AMD Kaveri Review: A8-7600 and A10-7850K Tested
by Ian Cutress & Rahul Garg on January 14, 2014 8:00 AM ESTCPU Performance
I often make a big song and dance about real world benchmarks being the main focus of a reviewer. Synthetics often stress parts of the CPU and distort advantages that a CPU might have and thus not affect you or me in the same manner when using the machine normally. For 2014 I have updated my usual benchmarking set, to include more video encoding and an image converter that takes 2D images and performs algorithms to convert the data into a 3D model. Some 2013 benchmarks are still here, showing what can be done, and to bring parity to previous CPU reviews, some synthetics are also included.
Agisoft Photoscan v1.0 - link
Our new main benchmark to AnandTech is provided by Agisoft. Their Photoscan software creates 3D models from 2D images, a process which is very computationally expensive. The algorithm is split into four distinct phases, and different phases of the model reconstruction require either fast memory, fast IPC, more cores, or even OpenCL compute devices to hand. Agisoft supplied us with a special version of the software to script the process, where we take 50 images of a stately home and convert it into a medium quality model. This benchmark typically takes around 15-20 minutes on a high end PC on the CPU alone, with GPUs reducing the time.
AMD suffers in overall time due to the lack of full-blooded cores and the reliance on single threaded performance in certain parts of the algorithm.
The second stage of the benchmark can be accelerated by the IGP of an APU, and as a result we can see the power of the high end APUs for this work can outshine any CPU we tested today. This is really the promise of HSA, it's just going to take a while to get there for most apps.
3D Particle Movement - link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
AMD is still suffering a lack of FP performance in our 3DPM benchmark.
WinRAR 5.01 - link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
WinRAR loves IPC from the high end Intel chips, but even against the older i5-2500K there is still a deficit. The 45W Kaveri APU however is within fighting distance of its main rival.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9 - link
Similarly to WinRAR, the FastStone test us updated for 2014 to the latest version. FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and thus single threaded performance is often the winner.
FastStone wants single threaded performance, so Intel wins here again.
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Fox5 - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Where are the Iris Pro results in CLBenchmark? Where are the CPU results of CLBenchmark; is the GPU faster than Haswell's AVX2? Where's the rest of the compute benchmarks, the area that Kaveri is supposed to shine in?JDG1980 - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Incidentally, will HTPC be covered in a different review? MadVR could be a good use case for Kaveri, as it requires quite a bit of shader power but isn't that memory bandwidth intensive.beomagi - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Per charts, Why are 100W APUs slower in 1280x1024 than at higher resolutions??beomagi - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Also, 45W APUs are faster? Are the benchmarks different? The charts only mention resolution.beomagi - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Nevermind - I now see this is as a percent difference compared to the slower chip - the title said FPS and that threw me off.Ignore! :D
Dribble - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Call me cynical but it's just the same as the previous gen. If you want a small form factor extreme budget gaming box these will be pretty good. For the rest of the world if you don't care about games you'd do better going Intel, and if you do intel + a proper graphics card.As with previous gen it comes with a load of marketing slide advantages, which if previous gen are anything to go by will come to nothing - I don't see the current range of AMD machines blowing away intel machines with opencl/stream/fusion/whatever - and that was what was on the previous set of marketing slides.
I always thought their best bet was mobile - but these days that markets getting really tough now for AMD as Intel have just spent the last few years optimising power usage.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
The biggest elephant in the room is that very few average people (those who don't visit this web site) care for playing games on laptops (or even desktops, considering the consoles). Once you ignore the gaming performance, the A10 APU effectively has the performance of Core i3, but at a high price. A Fry's or Best Buy "special" laptop with Core i3 can cost as low as $400 or less. But the A10 laptops cost around $500. Intel's pricing is pretty aggressive on the low end IMHO.jimjamjamie - Thursday, January 16, 2014 - link
Not just in laptops, the price/performance ratio of the dual-core Pentiums is extremely good - the Haswell-based Pentium G3220 (3GHz dual core, 3.5MB cache) is available in the UK for just over £40, which is excellent value.Nagorak - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
Yes, the issue is that the hybridization of CPU/GPU really provides no advantages. For someone actually playing games the GPU is still too weak and they'd be better off with a discrete card. For someone not playing games the quality of the integrated GPU doesn't matter.Maybe I'm wrong and there are tons of people out there playing games at ~30 FPS with low settings. I just don't see why someone who wants to play games wouldn't try to cough up an extra $100 for a discrete GPU, and if you don't play games then even Intel's older HD GPUs are fine.
mikato - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
*For someone actually playing [newer 3D intensive] games the GPU is still too weak and they'd be better off with a discrete card. Yep*For someone actually playing [older or lighter] games the GPU is good enough and you end up with a cheaper overall package without needing a discrete card.
*For someone not playing games, they will benefit big time from HSA eventually. Not there yet and depends on the software.
There are probably more people in the last two categories if you think about it. AMD isn't for us gamers right now unfortunately. And it's going to take a while for adoption for HSA to bring in the third category of people.