AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70

Office 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.