The AMD Kabini Review: A4-5000 APU Tested
by Jarred Walton on May 23, 2013 12:00 AM ESTKabini vs. Clover Trail & ARM
Kabini is a difficult SoC to evaluate, primarily because of the nature of the test system we're using to evaluate it today. Although AMD's Jaguar cores are power efficient enough to end up in tablets, the 15W A4-5000 we're looking at today is a bit too much for something the size of an iPad. Temash, Kabini's even lower power counterpart, will change that but we don't have Temash with us today. Rather than wait for AMD to get us a Temash based tablet, I wanted to get an idea of how Jaguar stacks up to some of the modern low-power x86 and ARM competitors.
To start, let's characterize Jaguar in terms of its performance compared to Bobcat as well as Intel's current 32nm in-order Saltwell Atom core. As a reference, I've thrown in a 17W dual-core Ivy Bridge. The benchmarks we're looking at are PCMark 7 (only run on those systems with SSDs), Cinebench (FP workload) and 7-Zip (integer workload). With the exception of Kabini, all of these parts are dual-core. The Atom and Core i5 systems are dual-core but have Hyper-Threading enabled so they present themselves to the OS as 4-thread machines.
| CPU Performance | ||||||||||||||||
| PCMark 7 | Cinebench 11.5 (Single Threaded) | Cinebench 11.5 (Multithreaded) | 7-Zip Benchmark (Single Threaded) | 7-Zip Benchmark (Multithreaded) | ||||||||||||
| AMD A4-5000 (1.5GHz Jaguar x 4) | 2425 | 0.39 | 1.5 | 1323 | 4509 | |||||||||||
| AMD E-350 (1.6GHz Bobcat x 2) | 1986 | 0.32 | 0.61 | 1281 | 2522 | |||||||||||
| Intel Atom Z2760 (1.8GHz Saltwell x 2) | - | 0.17 | 0.52 | 754 | 2304 | |||||||||||
| Intel Core i5-3317U (1.7GHz IVB x 2) | 4318 | 1.07 | 2.39 | 2816 | 6598 | |||||||||||
Compared to a similarly clocked dual-core Bobcat part, Kabini shows a healthy improvement in PCMark 7 performance. Despite the clock speed disadvantage, the A4-5000 manages 22% better performance than AMD's E-350. The impressive gains continue as we look at single-threaded Cinebench performance. Again, a 22% increase compared to Bobcat. Multithreaded Cinebench performance scales by more than 2x thanks to the core count doubling and increased multi-core efficiency. The current generation Atom comparison here is just laughable—Jaguar offers more than twice the performance of Clover Trail in single threaded Cinebench.
The single threaded 7-Zip benchmark shows only mild gains if we don't take into account clock speed differences. If you normalize for CPU frequency, Jaguar is likely around 9% faster than Bobcat here. Multithreaded gains are quite good as well. Once again, Atom is no where near AMD's new A4.
The Ivy Bridge comparison is really just for reference. In all of the lightly threaded cases, a 1.7GHz Ivy Bridge delivers over 2x the performance of the A4-5000. The gap narrows for heavily threaded workloads but obviously any bigger core going into a more expensive system will yield appreciably better results.
For the next test I expanded our comparison to include an ARM based SoC: the dual-core Cortex A15 powered Samsung Exynos 5250 courtesy of Google's Nexus 10. These cross platform benchmarks are all browser based and run in Google Chrome:
Here we see a 14% improvement over Bobcat, likely closer to 20% if we normalized clock speed between the parts—tracking perfectly with AMD's promised IPC gains for Jaguar. The A4-5000 completes the Kraken benchmark in less than half the time. The 1.7GHz Ivy Bridge part is obviously quicker, but what's interesting is that if we limit the IVB CPU's frequency to 800MHz Kabini is actually a near identical performer.
Jaguar seems to be around 9-20% faster than Bobcat depending on the benchmark. Multithreaded workloads are obviously much better as there are simply more cores to run on. In practice, using the Kabini test system vs. an old Brazos machine delivers a noticeable difference in user experience. Clover Trail feels anemic by comparison and even Brazos feels quite dated. Seeing as how Bobcat was already quicker than ARM's Cortex A15, its no surprise that Jaguar is as well. The bigger problem here is Kabini needs much lower platform power to really threaten the Cortex A15 in tablets—we'll see how Temash fares as soon as we can get our hands on a tablet.
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Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
I'll beg to disagree with that. As a non-promotional price, for a notebook with a 1080p touchscreen display I think that 500$ is more than fair. As for promotions happening your line of reasoning seems to assume that discounts will only affect Intel notebooks which isn't clearly the case.While you may get cheap Ivy Bridge notebooks when in promotion, go search for cheap Trinity/brazos notebooks with promotions and you'll find them even cheaper. The same will be said of Temash/Kabini notebooks.
I fail to understand why you don't seem to acknowledge that.
Or the proposition of an APU that beats Pentiums and Celerons in performance (excluding single-thread performance, which is much less relevant nowadays) and has superior battery life.
Will Atom and Haswell Pentiums offer better performance/efficiency/price ratio? It remains to be seen.
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Depends really. With a 1080p screen its a good price. Sales happen all the time. Yes you can and will get i3 ULV systems for cheap and can get kabini systems for cheap. I'm simply saying given the fact that these promotion happen all the time literally (go to newegg laptops, sort by price-lowest and more than 75% of the notebooks on that page are on sale) you have to take these things into consideration. Kabini is competing against discounted but perfectly fine notebooks in this segment. You can get a nice lenovo g580 with SV i3 for $350. Any promotion that runs with a kabini notebook will have to match that price/perf and kabini is much weaker than SV i3.http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
whyso - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
Sale % was taken from .ca g580 price from .com for .ca about half are on sale.dusk007 - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The performance quite poor and notebookcheck doesn't really tell a different story. An i5 is the right CPU to compare it too because it runs in the same performance envelope. With all the other stuff that goes into a decent notebook or tablet/hybrid the CPU cost alone does make that much of a difference.The problem with Kabini is Single Threaded performance which matters for responsivness in plain old office work loads. Which is what most of these notebooks do. x264, cinebench, ... none of that really matters.
And gaming. In game low settings don't do much for CPU requirements and that is why even at low many games aren't playable. Something Intel can offer despite its HD 4000 which has nowhere near the reputation of AMD's GCN. If all you want is an office notebook for some casual gaming like a bit of Starcraft. An i5 is still a worthwhile investment.
Gaugamela - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
The i5 is the right CPU because it runs in the same performance envelope??????? How about no??How much more does the i5 cost?
andrewaggb - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
Well theres two arguements. One is cost, and yes amd will come in cheaper because intel likes their margins. So if cost is your primary motivator than this chip looks good.The other argument is performance/watt and peak performance, both of which make an i5 look much better than this chip.
Now it's true an i5 doesn't scale down to 3.9W, so in that market this chip appears to be a real contender and the one to beat. But that's not the version that was tested here today so we don't know that for sure.
Personally, I'm disappointed, and think haswell will compare very favorably in all metrics except price. I'm not sure haswell will be tablet suitable though, where some sku's of this chip should be.
Not saying this chip is terrible, just saying for anything 8-9W and up it seems to me haswell will be the clear choice if price isn't a major factor.
Gaugamela - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
And this is a product that competes on price and battery life. Not performance as Haswell does.dusk007 - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Just that it does compete on performance doesn't mean performance isn't valuable information. How much speed loss are you dealing with when going with cost effectiveness. This isn't a smartphone CPU that will ultimately end up running different software. It is still Windows and the same games and programs as an i5 is used for.The cost difference in the end product isn't that huge or insurmountable. The buyer would like to know how much they get when paying up or who much they loose when going cheap. Comparing it only with Atoms would be cheating and something marketing folks do not a review site that wants to have some reputation.
These chips don't go into Smartphones not even Tablets (that is Temash) they go where 15W Haswells will go and 2/3 of those sub $800 notebooks BOM is still none CPU related. So even if Kabini was given away for free the notebooks would still cost something.
Parhel - Friday, May 24, 2013 - link
But price is always a major factor. It's the "majorest" factor. This is a site for enthusiasts (read geeks) but think of the person at the AT&T store who picks the 2 or 3 generation old iPhone because it's $50 cheaper.tunaman - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - link
AMD set the standard with x64 that Intel evetually agreed was superior and joined. With the introduction of these hUMA (fully shared CPU and GPU memory) chips AMD has again set the standard that Intel will have to copy.As I've said before; Intel hasn't been a tech leader in a decade and, again, they'll be playing catch up once they cave to AMD's superior design. But by then, just as has been true for years, Intel graphics and multitasking will continue to lag behind AMD. Intel's only bragging right is saving one or two watts and slapping an "Intel Inside" tatoo on products, but charging twice as much for it. http://goo.gl/OItwV