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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delirious7 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
also forgot to mention that one ivy bridge pentium has been out for a while now. the G2120. it is retailing for $100 on newegg.bill4 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
"Can easily upgrade down the line" pretty much misses the point imo.Theoretically, this thing might be for casuals who are never going to upgrade, or people who need to pinch every last penny, or people who want a general purpose machine that isn't a total dog when they wanna game now and again, etc.
LancerVI - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
THIS^^^I agree 100%. Trinity is perfect for a great kids/wife general use computer. Websurfing and minecraft or wizard 101.
As long as they stay off my machine, we're good!
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Yes, but you shouldn't expect people who didn't even read the conclusion to the article to pay any attention to what you have to say here. :(parkerm35 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
$70 will get you a nice GT630 which is slower than the 7660D! And then when it comes to threaded tasks, you will be left waiting an eternity. Nice plan....ac2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Actually I said "That puts a $50 saving towards...", I certainly didn't say that would be the total price!Highly threaded integer tasks are a rarity for me so...
CaptainDoug - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
why'd you pick a GT630? there's a 6670 for $65 that's roughly twice as powerful as the GT630. It would end up being like 35% more powerful than a 7660D.Jamahl - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Did you see how far the Pentium was behind in multi threading? It will not beat the A10 in gaming in most cases but feel free to waste money on a dual core if you want.mattlach - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Multithreading is still mostly irrelevant in most Games.Yes, there are a couple of games that support it pretty well well (Battlefield 3, Civilization 5) but the vast majority of games out there are still of the "load one core 100% and load a second (and possibly third) core 15-20%" variety.
In these circumstances two fast cores are going to beat 4, 6 or 8 slow cores almost every time.
It's not about IPC, and its not about clock speed. It's about the combination of the two. Per core performance is still king, and I don't think this is going to change any time soon due to the difficulties involved in writing good multithreaded code, and Amdahls law.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law )
bji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Yeah, but aren't *PC's* irrelevant in most Games?