The Desktop Kabini Review Part 1: AMD Athlon 5350 (AM1) Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 9, 2014 8:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks
Console Emulation – Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything above this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Encryption –TrueCrypt v0.7.1a: link
TrueCrypt is an off the shelf open source encryption 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.
Synthetic – 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.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
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MikeMurphy - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I'm excited to see this in an upgradeable NUC form factor.jardows2 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Please, someone make a thin-mITX for this platform. This is going to be a limited use platform anyway, so there is no reason to put in the full gamut of I/O on the back.jabber - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Mmm vertically stacked and the size of a paperback book.But whats this...they put the VGA socket at the top! Noooooooooo!
No analogue audio out on the back, just at the front! Noooooooooo!
Yep seen that.
macs - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Sorry Anandtech but this is not a good review.Where is power consumption data? Comparison with Intel Haswell G1820 (really affordable Haswell chip)? Htpc quality? Older generation (amd e-350)??
Communism - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
They put the newfangled AMD part in the best possible light since they can't afford AMD to be mad at them since AMD pays the bills :PDoes make the a mockery of this Article that it doesn't even include the Intel Haswell G1820 that is it's real competition.
MSRP Intel Haswell G1820 is 42 USD
You can get an H81 board for 49 USD
You can also have real upgradability, since you can go up to a 4670 if you want to.
CiccioB - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I agree, having a sponsored section on the site isn't really a best thing to avoid any suspicion about bias or favouritism. Any glitch in a review can be seen as a favour to the sponsor. And none will ever know if that's true or not.BTW, I have an Atom D510 (dual physical cores with HT) ITX server which is on 24/24 7/7 used for P2P, backup and some script, stotage and database server. No GFX capacity needed (it is connected to the main PC through Remote Desktop thus "sharing" one of the monitors).
What would be the best solution to replace it if it will eventually die tomorrow?
That Pentium J1800@10W seems very good. Is there something better than that? Consider that power consumption and related fan noise are critical, being always on in my bedroom.
macs - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I have a similar setup with an AMD e350 itx board. I'm trying to understand if I should upgrade to a newer platform but this review didn't help.Main concern is power consumption, it would be interesting comparing Kabini, BayTrail D and low end Haswell
Communism - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
I can understand not doing the Power Consumption tests, since their standard benching platforms are "Enthusiast" and "Overclocking" motherboards, resulting in higher power consumption of the boards masking the true TDP of the CPU/GPU as a result of the additional chips on the board adding other functionality.They would have to use very sparse basic boards to make the comparison anywhere close to realistic.
jospoortvliet - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Reviews on other sites show AMD consistently beating baytrail at virtually the same active power envelope and much lower idle. Baytrail offers no advantage whatsoever so you can cross that off the list already 😎Beany2013 - Wednesday, April 9, 2014 - link
Try reading the article rather than just looking at the pretty pictures:"As mentioned in our test setup, the benchmark results in this preliminary article are only a small fraction of our normal coverage. Due to other commitments we were unable to run every test on all comparison systems, but we have the other Athlon and Sempron APUs as well as comparable Intel counterparts coming in for review."
Also, the title - Review *Part 1*.
More numbers, compared to competing parts from intel, will be upcoming. It says it in the article - at least twice. It's not ATs problem if you weren't gifted with the good grace to actually read an article before accusing the author of being a shill/being biased/being on the payroll.
Steven R