The AMD A8-7650K APU Review, Also New Testing Methodology
by Ian Cutress on May 12, 2015 10:00 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost 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 minutes.
Dolphin likes high IPC and clock frequency, which indicates that the highest clocked APUs perform the best out of AMD here. Because the benchmark is single threaded, even a dual core Intel wins though.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
The varied-thread workload of WinRAR seems to vary between the dual core Intels and the dual module AMD chips, showing that threads matter.
3D Particle Movement
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.
In this nieve benchmark, the compiler prefers x87 style commands which AMD's Bulldozer based architectures isn't too fond of. This benchmark is meant to be a representation of crude scientific code, similar to that used in a research lab. Ultimately, Bulldozer architectures such as Kaveri prefer specific commands, especially when dealing with basic math.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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silverblue - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
I heard a rumour that AMD were unable to meet demand and as such failed to secure a contract with Apple. Make of that what you will. As it was, Llano went from being under-produced to the exact opposite.galta - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Exactly: not only have they devised a poor strategy, they were also unable to follow it!V900 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Nah, Llano would have been way too hot for an Apple laptop. Heck,'the CPU/GPU in a MacBook Air has a tdp of 15watt. Does AMD have anything even close to that, that doesn't involve Jaguar cores?galta - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Again, they were not able to deliver their strategy, even if it was a poor one.One says that integrated GPU is the future. That, per se, is questionable.
Later, we find out that they can't meet production orders and/or deliver a chip that is too hot for one of its potential markets. This is poor implementation.
Teknobug - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Enjoying my i3 4010U NUC as well, all I need for daily use and some occasional light gaming on Steam (I run Debian Linux on it).nerd1 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Yoga 3 pro with 4.5W Core M got 90 points in Cinebench R15 Single-Threaded testThis 95W chip got 85 points in Cinebench R15 Single-Threaded test
So who's gonna buy this at all?
takeship - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Cynically, AMD may consider it better to have *any* product to discount/write-off down the road rather than fork over another wafer agreement penalty to GloFo with nothing to show for it.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
I noticed that as well, but the fact that this is a 95 watt processor isn't that much of a concern when you have the power envelope of a desktop chassis at your disposal. The intended niche for these APUs seems more to make a value proposition for budget gaming in a low-complexity system (meaning lacking the additional PCB complexity introduced by using a discrete GPU). Unfortunately, I don't see OEMs really putting any weight behind AMD APUs by selling systems containing them which leaves much of the sales up to the comparatively few people who DIY-build desktop hardware. Even those people are hard-pressed to find a lot of value in picking an APU-based platform over competing Intel products as they tend to have a little more budget flexibility and are targeting greater GPU performance than the A-series has available, putting them into discrete graphics solutions.zodiacfml - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
The APU has more cores than that. In the test, did it tell you how much power it is using?yannigr2 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Those two more and much more expensive Intel CPUs on the charts, make APUs look totally pathetic. Yes you do have the prices next to the charts, yes they do make APUs, look extremely valuable in the 3D games, but most people probably would not go past the first 4-5 pages in this article having being totally disappointed from the first results. Also the long blue lines will imprint in their memories, they will forget the prices.Next time throw a few Xeon e7 in the charts.
PS. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, don't turn to Tom's Hardware.