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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The_Countess - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
actually bulldozer on 14nm would have been a completely different beast. it would have allowed AMD to use far more transistors per core while still making it way smaller in terms of size. that would have allowed AMD to create a far wider execution core, eliminating most of its bottlenecks.the high latency cache would probably still means it wouldn't be great for games but for everything else it would be a far more competitive design.
it is also 14nm that will allow zen to make such a massive leap in IPC's as it will be a very wide Core, while still being pretty small, something that just can't be done on 28nm.
bulldozer might not have been the best idea, but being stuck on 32/28nm for so long made all it's issues infinitely worse.
nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
"Well better late than never for Andantech,"There was no point in Adanantech writing this review, because it is a chip for those people too stupid to wait until Zen. Zen is the only thing that matters.
BurntMyBacon - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
@nandnandnand: "There was no point in Adanantech writing this review, because it is a chip for those people too stupid to wait until Zen. Zen is the only thing that matters."Now, because this review exists, people as yet uninformed have concrete data to avoid decisions that might make them look (as you put it) stupid. There is very much a point.
Byte - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Zen will probably be the RX480 in the CPU world. Better performance, still trounced by the competition, but competently priced.looncraz - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
That would be an improvement on the current situation. AMD is pricing their CPUs quite poorly right now.An Intel Celeron G3900 is $50 right now. AMD's closest competition is the A6-7400k - at $55.
Both are dual cores, both are 65W, both have middling (but usable) graphics performance... quite similar at first glance... except the Intel runs at 2.8Ghz and the AMD runs at 3.5Ghz w/ 3.9Ghz turbo and can rather easily exceed 4Ghz when overclocked.
Sounds like AMD should be taking home the gold on that one, until you find that the Celeron is nearly 25% faster in single threaded programs and is ~40% faster in multi-threaded programs... Bad deal going for the AMD... especially since the same board that hosts the Celeron can accept much faster CPUs and the AMD board simply doesn't have notably more powerful options available - you can upgrade to a quad core, but you won't be getting better single threaded performance no matter how hard you try. You might break even around 5Ghz, if you can manage it...
AMD has a 40% clock-speed advantage out the gate, but loses by a large margin.
bananaforscale - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
You know what's funny? The fact that if I want to get a CPU that's faster than the FX-6100 I bought almost 5 years ago I still have to pay more than what I paid for it. Sure, Intel gives better single thread performance but I'd get fewer cores and no overclockability. Then there's the fact that I've been running that original Bulldozer with a 20% OC and it seems more stable than at stock clocks.Comparing single data points tells nobody a thing. Anyway, isn't that A6 in your comparison unlocked? :P
wumpus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
I'm sure you missed an FX-8320 sale, or you really nailed the low point. Unfortunately Intel can match AMD's performance at nearly the same price, and is cutting off AMD's air supply that way.artk2219 - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
Whats crazy is that Microcenter sells the FX 8320E's for $89.99. They also have a motherboard bundle option that you can get for $125 to $170 depending on which board you choose. Theoretically you can get a processor, motherboard, cooler, and memory for the price of a non-K core I5, or just a motherboard and processor for the price of an I3. The unfortunate thing is that not everyone has a microcenter near them, but for the ones that do you can get quite the deal, especially since those 8320E's will easily OC to FX 8350 levels, and more likely 4.2 to 4.6 from a stock clock of 3.2BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
From the leaks plus AMD's vague announcements, all points to AMD's Zen is going to be quite late (right into 2017). Why put use 28nm "placeholder" for AM4 if Zen is due soon? Also Global Foundries only has 14nm LPP which is a low power process. That may mean the frequency is going to be low (just look at the chips made on 14nm LPP like Qualcomm's Snapdragon 820, or even AMD's latest Radeon RX480). Reference http://semiengineering.com/high-performance-and-lo... quote "The “LP” processes are optimized for low power and feature design rules targeted for the lowest leakage, support lower operative voltages, and tend to have the slowest transistors of the three options".wiboonsin - Sunday, November 12, 2017 - link
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