the 'good ol days' of the 90's when Intel basically completely owned the x86 market and routinely released their latest chips always around $900. For example the original Pentium in the 'cheaper' 60mhz variant was released in 1993 at $847. And no that was not an 'extreme edition' either. In today's dollars it's close to $1400. That is the x86 world without a viable competitor to greedy Intel.