AMD A10-7800 Review: Testing the A10 65W Kaveri
by Ian Cutress on July 31, 2014 8:00 AM ESTConclusions
When AMD launched their 95W Kaveri APUs and we had the opportunity to test the top A10 model, it offered some of the best integrated graphics performance for a desktop we had seen. The fact that the die is partitioned such that more than 50% of it is for the graphics, along with expanding HSA and OpenCL support, means that for applications that can be computationally enhanced by integrated graphics, AMD has the edge for the single chip solution.
In our testing, because the A10-7800 shares the same processor graphics configuration and speed as the A10-7850K, results were fairly similar despite a +100 MHz advantage to the A10-7850K. This means that, at stock, AMD is offering a similar CPU for $18 less.
If we remove the price from the equation, the biggest contender for the title of ‘best processor graphics’ is Intel’s Iris Pro. The upside of AMD’s Kaveri at the minute is not only the price, but also the form factor – Iris Pro is only available as a soldered on (BGA) CPU at this point in time whereas Kaveri is in both soldered and socketed form. Also, Iris Pro relies on an extra L4 cache, which adds size to the CPU package as well as cost and power consumption. News from Intel might change that with Broadwell, as back in May an announcement regarding a socketed, overclockable Iris Pro CPU would be coming to market. We have not the slightest clue when AMD will have this competition, but it looks good for AMD given that recent reports suggest that Broadwell for the desktop may be delayed beyond the expected launch of 14nm Core-M in Q1 2015.
In that respect, it may give AMD some time to prepare for their new 64-bit x86 architecture, or give AMD another chance to leap forward in with their Carrizo APUs (still based on modules and GCN) if they are launched in 2015.
Back to the A10-7800 reviewed today, and as it stands it is the most cost effective processor graphics solution available. Here is all the speed of the A10-7850K for $18 cheaper, and more performance than the A8-7600. The 45W configurable TDP makes it even more enticing as a lower power consumption part.
The only issue users might come across is the speed and feel when running single threaded tasks that do not utilise OpenCL or HSA – our web benchmarks put the AMD APUs behind many of our 55W Intel samples for the last couple of generations. But for anything that uses OpenCL as an accelerant, such as the software on which PCMark8 is based or anything compute, AMD comes out on top.
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Homeles - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Unfortunately, Ian's been omitting power consumption numbers lately. Wish he weren't :\Stoneburner - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
" News from Intel might change that with Broadwell, as back in May an announcement regarding a socketed, overclockable Iris Pro CPU would be coming to market."That sentence gave me a migraine :(
leopard_jumps - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
price wise is A8 6600KBlack Obsidian - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Kaveri: Fantastic if you absolutely require IGP gaming. Otherwise, humiliated by a $60 Pentium.I'm sure that AMD must have done the research, but I'd be astonished if the intersection of:
1) Willing to buy non-Intel CPU
2) Interested in gaming
3) Unwilling to invest in a dGPU
Is big enough to be profitable.
Or perhaps it's just the least-unprofitable niche that AMD feels it can compete in, having largely ceded the server and high-end desktop markets to Intel, in addition to their questionable mobile story.
I miss the AMD of yore, but buying up ATI seems like a better decision with each increasingly-lackluster CPU release...
ArcticCoder - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
To make matters worse, you can get a G3258 with an Z97 motherboard from Microcenter for $100. (Overclocked mine to 4.3 GHz).meacupla - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
damn, that's a good deal.But the average price for PAE and a Z87/97 mobo is around $160~$180.
Computer Bottleneck - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
See this thread for overclocking on Non-Z motherboards:http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=23899...
silverblue - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
I haven't found enough benchmarks to suggest anything about the 7850K vs. the G3258 barring the price differential...bebimbap - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Having bought a i7-920, pentium 3220, i7-3770k, i7 4770k, I can say CPU speed matters way more than iGPU if you are not gaming.General use - internet/email, you may think cpu speed doesn't matter, but it does. You might get your email to open "instantly" instead of waiting 1-2 seconds.
watching videos - "gpu acceration" with a gtx 670 just irritates me as the pixels are all meshed and audio becomes out of sync when you seek through the video. I just use the cpu.
creating videos into 264h content - if you use gpu acceleration, no to encoding runs will produce the same result, in the end, you'll want to use the cpu for consistent results, unless you want to do a quick rip to your ipod, in that case just use quick sync, it's very fast.
file compression/extraction - cpu speed matters here especially compression.
file copy - cpu speed matters. If you ever run a low end cpu and try to copy at 100MB/s you start using a non-significant portion of your cpu.
I've never run into a case outside of gaming where even the GMA 900 with the 915G chipset wasn't good enough, and what ever iGPU intel is using now is much better than that. If you are a "light gamer" and play mostly flash or shockwave, i would say intel igpu is still "good enough." If you are doing "budget" build your monitor would probably be on the "budget" side too, and wouldn't be good enough to display your games at high res or without significant ghosting at high frame rates.
I'm not an intel fan boy or an amd fan boy, I just go with what suits my needs best. In the end, I ALWAYS read what AMD is up to because the one thing I am waiting for is, AMD manages to run all their cpu-floating point operations through their iGPU. THAT would be very interesting. Similar to the FPGA added to the upcoming line of intel XEON processors.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, July 31, 2014 - link
Intel needs competition. Unfortunately, AMD isn't providing it.