AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTFinal Words
I have to admit, Trinity's CPU performance made it a lot closer to Intel's Core i3 3220 than I expected it to. In the worst case there's still a huge gap in single threaded performance, but even SYSMark 2012 only shows Intel's Core i3 3220 with a 12% performance advantage. Multithreaded workloads do reasonably well on Trinity as well. Intel pulls ahead in some, while AMD does in others and there's another selection of applications/workloads where we see performance parity between similarly priced Trinity and Ivy Bridge parts. A big part of all of this is Intel disabling features on its Core i3 (the lack of turbo hurts), but Piledriver's high clock speeds and AMD's pricing strategy both play a role here as well.
The big exception to all of this is high-end gaming performance. If you're planning on pairing a beefy GPU with a cheap CPU, you're much better off going with Intel than AMD at this point. Single threaded performance is still far too important to most gaming workloads for the recommendation to be anything different.
As I mentioned earlier, Trinity's CPU performance puts the buying decision squarely in the tradeoff evaluation zone. Once again what matters the most is how important Trinity's GPU is to you. AMD holds a clear advantage there if you're going to use it, otherwise the decision is heavily weighted towards Intel. Intel holds a power consumption advantage and a clear single threaded performance advantage, while there are some specific workloads that will do better on Trinity (e.g. AES-NI accelerated apps, heavily threaded integer applications).
Overall Trinity is a step forward from Llano. It's not enough to make the job of recommending the APU any less complex than what I've outlined above however. Depending on what you plan on doing with your system, Trinity is either going to be perfect or a distant second.
What I am happy to see is AMD putting a little competitive pressure on Intel here. Offering unlocked K SKUs, features like AES-NI and great GPU performance at these price points is important. I don't believe Trinity is strong enough on the CPU side to really force Intel to do the same with the Core i3, but we do need AMD to keep doing this and getting better each time.
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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.