The Llano Desktop Preview: AMD A8-3850 CPU & GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Pretty Much an Athlon II X4
As we found in our look at mobile Llano, the A8 isn't impressive as a general purpose x86 microprocessor. In general the chip is somewhat faster than the Athlon II X4 635 and I'd say it performs more like a 645 based on the numbers I've seen here. Again, nothing to be impressed by but if you're building a value gaming PC it may not matter.
Note that heavily-threaded applications actually favor the A8-3850 to the Core i3 2100 (its most likely target based on pricing rumors) thanks to its four cores. They may not be as efficient as the i3's cores, but you sure do have more of them. We have been discussing this tradeoff with AMD for quite a bit over the past couple of years. You lose out on single-threaded performance but you do gain better performance in heavily-threaded workloads. I had assumed that Turbo Core would partially solve this with Llano but 2.9GHz is going to be the fastest SKU AMD offers and it doesn't ship with any turbo enabled.
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mczak - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Oh and forgot to add could you please specify the exact specification of the HD5570? The article only says 400 cores at 750Mhz (seems very high for 5570) and misses the memory completely (there are 5570 on the market with pretty much anything ranging from ddr2 to gddr5...). Reference 5570 would be 650Mhz core clock and 900Mhz ddr3 memory.Tanclearas - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Seriously?! Have you even checked memory prices lately?DanNeely - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
newegg typical basely prices for 2x2GB DDR3:1333: $40
1600: $44
1866: $70
2000: $60
anything above 1600 starts to show a binning penalty. (The 1866/2000 prices are not an error, DDR3-2000 is readily available for less than 1866.)
Tanclearas - Thursday, June 16, 2011 - link
Right. So $14 difference changes a $499 system into a $513 system. While I recognize the psychological difference between those numbers, I also know that manufacturers and marketing departments can find ways to trim that $14 from somewhere else and highlight the DDR3-2000 memory, even if they only advertise and run it as DDR3-1866.I would not typically encourage the use of high-speed memory because traditionally it has little to no impact on most real applications. However, Llano changes that when using the IGP.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Here's some additional data to tide you over :)http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/cpu/amd/llano/...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
Hmm a shortened link, looks like our comment system needs a tweak :)http://bit.ly/kYGkvk
mczak - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
very nice scaling results. This platform REALLY wants at least ddr3-1600. AMD should have only officially supported ddr3-1600 and faster to force the OEMs to not skimp on the memory :-).duploxxx - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
major improvement seen from this increase of RAM speed, can you pls reload ALL benches with this new DRAM?It was clearly mentioned in the AMD slides that memory bandwidth was very important, this might also influence the CF setup a lot.
mczak - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 - link
The cpu benches shouldn't change really, just like older Phenom II you could just as well use ddr2 I bet.It should probably help for CF indeed as it will make the setup more symmetric, but given it barely worked at all I don't think there's much point retrying that without a newer driver version anyway.
plonk420 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
will the final review have 1333 vs 1866 ram?