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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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...