AMD Kaveri Review: A8-7600 and A10-7850K Tested
by Ian Cutress & Rahul Garg on January 14, 2014 8:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Continued
Xilisoft Video Converter 7 - link
The XVC test I normally do is updated to the full version of the software, and this time a different test as well. Here we take two different videos: a double UHD (3840x4320) clip of 10 minutes and a 640x266 DVD rip of a 2h20 film and convert both to iPod suitable formats. The reasoning here is simple – when frames are small enough to fit into memory, the algorithm has more chance to apply work between threads and process the video quicker. Results shown are in seconds and time taken to encode. XVC also offers acceleration via CUDA and AMD APP, so if these are available on the CPU we offer results with and without.
With large frame data, the IGP on Kaveri does not particularly help much.
For smaller frames however, there is an advantage to enabling the AMD APP function.
HandBrake v0.9.9 - link
For HandBrake we do the same files as XVC but convert them into the default format Handbrake offers upon loading the software. Results shown are in Frames Per Second.
Handbrake loves cores, threads and MHz
Adobe After Effects 6
Published by Adobe, After Effects is a digital motion graphics, visual effects and compositing software package used in the post-production process of filmmaking and television production. For our benchmark we downloaded a common scene in use on the AE forums for benchmarks and placed it under our own circumstances for a repeatable benchmark. We generate 152 frames of the scene and present the time to do so based purely on CPU calculations.
7-Zip 9.2 - link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
PovRay 3.7 - link
PovRay historically loves threads, MHz and IPC. The standard benchmark from PovRay is what we use to test here.
TrueCrypt 7.1a - link
TrueCrypt is an off the shelf open source encoding tool for files and folders. For our test we run the benchmark mode using a 1GB buffer and take the mean result from AES encryption.
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retrospooty - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
"a low end cpu like the athlon X4 with a HD7750 will be considerably faster than any APU. So in this regard, I disagree with the conclusions that for low end gaming kaveri is the best solution."I get your point, but its not really a review issue , its a product issue. AMD certianly cant compete inthe CPU arena. They are good enough, but nowhere near Intel 2 generations ago (Sandy Bridge from 2011). They have a better integrated GPU, so in that sense its bte best integrated GPU, but as you mentioned, if you are into gaming, you can still get better performance on a budget by getting a budget add in card, so why bother with Kaveri?
Homeles - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
"I get your point, but its not really a review issue , its a product issue."Well, the point of a review is to highlight whether or not a product is worth purchasing.
mikato - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
I agree. He should have made analysis from the viewpoint of different computer purchasers. Just one paragraph would have worked, to fill in the blanks.. something like these -1. the gamer who will buy a pricier discrete GPU
2. the HTPC builder
3. the light gamer + office productivity home user
4. the purely office productivity type work person
just4U - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
I can understand why he didn't use a 7750/70 with GDDR5 ... all sub $70 video cards I've seen come with ddr3. Your bucking up by spending that additional 30-60 bucks (sales not considered)Computer Bottleneck - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
The R7 240 GDDR5 comes in at $49.99 AR---> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...So cheap Video cards can have GDDR5 at a low price point.
just4U - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
That's a sale though.. it's a $90 card.. I mean sure if it becomes the new norm.. but that hasn't been the case for the past couple of years.ImSpartacus - Thursday, January 16, 2014 - link
Yeah, if you get aggressive with sales, you can get $70 7790s. That's a lot of GPU for not a lot of money.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Do you think that once HSA is supported in SW we can see some of the CPU gap reduced?I'd imagine that *if* some of the GPU power can be used to help on FP type of calculation, the boost could be noticeable. Thoughts?
thomascheng - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Yes, that is probably why the CPU floating point calculation isn't as strong, but we won't see that until developers use OpenCL and HSA. Most likely the big selling point in the immediate future (3 to 6 month) will be Mantle since it is already being implemented in games. HSA and OpenGL 2.0 are just starting to come out, so we will probably see more news on that 6 months from now with partial support in some application and full support after a year. If the APUs in the Playstation 4 and Xbox One are also HSA supported, we will see more games make use of it before general desktop applications.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, January 14, 2014 - link
Agreed. I do hope that the gaming consoles pave the way for more broad adoption of these new techniques. After all, gaming has been pushing most of the innovation for quite some time now.CPU improvement has been rather uneventful: I still use a PC with an Athlon II X2 @ 2.8GHz and with a decent graphic card is actually plenty good for most of the work. That's nearly a 5 year old CPU and I don't think there's a 2X improvement even going to a core i3. In any case, there have to be solution to improve IPC that go beyond some circuit optimization, and HSA seems promising. We'll all have to gain if it happens: it would be nice to have again some competition non the CPU side.