The AMD A8-7670K APU Review: Aiming for Rocket League
by Ian Cutress on November 18, 2015 8:00 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern in environments with variably-threaded workloads. 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 ray traces 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.
All AMD CPUs performed similarly here.
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 2,867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52GB – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
WinRAR is all about threads and DRAM speed, so the CPUs that can support higher DRAM frequencies get a boost.
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 win in the single-thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads, and loves more cores.
Again, all AMD CPUs seem to perform similarly in 3DPM for single-thread mode, indicating that something more fundamental about the design is a bottleneck.
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.
Single-thread frequency and IPC win here.
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.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
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JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
So then why brin it up? What relevance does Netburst have to do with modern-day Intel or AMD?silverblue - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link
About as much relevance as you comparing current AMD CPU performance with that of Netburst.Other than that, it only serves to highlight that AMD have beaten Intel before, but I don't think Intel will get that complacent again anytime soon.
Klimax - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Only because Intel made mistake. (And hit multiple unobvious problems later like frequency wall)JoeMonco - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
Don't bring in your silly *facts*. This is an AMD wankfest where we ignore all evidence of claim and perpetually claim that [Year+1] is gonna be the year AMD releases that great CPU! Oh and we'll high five each other over AMD beating Netburst over a decade ago because that's hugely relevant still.anubis44 - Wednesday, November 18, 2015 - link
"This is an AMD wankfest where we ignore all evidence of claim and perpetually claim that [Year+1] is gonna be the year AMD releases that great CPU! Oh and we'll high five each other over AMD beating Netburst over a decade ago because that's hugely relevant still."Spoken like a true jerk. AMD's Zen is not a mere refresh of Bulldozer, and it wasn't designed by the same people who designed Bulldozer or Phenom/Phenom II. It was designed by the guy who is widely considered the very best CPU engineer on the planet. It's going to be entertaining to see what you have to say when AMD's comeback is truly in full swing.
JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
"It's going to be entertaining to see what you have to say when AMD's comeback is truly in full swing."No it'll actually be more entertaining when Zen fails like every other AMD processor for the last decade. Then you and your ilk will be going on and on about how Zen 2 is going to be the one to finally beat Intel.
sld - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Well said by someone who enjoys paying the near-monopoly prices for Intel's CPUs.JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
No, I'm just a realist.BurntMyBacon - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
eanazag: "I fully expect AMD to disappoint with Zen. I see no facts that indicate they will not do what they did in the past - fail to meet expectations at the time they said they would."If your expectation is that AMD will disappoint with Zen, then I don't suppose they'd be too sad if they failed to meet that expectation ;' )
JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Unless the benchmarks are going to translate into sales, it's not really going to matter.