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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Chaser - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Yeah lets celebrate another year of 10 or so of AMD's paper launches of incredible CPUs. Bulldozer was awesome dude!Dr. Swag - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yes, the review is finally here! Yes!nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
A review for a chip nobody should buy, because it's much worse than Zen will be.Laxaa - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I wish there was a AM3+ version of Zen for us stuck on that platform. I'm not that interessted in getting a new motherboard(perhaps I should have stuck with Intel instead)Peichen - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
You should have stuck with Intel. I buy into AMD's upgrade CPU, motherboard at different time scheme and is now stuck with a hot old CPU and a quite new motherboard with unreliable RAID controller. Junk the whole system means I toss out a 1.5 years old motherboard. Upgrade the CPU means not much performance increase and when the board's RAID fail I will have to buy AMD again so I won't throw out a new CPU.I wish I pay slightly more for an i3 or i5 and have a reliable media/light-gaming system for 6 years without all the hassle.
just4U - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
well.. then you'd have been stuck with a socket 1156 cpu and no board to go with it.. Intel's gone thru what.. 5 socket changes during the last 6-7 years.. There's something to be said for throwing a 2009 cpu into a 2016 board, and it's easy enough to (at some point..) change over to one of their newer processors in that lineup.It's also a hit/miss on any hardware. While some go the distance lasting a long time .. other's fail and it's not exclusive to either platform. I use processors from both camps. +/- for both. Just depends what your using your system for and what your expecting to get out of it.
pats1111 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I don't know why you're whining about a 1.5 year old mainboard. Typically, your NORMAL computer enthusiast is upgrading everything every 2 to 3 years. You have the same issues with Intel, platform changes occur every 1.5 years, and you're stuck with your "old, hot" processor. Wake up and embrace the technological advancement in front of you...Nagorak - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link
What advancement?artk2219 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link
Ding ding ding, we have the real question. Sure skylake is faster than sandy bridge, but compared to the advancement that 4 years used to make in chip tech, its nothing. An average of 25% IPC increase, most of which you can get back by bumping the clocks 30%, which most sandy bridge chips would do easily. Granted with skylake chip is more efficient, with more features, and better a igp, and blah blah blah. But honestly, for most things you would never notice, and dont even get me started on how pointless DDR4 is currently. But even that atleast will mature with time, unfortunately I'm sure you'll need another new socket to really realize its benefits.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
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