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: Legacy Benchmarks
Some of our legacy benchmarks have followed AnandTech for over a decade, showing how performance changes when the code bases stay the same in that period. Some of this software is still in common use today.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
Despite 3DPM v1's coding issues, the multithreaded result is a lot closer than I had originally expected.
Cinebench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
In both CineBench instances we see the high IPC of the Pentium take a 33-50% lead, whereas moving to multi-threaded puts the X4 845 firmly in the driving seat.
POV-Ray 3.7
POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multithreaded benchmark.
POV-Ray fully exploints all the threads in the system, and the latest AMD microarchitecture helps here as well, pushing the X4 845 beyond the other AMD CPUs in this test and comfortably over the Pentium and low-power Core i3 parts.
TrueCrypt 7.1
Before its discontinuation, TrueCrypt was a popular tool for WindowsXP to offer software encryption to a file system. The almost latest version, 7.1, is still widely used however the developers have stopped supporting it since the introduction of encrypted disk support in Windows 8/7/Vista from 5/2014, and as such any new security issues are unfixed.
The Pentium lacks AES acceleration, which is available on Core i3 parts and up, which explains the Pentium's low performance here. The Carrizo microarchitecture pushes the 65W part ahead of all the other 95W/100W/125W parts.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
7-zip
7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results.
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mrdude - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Fantastic work, Ian. Now if AMD put half as much work into their uArchs as you did into reviewing them, we might finally get somewhere =PGeranium - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Ian,Exynos 7420 and Apple A9 is built on Samsang's 14nm LPE. Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820 is built on 14nm LPP.
Vlad_Da_Great - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
AMD CPU R&D has been outsourced pretty much close to an 1 year ago. Even Jim Keller left before anything(silicon) was remotely close to be released. AMD has submitted on the CPU front, and now with the another failure from the RX 480 power fiasco it seems in the GPU segment too. ZEN is just a myth for the small minded amoebas. The closest they can come to is Haswell, even in some benchmarks they will be far behind.Intel has reported times in many improvement over the 4/5y spam CPU's. AMD can barely get 30% and in some synthetic benchmarks they are below something was produced/developed half a decade ago.
TheinsanegamerN - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
You have sources for your ludicrous claims?wumpus - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
Zen tapped out. Thus the drawdown. But if you think Zen will compare as well to Intel silicon as the 480 does to the 1060, remember that Intel is still hand-laying out the transistors and AMD is using autorouters.Hopefully AMD will at least be able to get back to producing "the cheap stuff', but that is their best hope. They've pretty much surrendered.
Calculatron - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Great article, overall! I am glad to see someone finally review the product.I was hoping, however, that you would come across this strange "throttling" issue that this CPU seems to have while playing certain games (not all games, just certain ones). Some people have started threads on Tom's Hardware, and I started one on AMD's own forums:
https://community.amd.com/thread/198618
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3054721/ath...
DominionSeraph - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yeesh, the barest overclock physically degrades the processor? This likely means it's degrading at stock as they've pushed a 35W part to 65W and beyond.Sherlock - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
/rantWho's your web-designer Anandtech - seriously - I see a big banner at the top & two big ads on the left & right of the page. I am so pissed by the design - I actually calculated the pixel count - only 24% of the screen is dedicated to content - excluding the large Anandtech logo & the menu bars - 10% for the screen is content - please don't kill the site with such crap
rant/
Also - "For clarity, hand was from AMD but not Lisa Su's" :)
DominionSeraph - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
A narrow column is more readable. Who cares what's on the sides?The_Assimilator - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link
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