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 ESTStock Comparison: Real World
For our stock performance comparison, we take our four CPUs at their off-the-shelf frequency and also add in benchmark results from previous reviews for processors that are at a similar price. In the case of the Carrizo core based Athlon X4 845, which had an original MSRP of $70, this means that Intel’s dual core Pentium G3258 at $72 is the main competition. The Pentium comes with integrated graphics and a higher per-clock performance, however the Athlon has four threads to play with, which is two more than the Pentium, meaning the initial examination is a back and forth between the two.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Dolphin historically favors Intel, and all three of our comparison points beat all the AMD processors here. The Athlon X4 845 holds the top spot for the AMD parts however.
WinRAR 5.0.1: 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.
As stated earlier in the review, the X4 845's performance is below that of the other Athlon parts due to the 2MB of L2 cache. It still stays within reasonable striking distance of the Pentium here though.
3D Particle Movement v2
The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. As v2 is fairly new, we are still gathering data and results are currently limited.
As 3DPMv2 is still new, we don't have G3258 results at this time, but we do have i3-6100TE results. Carrizo has an architectural advantage over other AMD microarchitectures, but the speed of the 760K means that it catches up. Both parts are ahead of the Core i3.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing.
Google Octane v2
Both AMD and Intel get similar scores in Octane.
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Meteor2 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Thanks. It's a little more complex than i3/5/7-nxxx, where n increments by one each generation...TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
cariizo cores use the excavator design. excavator is core design, carrizo is the product line.Mokona512 - Saturday, July 16, 2016 - link
Please do this test with the Phenom II series in order to understand the generational IPC changes, and also providing a better point of reference for the Zen CPUs. The Zen claims are based on IPC changes from a CPU series where there was a drop in IPC.Ian Cutress - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
I recently redid a Phenom X6 in Bench, though that's absolute chip perf and not exactly what you're looking for, but it's there :)Elizabeth king - Sunday, July 17, 2016 - link
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I find AMDs low cost offerings really interesting but this just doesn't work for me. The Carrizo on the desktop just seems too limiting. I wish that AMD would update the AM1 line. It is so inexpensive and can support a good number of PCIe lots. For things like a NAS, media pc, or even a Chrome box/low end pc they seem like a really good choice except that they have not been updated in years.silverblue - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
Puma+ is kind of like what Atom did with their earlier Atoms, a more efficient version of Jaguar. I'm surprised that they didn't just lock the turbo and produce these in Jaguar's place, unless it's not cost-effective to do so.The cat cores are dead now, which is a shame as we never got to see how a dual channel memory interface would improve their performance.
Eris_Floralia - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
Another great review. I've translated all articles about Bulldozer architecture into Chinese in order to let people know why it didn't success. I believe that an eight-core Steamroller or Excavator would be competitive, but that never comes out.TheinsanegamerN - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
it wont be competitive, excavator is still far behind intel is performance and in TDP, and cant overclock at all. And it is still 28nm and cache limited.AMD really needs to kill the bulldozer line. It is AMD's netburst.
Eris_Floralia - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
well, with some adjustments, steamroller can still reach high frequency. with additional L3 and larger L2, the problem with excavator may get solved. I mean that latest bulldozer architecture can do better than present piledriver, but the improvement obiviously doesnt worth a try.