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
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BurntMyBacon - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
@medi03: "I would point you to the fact that Netburst outsold superior Athlon 64s 4 to 1."True, a superior architecture doesn't guarantee better sales, even at better prices. However, Dribble didn't accuse this solution of being inferior for the market it is targeting. He stated:
@Dribble: "No one is buying, ..." and "... the market isn't there."
I don't entirely agree, though (by CPU sales) the market doesn't seem to be very large and is clearly low margin. These are not the processors that will save AMD's business. Zen will likely be the most important CPU architecture in the company's history (whether the design is good/bad/novel/obvious).
medi03 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
I would point you to the fact that Netburst outsold superior Athlon 64s 4 to 1.JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
But your silly *facts* don't matter. [Year+1] with the release AMD [Microarchitecture+1] is gonna finally beat Intel! And I know this because my irrational brand loyalty says so!!barleyguy - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
You mocking irrational brand loyalty is irony at its finest. ;-)JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
I don't see what the irony is supposed. Criticizing AMD doesn't mean I like Intel. ARM is the only real competition that Intel faces.hojnikb - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
How much did you spend on that ram ?I bet you could get pentium+4g of ram and a nice 250X (or even 260x on sale) for around the same money.
Thats the problem with apus. They need fast ram in dual channel to be taken advantage of.
yannigr2 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
An A8 7600 costs only $20-$30 more than a Pentium? 8GBs of 1866-2000MHz costs only $10-$20 more than 8GB 1333Mhz? And the card you get in the APU is a little faster than an R7 240 as the review shows.So, in the end you save $30-$40 for the same if not a tiny better gaming experience. This is HUGE if you don't have the money, or if you are a retail shop that tries to create an ultra cheap system that you can market it as gaming and also have one less part in there that makes the assembly easier and also lowers the possibility of an RMA because of the extra part(the discrete card).
AMD can't sell much, because Intel controls the market, people who don't know about hardware buy the Intel brand and individuals who are asked to help others to build such low cost machines, usually exclude AMD from the beginning without even considering it as an option, or even try as hard as they can to make other avoid AMD's solutions. That's even when AMD's solutions are the perfect solutions for specific cases, and those are the same people who constantly cry about competition. My example in my previous post proves that and it was an example based on a last week's case.
silverblue - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
Fast RAM which isn't exactly at a premium anymore... at least, right now. I just took a quick glance at HyperX Savage prices on Amazon and a 16GB (2x8) kit was £64 to £65 for 1600 and 1866MHz, and £68 for 2400MHz, with 2133MHz being a little more still. I know, it's a small sample for a single product range, and a lot of these look to have had massive reductions recently, but right now it's not really an expense going with faster RAM.If you play games that benefit from Hybrid Crossfire, it's an option, certainly more than it used to be, however it's still not at the level that I would consider to be worthwhile outside of that particular scenario, and scaling is still minimal even when it does work (in general).
I would like to know what AMD's current CPU market share is. People are forever saying that nobody is buying AMD, however based on popularity on www.dabs.com it appears that the 860K is the top CPU, with the 8320E in second place. The i3-6100 is in third place.
JoeMonco - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
25fps? Is that supposed to be impressive?yannigr2 - Thursday, November 19, 2015 - link
You are wrong. I guess two years ago you would have been absolutely sure that this generation consoles wouldn't sell because the hardware wasn't strong enough to run latest AAA titles at the highest possible settings.