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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CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
AMD's engineers can't seem to figure out pci-e 3.0They released their 7000 series with pci-e 3.0 uncertified (while nVidia waited and did a proper and offical implementation), then a bunch of amd card people had trouble in boards, but since the "press" kept their yappers shut except for a few, it wasn't widespread knowledge, so amd fanboys ( and others) suffered with their crap non certified cards, unable to chase down the plaguing glitches properly.
rarson - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
"So as of today, in general - it costs more to get an AMD."...unless you actually want decent gaming performance.
The problem for Intel is that the things that Trinity doesn't do well aren't much of an issue to the average consumer. The average consumer doesn't have a clue how threaded their workloads are, and won't notice any significant differences between the i3 and the A10 other than how much faster the graphics are.
If I were going to build an HTPC without discrete graphics, I'd be buying a Trinity. Intel doesn't make sense in that application (of course, I'd probably still go discrete, in which case Intel makes more sense).
CeriseCogburn - Friday, October 12, 2012 - link
That's great rarson, when amd is crap, it's ok because people need crap, and won't notice the crap they have.LOL
Someone may be full of crap.
g101 - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
Yeah, you. You lifeless little shit. Find something better to do than comment on every anandtech article with senseless garbage that never contains a shred of evidence or fact.rarson - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
"I think there is very little need for raw single-threaded performance increases in consumer-level "general computation" processors (e.g. few-core x86 processors)."Exactly. While AMD could stand to improve their single-threaded performance, the fact that Intel is so far ahead in that specific metric doesn't automatically mean that Trinity is "slow." It does other things quite well, including multi-threaded performance, which is obviously more of a concern at this point considering software is moving towards multi-threading anyway.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
LOL - you are such a sad fanboyI hope amd showers you as fanboy of the month with their slow crap so you have to use it.
amd4evernever - Sunday, October 14, 2012 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-trin...choke on that.... no matter how you troll the amd solution in the ends beats the core i3 both in price and in gaming read the full article at tomshardware.. you lunatic.
g101 - Monday, October 22, 2012 - link
You stupid little bitch, you comment on EVERY article with pro nvidia/intel comments and every single one is absolute rubbish.What I really want to know is: how the fuck can you have nothing better to do, yet still be so ignorant?
rarson - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
"We need this for some real progression to be made in desktop CPU's and also drive prices down at the high end."Why? Is an i7 not fast enough for you? Are you being bogged down by your uber-user workload?
The vast majority of people buy processors that are cheaper than the A10 here. Sure, it'd be nice to see AMD compete at the high end again, but the high end doesn't drive the market; the high end is barely a blip on the radar.
Flunk - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Exactly, why buy the kids a new A10 when I can just give them my old Q6600? AMD really needs to make a better case for themselves than this.