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 ESTGrand Theft Auto V at 3 GHz
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Grand Theft Auto Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Lowest |
| ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3 | |||
| Medium GPU | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB | 1920x1080 | Very High |
| MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G | |||
| High GPU | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB | 1920x1080 | Very High |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
If we look purely at the average frame rates first, the same pattern as the other tests shows here. Carrizo sits between Kaveri and Trinity, anywhere from 3-7% behind Kaveri.
![Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS R7 240 DDR3 2GB ($70) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82553.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on MSI R9 285 Gaming 2GB ($240) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82561.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82571.png)
![Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560) [Under 60 FPS]](https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10436/82591.png)
If we compare the time spent under 60 FPS, again Kaveri takes the lead over Carrizo. The low end GPU is interesting, showing a good trend towards the newer microarchitectures, but still in favor of Kaveri with 4 MB of L2 cache over Carrizo with 2 MB of L2.
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artk2219 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
They had too many parts that weren't hitting their mobile TDP's, or they just bakes too many chips than was needed on the mobile side. Either way, why let them sit in a warehouse or toss them at a loss, when for a very smalla mount you can just throw them into your standard desktop package and make some extra sales.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Carrizo and kaveri did not use hypertransport. They would have to re-engineer their chip to work on AM3+, and to be frank, the AM3+ market is just too small to justify the tiny margins they would get.That money is better spent on getting zen out of the door.
neblogai - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Why invest into upgrading bad product, when you can sell the same Bulldozer cores till Zen comes? And this Carriso Athlon is just a by-product of a mobile part and can only be sold for desktop. It all makes sense financially. By the way, new Bristol Ridge AMD 15W APUs are really nice and competitive, but laptop manufacturers are failing again- for example, HP Envy x360 comes with FX-9800P APU- again in single channel memory memory configuration, also with HDD installed and without possibility to use SSD. https://hardforum.com/threads/unboxing-1st-impress...TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
AMD doesnt take the mobile market seriously. If they did, they would be partnering up with the likes of MSI or clevo to produce a good laptop line for their APUs, or at the very least make dual channel a strict requirement.The_Countess - Tuesday, July 19, 2016 - link
AMD unfortunately can't demand much of anything from OEM's currently.and as intel still has a defacto monopoly no OEM wants to piss of intel by making a better AMD laptop.
nathanddrews - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
So... will there ever be a desktop Carrizo w/IGP? Much of the hype around Carrizo was focused on its very low power video playback, including H.265 hardware encode/decode.stardude82 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Isn't that what Bristol Ridge is? But on the new AM3 socket.Arnulf - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
AM4.Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Why not bang 8 of these cores into a 125w TDP and make it for FM2+ or AM3+? Finally an upgrade for Piledriver on AM3KAlmquist - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
If you compare the Athlon 845 with the FX-4350 (link below), the Athlon wins on some benchmarks and loses on others. The Athlon has better IPC, but the FX has a faster clock and a 3rd level cache, leaving no clear-cut winner. If we added an L3 cache to the Athlon chip, that would speed it up, but not by a lot. In other words, Excavator is a big improvement over Piledriver in terms of performance per watt, but not much in terms of absolute performance. An Excavator based FX chip (by which I mean a chip with 8 Excavator cores and 8 MB of L3 cache) would probably be a very marginal improvement over the existing FX lineup at stock frequency, and would have less overclocking potential. I can see why AMD decided not to spend the resources to develop such a chip.http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1684?vs=127...