AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTContent Creation Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS4
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Our Photoshop workload still runs better on Intel hardware, but the gap in performance between the 5800K and 3220 is smaller than it was between the FX-8150 and 2500K last year. While Bulldozer was pretty much unrecommendable, Trinity approaches tradeoff territory.
3dsmax 9 & POV-ray
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
Once again in a heavily threaded FP benchmark, the A10 and Core i3 perform very similarly. POV-Ray is another example of this below:
File Compression/Decompression Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Our multithreaded Par2 recovery test shows AMD with a small advantage over the Core i3 3220, although it obviously can't touch any of the more expensive quad-core parts.
Excel Math Performance
Not all heavily threaded FP applications are easy wins for AMD. In our Monte Carlo simulation benchmark the 3220 manages a decent lead over the A10-5800K.
Our old Sorenson Squeeze test is one area where we see a slight regression compared to Llano. Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't super common but it does happen from time to time given the dramatic architecture difference between Llano and Trinity.
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Hubb1e - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Atom falls down with Netflix and idles around the same point as these chips.mattlach - Thursday, October 4, 2012 - link
My current AMD E-350 can not handle Netflix HD, which is disappointing.The way Netflix has implemented DRM in Silverlight, hardware decode acceleration doesn't work on any system, so it all hits the CPU, and many lower end systems (Atom, E-350) just can't handle it above SD resolutions.
Everything else I've tried (Youtube, custom encoded video files, etc. etc., habe not tried Hulu though) works just fine, as the on-chip GPU offloads the CPU and they play fine, but Netflix HD chokes, and chokes badly.
Thus the need for a low end, power efficient Trinity setup.
I would love one of those mobile Trinity chips in a desktop FM2 package. A 35W TDP Trinity or lower would be perfect for my HTPC needs.
stimudent - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
We need to appreciate and thank anandtech.com for being professional about a staged release. This is in stark contrast to taking part in cry baby journalism that TechReport.com engaged in.Pythias - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
"Professional" is a polite euphemism for prostitute in some circles.Pythias - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Why did you remove the pentium from the descrete gaming chart?Hubb1e - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Because he wanted to keep the forums ripe for the trolls who think a Celeron plus a 6670 are faster than Trinity.Pythias - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Seems rather dodgy.HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Hopefully, one of these days, Intel will be bothered enough by these APU's that they release an i3 with boost and an unlocked multiplier with the higher end version of the integrated GPU.Price it right at the high end of AMD's APU lineup, bam, the whole thing is dead in the water. I suspect Intel wants AMD to seem like they're competition to keep the regulators away, so they're holding back on the obvious killshot.
mikato - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
It would somewhat kill their higher priced CPUs also though.eanazag - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
I wasn't expecting AMD to close the performance gap or power usage gap with Intel. I was concerned that it might not even be able to beat Llano CPU performance consistently. I feel comfortable with the CPU performance. I think at even lower pricing AMD could dominate the low end market. I have a Core i5 860 and Core i3 Arrandale (same time frame). I certainly noticed the 860 appearing in the benchmark numbers. The A10 Trinity is not too far off the performance of my 860, especially when considering price in factors. And off the FX-8150 it has pretty good performance, which is a decent sign for the higher end AMD desktop parts coming soon (can't really call the AMD high end parts).Idle power usage is excellent. Power usage can make sense for AMD if you are considering a cheap Intel proc and a discrete card. I think in that situation AMD makes more sense.
Drivers and support go to AMD on both sides of software compatibility (AMD drivers and game support).
SATA 6Gbps on Intel with just 2 builtin ports still upsets me. This should be an advantage for AMD at the platform level.
I want to see the desktop and server chip data next. I am glad that I don't have to rule out buying the AMD parts from the get go. The buying decision will still be that.
I still believe AMD should make a 200W part combining their FX proc with a 7700/7800 range GPU. I think they could dominate the midrange with that and who could compete then? From price and gaming performance at least. Power and heat still makes sense considering the removal of that level GPU from the case. Hell, I could deal with 250W and be happy also.