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: Office Performance
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.
The higher IPC of the Pentium offsets the extra threads provided by the X4 845, which lags behind the other Athlons due to its reduced L2 cache size.
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.
For CineBench, we see the four threads of the X4 845 in action, easily pushing a strong advantage over the Pentium in the multithreaded test. However, the Pentium does pull a 33% increase in the single threaded test due to its higher IPC.
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.
The Athlon X4 845 rules the roost in our HandBrake tests, showing what the latest AMD microarchitecture and four threads can do.
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.
This also translates through to x265, where the dual core Pentium is lacking the ability to exploit more parallelism.
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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...