The Kaveri Refresh 'Godavari' Review: Testing AMD's A10-7870K
by Ian Cutress on June 1, 2015 11:59 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.
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.
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.
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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akamateau - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
@Ian CutressYou last tested AMD A6-A10 using both Starswarm and #dMark API Overhead test.
When you pulished those results it was determined that all AMD APU's A6-A10 outperform Inteel i3, i5 and i7 by 100% in drawcalls and frames per second.
What was the 3dMark API Overhead for A10-7870K?
How did it perform using Starswarm?
You have those benchmarks why didn't you present them here?
When I spend money I would like to know how the silicon will perform on using high performance software.
Ignoring the impact of DX12 is absurd,
Any new systems with AMD A10-7870K will be Windows 10 and the gaming will be either with Mantle or DX12.
Users will tolerate DX11 only until the legacy games get ported to a better API.
frozentundra123456 - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
What games do you suggest he test with DX12? Oh wait, there arent any. The few games tested with mantle showed minimal gains with an APU in real gaming preformance, not some artificial benchmark.ToTTenTranz - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
DX12 performance may be predicted by testing a Mantle title.0VERL0RD - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IpATnpx45BILolimaster - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
I hope they can actually bring Carrizo to the FM2+ platform.Cryio - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Not happening.savagemike - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Back in the day the idea of a 95 watt part didn't even make me blink twice. 'Like having a light-bulb on", I thought. Now - in the age of LED light-bulbs it makes me wince. The thought of it feels like leaving a faucet on with all the electricity running out, draining the well.LOL. Whatever the reason and how ever logical I simply wouldn't buy a 95 watt part today for general use. What is the point with so many parts pulling a fraction of that and perfectly able to handle day-to-day chores?
Lolimaster - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
If you really care about energy:-You and your family will use a towel not a hair dryer
-You and your family will use bycicle, public transportation or simply walk (check nederlands)
-Implies no car.
Gigaplex - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
Do you have a point? I don't own a hair dryer and I use public transport. It's not exactly hard or uncommon.Lolimaster - Monday, June 1, 2015 - link
TDP does not mean power consumption, and the actual measures are with the cpu @full load both gpu/cpu. You don't run a cpu/apu full load 24/7.You can disable turbo and reduce power consumption (turbo ups the voltage by a fair margin).
Electric kitchen, air conditioner, those things monthly multiply any cpu "tdp" consumption in the range of 100's.