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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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.