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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drothgery - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
That was also a world where $3000 desktops were in "reasonable high-end" space, not "if you don't have a serious business case where you're maxing out the resources on this thing -- and you probably don't -- only buy it if you've got more money than sense" space.AMD was only a viable competitor to Intel from the trailing end of the P3 era to the Core 2 launch. If Intel was going to jack up their prices when AMD stopped being a viable competitor, they've certainly taken their time at it. They released a dominant product 7 years ago, have only increased and broadened their performance lead, and still aren't doing it.
TerdFerguson - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - link
I haven't forgotten those heady socket 7 days in the least. As I recall, one could buy x86 chips from IBM, Cyrix, AMD, and others. The $2000+ machines you're talking about were perhaps not marketed as "extreme", but they certainly performed remarkably well compared to the nearly as expensive 486 machines from Intel and others that they slowly replaced. Fast-forward 20 years, and we're down to two manufacturers and CPU prices are pretty much at an all time low. So, where's the correlation? There, meanwhile, are a dozen different motherboard manufacturers and prices have been rising like mad during that same time period. Again, where's the correlation?If having a large number of vendors automatically precluded ludicrous pricing, there'd be no such thing as price fixing.
mitcoes - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
I agree and I always miss a Price/Performance note at benchmarks. Perhaps with a second bar.i7 vs A8 / A10 for gaming Price / performance is a no brain choice
And all we know that gaming is almost the only thing that requires real desktop performance as almost every other desktop common app will run well at almost any actual CPU+GPU
johnny_boy - Saturday, June 29, 2013 - link
I would have liked to have seen the (a) system running dual channel 1866 memory, since that would have offered an additional small boost to graphics performance. I'm surprised how much this evolutionary development over Trinity results in significant performance gains. Waiting for Kaveri now.dineshramdin - Sunday, June 30, 2013 - link
For me, I need something with a high end APU…. I sometimes feel its irritating to get ur CPU occupied with some unnecessary game console… I am not gonna buy this.mikato - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link
Error-"PCMark 7 is always going to respond primarily to the storage system, so the GX60's SSD takes a bath." page 2.I thought at the GX60 didn't have an SSD and that's why it takes a bath. Justin needs to take a bath actually since I keep hearing about all this bathing of computer hardware lately from him.
medi02 - Wednesday, July 24, 2013 - link
It's hard to get this where this conclusion is coming from:As Intel's HD in this very article is roughly 2 times slower that AMD's APUs. (while gap between CPU's is about 1.5)
This means that if you occasionally play games you should avoid Intel's notebooks without dedicated graphic cards, while you're fine with AMD's without. And I have yet to find an app that I would run on a notebook, besides games, that would seriously benefit from a faster CPU.
PsychoticFlamez - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Ok let me just say something all these sites say the new cpu is the same as trinitys. but its not richland has improved thier cpu, and intergrated gpu so much that its at a comparason. to your mid range desktop. I would know I upgraded not to long ago and this spd increase is about 60+fos in my games. P.S. I do not have a dedicated video card in my computer.webcat62 - Tuesday, September 24, 2013 - link
I just bought a HP AMD A10 laptop 2.5ghz cpu with 8gb of ram 1TB hard drive ATI Radeon 2500 with 768 memory, 8mb of of L2 cache, blutooth, multiple dvd writer usb 3.0 x2 usb 2.0 glossy screen. 5 hour battery life, hdmi port 10x card reader, loaded with windows 8. I bought it at Future shop, there were only 10 units available for $399.00 + tax= $480.00 This laptop retails on the web between $650 to $700 How is that for a great bargain, IT does not overheat, I leave it on all day, i play the most demanding games at medium resolution. For this price it does not get any better.webcat62
UtilityMax - Thursday, December 26, 2013 - link
AMD needs to bring something new to mobile APU market ASAP. If this APU was compared to a portable with Intel's 35watt Haswell processor with HD4600 or even HD4000 graphics, the massive lead of the APU in 3D games would disappear. I mean, A10 may still be a little faster, but not by a truly significant margin. At best, it competes with Haswell i3, which will be priced aggressively, considering Haswell i5 portables can go for $600 or less.