The Kabini Deal: Can AMD Improve the Quality of Mainstream PCs with Its Latest APU?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 24, 2013 1:45 PM ESTGPU Performance
Looking at 3DMark’s Ice Storm test, the comparison between Intel’s 22nm HD Graphics in the Pentium 2020M and the Radeon HD 8830 in the A4-5000 is extremely close. In fact, across almost all of the 3DMark benchmarks we see the two perform very similarly. The lone exception being 3DMark 11 where the A4-5000 maintains a significant lead and even approaches Trinity in terms of performance (making it feel more like a fluke than the norm).
Turning to GFXBenchmark (formerly GL/DXBenchmark), we see performance tilt in favor of Kabini once again. The T-Rex HD test is extremely shader intensive. There’s about a 20% gap in raw shader performance between the 2-CU GCN implementation in Kabini and the 6 EU Gen7 graphics core in the Pentium 2020M, which maps almost perfectly to the performance delta we see in T-Rex HD. Now we see where the Pentium/Core i3 comparison comes from.
| GPU Performance | |||||||||||||||||
| 3DMark Ice Storm | 3DMark Cloud Gate | 3DMark Fire Strike | 3DMark 11 | 3DMark 06 | GFXBenchmark T-Rex HD | ||||||||||||
| AMD A4-5000 (Radeon HD 8330) | 23196 | 2159 | 310 | 580 | 3803 | 37 fps | |||||||||||
| Intel Pentium 2020M (HD Graphics) | 23135 | 2168 | 285 | 401 | 3542 | 30 fps | |||||||||||
All of this is fine if we’re looking at theoretical GPU benchmarks but what about actual games? In our Kabini review Jarred found the A4-5000 to be incapable of playing modern titles at reasonable frame rates, but what about titles from a few years ago? To find out, I dusted off Oblivion (with the Shivering Isles expansion) and threw it on my Kabini, Brazos and IVB Pentium systems.
I configured all three systems the same way: 1366 x 768, with medium graphics quality presets. I even used our old Oblivion SI benchmark from 2007. The results seemed to mirror what we saw in 3DMark:
| GPU Performance | ||||||||||||||||||
| Oblivion - 1366 x 768 Medium | Diablo III - 1366 x 768 Low | Oblivion - Power Consumption | ||||||||||||||||
| AMD E-350 (Radeon HD 6310) | 20.1 fps | 21.9 fps | ||||||||||||||||
| AMD A4-5000 (Radeon HD 8330) | 26.1 fps | 25.8 fps | 15.2W | |||||||||||||||
| Intel Pentium 2020M (HD Graphics) | 27.7 fps | 20.3 fps | 31.4W | |||||||||||||||
Kabini is about 30% faster than Brazos in GPU performance, and almost identical to the Pentium 2020M. Intel has a 6% performance advantage here, but I’m wondering if that’s from the CPU and not the GPU (Oblivion tends to hit both pretty hard). At lower quality settings (and/or resolution) you can definitely get Kabini above 30 fps, but even here I’d say it’s playable. More importantly, it’s performance competitive with Intel’s HD graphics.
I was also curious to see how Diablo III ran on Kabini so I fired up an early save and ran through the Cemetery of the Forsaken recording average frame rate. On a more modern title, both Kabini and Brazos actually hold a performance advantage over the Pentium 2020M.
As far as power goes, Kabini delivers relatively similar performance at roughly half the power of the Pentium 2020M.
With any of these integrated GPUs, the gaming experience even on previous generation high-end titles isn’t going to be a walk in the park.
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kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
The x202e does seem like a great platform for Kabini. Something similar as a dockable tablet design would be even more interesting.FwFred - Sunday, May 26, 2013 - link
Because Intel is able to share TDP budget between CPU and GPU. Because AMD cannot, it must 'reserve' TDP for the GPU even when a CPU-only benchmark is running.JarredWalton - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
I noticed that a few of THG's Kabini numbers appear off -- specifically PCMark 7 is clearly using an SSD on Kabini and not on the others. Which is horribly unfair, as that's the benchmark that benefits most from an SSD. For reference:http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/826?vs=823
kyuu - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
Yes, I believe THG noted that some of the numbers were skewed to due them not using an SSD across the board.JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 29, 2013 - link
Where did they say that? What I see is this:http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kabini-a4-5000...
"Although we used a number of different notebooks for our benchmarks, we used the same hard drive and memory in all of them to keep our comparisons as valid as possible. We want to zero in on platform performance after all, and not the difference between a mechanical disk and SSD."
This is clearly not true, as the Kabini laptop has an SSD for PCMark 7 while the others are HDDs. The configuration tables also make no mention of SSDs. I understand the difficulty of getting all the tests run under a time crunch, but at least we try to acknowledge the shortcomings and are honest in the configuration details.
yensteel - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
I think Kabini is in a similar position as Sandybridge HD 3000 was 2 years ago for gaming. Barely there in playability, but so close!For me, the Intel HD4000 is the bottom line for basic gaming performance (low res and quality for current gen games), I hope that AMD can pass that threshold with the next generation. With the mentality of "good enough", many people like students would find it very attractive.
I also appreciate the improvement in efficiency and price. It's a good direction.
duploxxx - Monday, May 27, 2013 - link
that's why A6 is there.... you see anandtech doesn't have the right HW to comapare and now all a sudden people start to see this as a counterpart of I series...its a a4 meant to be replacement of barzos, which it clearly does and against Atom which it destroys in any matter.
mschira - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Well they should be compared to Atoms, that's their price bracket. And they destroy Atom, so thoroughly it is beyond the scales.And on the GPU side things are even worse. Atom GPUs are the biggest nightmare on the planet.
So they should go in $200-$400 small systems with a 10 or 11" screen.
Kinda like the netbooks we wanted for 5 years but we only got Atom.
Cheers
M.
mschira - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
By the way is Kabini made on a cheap bulk process?If so I think the costs for the chip would be lower than a same surface Intel Chip.
So of course they can beat their prices easily.
M.
Roland00Address - Saturday, May 25, 2013 - link
Intel foundries are also on a bulk process.