AMD AM1 Kabini Part 2: Athlon 5350/5150 and Sempron 3850/2650 Tested

AMD Kabini AM1 Conclusions

After dealing with enthusiast mainstream CPUs for so many years, wrapping your head around 2 GHz dual/quad core parts again is somewhat mindboggling, feeling like I have just pulled out one of those first dual core systems when they hit the enthusiast mainstream segment.  I am glad that several years down the line they are now the low-end part of the market, and it raises the bar of the minimum performance of a desktop into something more usable as well as a rise in the quality and grunt of integrated graphics, all within a low cost framework.

To cut straight to the chase, our review here pitted all four new AMD Kabini AM1 Socketed Desktop APUs against the two Intel Bay Trail-D SoCs that matched up closer in specifications.  Both sides of the coin features 2-4 cores ranging from 1.3 GHz to 2.4 GHz, as well as integrated graphics solutions to sufficiently tackle all regular daily tasks asked of them.  The best match up was the AMD Athlon 5350, a quad core 2 GHz part with 128 SPs at 600 MHz against the Intel J1900, a quad core 2 GHz (2.4 GHz Turbo) part with 6 EUs at 688 MHz.

If we directly compare these two, we see a range of different characteristics.  The Intel CPU takes the crown in floating point tests, potentially indicating a better scheduler when dealing with floating point numbers.  The 3DPM test shows that here, as well as some of the more general purpose benchmarks such as the Media/Data segments of SYSmark 2014.  There is also the power consumption to consider, as the Bay Trail-D CPUs have only a 10W TDP.  The Athlon 5350 takes the majority of the integer based operations, such as Cinebench and FastStone, as well as the TrueCrypt benchmark due to its included AES-NI hardware acceleration.  Other items such as the web benchmarks showed little difference between AMD and Intel.

However where the Athlons stand out is in the associated IGP benchmarks.  In our 1280x1024 low resolution game tests, the top two Athlons (5350, 5150) approached 30 FPS average whereas the Bay Trail-D CPUs struggled with half that frame rate.  The same comes down to synthetics (3DMark), although some of the more CPU focused game benchmarks (draw calls) narrowed the gap.

When it comes to discrete GPU tests, as our Intel samples only had a closed PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, we were unable to compare directly with AMD’s Kabini.  In the global scope of things however, the AMD Kabini platform paired with a high powered GPU (AMD 7970, GTX 770) managed 30 FPS+ in 9 out of 12 of our benchmarks at 1080p with maximum detail using the Athlon 5350.  Even in Battlefield 4 single player with these high settings, a 20.7 FPS minimum indicates that a few notches down on image quality makes it readily playable.  However using such a powerful GPU is perhaps not the best scope for such a platform.

When using the systems and running the tests, it was clear with the two Semprons that during basic use, such as web browsing and navigation, it did feel a little slower than what I was used to. The web browsing tests show that up quite well, with the Kraken benchmark showing a +50% slower time to complete on the quad core Sempron vs. the top level Athlon.  This delay was not show stopping, and using an SSD alongside the system almost certainly helped with that.

Another point of sale for AMD Kabini will be in integrated systems, such as digital signage, library computers or similar.  From this perspective, as long as the system is not doing severe rendering on the fly (such as more than 1280x1024 on low with modern engines) but needs more computational power than say a Raspberry Pi, then the Kabini AM1 platform offers a good implementation and a low cost.  The next step from here would be to see small form factor devices that could also be upgradeable - something that could fit onto a VESA mount perhaps.