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 ESTOffice Performance at 3 GHz
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Agisoft Photoscan – 2D to 3D Image Manipulation: link
Agisoft Photoscan 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.
Looking at the subtests for Photoscan, Carrizo's biggest hiccup was in the first stage which loads images into memory and attempts to identify and compare similar points in the photograph and its location relative to the object. This requires a significant amount of memory management, and Carrizo loses 17% in the first stage to Kaveri. Stage 4 gets a bump with Carrizo over Kaveri, enough to bring it back over Trinity and Richland, but overall the Carrizo part is still 6% down.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a benchmark based around Cinema 4D, and is fairly well known among enthusiasts for stressing the CPU for a provided workload. Results are given as a score, where higher is better.
Similar to Dolphin and 3DPMv2, Carrizo's microarchitectural changes help with CineBench 15 as well. Kaveri appearing on the same level as Trinity/Richland for single threaded is as expected, with the better multithreading handling coming through in the second test.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Typically we expect something like video conversion to be memory intensive, especially with codec decone/encode, however the base microarchitecture gives Carrizo an 8% lead and a 9% lead over Kaveri in our low quality and double UHD tests.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
However, with x265. both Kaveri and Carrizo perform similarly.
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owan - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
A nice little pop over the previous generation and its still woeful compared to its direct competition from intel. I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product, Intel has a complete stranglehold on the mobile market and AMD's design wins are few and far between. Surely some of the architectural changes could have been rolled into a replacement for their incredibly stale AM3+ products, which have by now become completely irrelevant. I mean, we all know Zen is coming (and I hope its good) but something in the meantime would probably have done more for their mind share than a mobile part.AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
"I wonder why AMD even bothered with this product"Yeah, pretty much what I've been thinking with AMD's CPU launches for a while now. *Surely* they can't be making money on their CPUs compared to how much they spend on researching, testing, producing and then marketing them?
(Unless there's a market that's low-profile in the media but is lucrative for AMD - perhaps the low budget market in Asia?)
patel21 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
I'm from Asia, India. And here too people are smart enough to ignore AMD even in really low budget systems. And really we still have a complete PC with P4 or C2D easily available around 100$jospoortvliet - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Compared to a p4 these amd cpu's are amazing... remember that in the time of the P4, amd made the faster more power efficient cpu's.mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
P4 or C2D are worse than every current AMD cpus on the market .... in one or another aspect.BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
It is called "progress". Both Intel Pentium4 and Intel Core 2 Duo are already out of production years ago. Also it was Intel's Core 2 Duo that blew away AMD back into the stone age a decade ago, and since then AMD has never recovered. AMD's QuadFather FX and Barcelona (especially the TLB bugged ones) are the worst CPUs of their era (quite often was much slower than previous generation overall).bananaforscale - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
P4? Ew. :P (I have a P4D in the other room, it's not really preferable to anything. That if anything is a dead end.)nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
AMD is good in laptops. It will be better when Zen is out. Zen on the desktop may be good depending on the benchmarks and price.mr_tawan - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
I'm from Asia, Thailand. AFAIK AMD is pretty popular among internet cafe' (or should I say... game center instead ?).BlueBlazer - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Over here, hardly see AMD being used in internet cafes.