AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70
by Ian Cutress on July 14, 2016 9:00 AM ESTLinux Performance at 3 GHz
Built around several freely available benchmarks for Linux, Linux-Bench is a project spearheaded by Patrick at ServeTheHome to streamline about a dozen of these tests in a single neat package run via a set of three commands using an Ubuntu 11.04 LiveCD. These tests include fluid dynamics used by NASA, ray-tracing, OpenSSL, molecular modeling, and a scalable data structure server for web deployments. We run Linux-Bench and have chosen to report a select few of the tests that rely on CPU and DRAM speed.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
C-Ray: link
C-Ray is a simple ray-tracing program that focuses almost exclusively on processor performance rather than DRAM access. The test in Linux-Bench renders a heavy complex scene offering a large scalable scenario.
C-ray, while slowly fading in importance as a benchmark, shows a slight gain here for Kaveri despite the lack of DRAM accesses this benchmark uses. There may however still be some L2 use.
NAMD, Scalable Molecular Dynamics: link
Developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NAMD is a set of parallel molecular dynamics codes for extreme parallelization up to and beyond 200,000 cores. The reference paper detailing NAMD has over 4000 citations, and our testing runs a small simulation where the calculation steps per unit time is the output vector.
NAMD shows a small benefit for Kaveri here, with all three processors showing a +16% gain minimum over Trinity.
NPB, Fluid Dynamics: link
Aside from LINPACK, there are many other ways to benchmark supercomputers in terms of how effective they are for various types of mathematical processes. The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a set of small programs originally designed for NASA to test their supercomputers in terms of fluid dynamics simulations, useful for airflow reactions and design.
Redis: link
Many of the online applications rely on key-value caches and data structure servers to operate. Redis is an open-source, scalable web technology with a strong developer base, but also relies heavily on memory bandwidth as well as CPU performance.
The 2MB of L2 cache, compared to the 4MB of the other parts, hurts Carrizo here.
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TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
carrizo is gimped because it's a bulldozer product. AMD should have stuck with k10 cores on their APUs.Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Unless they axed BR in favor of non-APU Zen and bring Raven Ridge early 2017.Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
They were nice in 2014.We should have a nice 20nm 768SP APU in 2015 with a full L2 cache Excavator and fully mature 896SP 20nm early this year.
Remember the A8 3870K? That APU was a damn monster only hold back from being godly cause of their sub 3Ghz cpu speed, what we had after?
400SP VLIW5 2011 --> 384 VLIW4 2012 --> 384VLIW4 2013 --> 512SP GCN 2015 --> 512SP GCN 2016
Intel improved way faster (non "e" + edram igp's are near A8 level from being utter trash when the A8 3850 was release).
serendip - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Still not attractive when a cheap Pentium kills it on single-threaded performance, which is what matters in real-world usage. AMD needs to make tablet chips to take the place of Intel Atoms. I'd love to have a 2W TDP APU with double the performance of Atom GMA graphics and similar single-threaded performance.One can dream...
TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
AMD powered surface 4 (non pro model) with LTE would be perfect.Too bad AMD abandoned that market. They had a good thing going with their cat cores, but they let that line wither on the vine.
leopard_jumps - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review ! You should include Intel i7 for comparison . Here :http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_athlon_x4...
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
The latest microarchitecture from AMD based on the x86 instruction set was given the codename Excavator, using the fourth generation of AMD's Bulldozer cores, called Carrizo cores.' - Can someone explain that to me? Or are we saying these are Excavator Bulldozer Carizos??Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Fourth generation Bulldozer-style cores, named Carrizo.The architecture type/family is Bulldozer, this version/generation is called Excavator, and this specific kind of core is called Carrizo. The mobile version is called Carrizo-L, I think?
If you, or anyone you know, bought an FX-8350, they bought a second-generation Bulldozer product, and it was called Piledriver. Anyone who bought the A10-5800K also bought a second generation Bulldozer product, but it was called Trinity. Both of these were Vishera, since they were second-generation.
Lolimaster - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
No.The 1st APU platform featuring piledriver cores was called Trinity,
The 1st and only desktop FX platform featuring piledriver cores was called Vishera.
Calculatron - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
This is correct: I confused, and swapped, Piledriver and Vishera.Both the A10-5800K and FX-8350 were Piledriver, but they were Trinity and Vishera, respectively.