AMD's A10-5750M Review, Part 1: The APU and Radeon HD 8650G Performance
by Dustin Sklavos on June 28, 2013 12:00 PM ESTConclusion: Surprisingly Potent Refresh
Without getting into the nitty gritty of the MSI GX60 that houses our review APU, AMD's A10-5750M, it seems like AMD's new APU is a net victory...with some caveats.
I imagine at the time of Richland's development, graphics performance wasn't a huge concern. With Haswell, that performance target shifts a little bit, but as long as we're not heavily CPU-bound, AMD continues to offer superior mobile graphics. Richland seems to be most aggressively focused on shoring up the primary weakness of AMD's existing architecture: the CPU itself. Piledriver was a decent improvement on Bulldozer and, ironically, a mild one on Llano, but it's nowhere near enough. Bumped up clock speeds and improved turbo help close the gap at least a little bit, but we're still dealing with 35W AMD APUs struggling to hit the same performance levels at 15-17W Intel chips.
Arguably more impressive is that this refinement was possible at all. AMD was able to take Trinity, tune the silicon ever so slightly, and extract a healthy gain in CPU performance from it. Graphics performance seems to have held flat from Trinity, but an essentially free performance boost on the CPU is welcome.
I am, however, forced to address a few elephants in the room that are getting glossed over. As consumers, we need AMD to succeed. Lack of competition is showing in a major way: desktop Haswell is a joke, Haswell's GT2 IGP is a minor improvement yet promises to be the most common one in Intel's lineup, and Intel seems to be planning to mostly coast on Haswell for two years while focusing on Atom's successor.
Yet the ugly truth about Richland and Trinity before them is that these reviews are covering the fastest models available. A8 chips lose a third of their GPU hardware across the board, and A6 chips lose another third. If you do some quick and dirty math, that means that anything below an A10 is going to be almost directly inferior to Haswell or Ivy Bridge. Graphics performance will at best be slightly above parity, while CPU performance takes a bath.
The other problem is that AMD is still targeting 35W as the mainstream TDP, but that's a target that's actually quietly shifted in the marketplace. This isn't 2008 anymore and Intel isn't charging a fat premium for its low-voltage hardware. The market that needs 35W CPUs is shrinking, being devoured at the low side by tablets and systems with ULV CPUs that still offer enough performance to handle the majority of tasks end users will need them for. And anyone who needs more performance than that can simply make the jump to a system with a quad-core Intel CPU that has more muscle. 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.
AMD doesn't just need Kaveri. We need Kaveri. We need the Steamroller architecture update, and we need the graphics cores to switch over to GCN from VLIW4. Hopefully AMD will be able to produce a Kaveri part that has a fighting chance against Intel at 15W/17W, since Kabini and Temash are destined for smaller form factors. For now, the Richland A10-5750M is a good option and a solid offering for a refresh, but I don't think anyone can rely on it as a stopgap for too much longer.
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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.