AMD Trinity On The Desktop: A10, A8, And A6 Get Benchmarked!

Features
By Chris Angelini
published

Benchmark Results: Content Creation

3ds Max is known as a floating-point-intensive application, and it’s in this test that Piledriver’s shared resources hurt its performance relative to Llano. A8-3850 isn’t even the quickest previous-gen APU available, and it’s still faster than the unreleased A10-5800K in this real-world metric.

Fortunately, APUs aren’t being positioned as great solutions for workstations. Nevertheless, 3ds Max serves as a reminder that AMD’s newest architecture makes certain compromises that affect the behavior of some applications positively and others negatively.

The same goes for SolidWorks. Although the Trinity-based parts don’t trail by much, you wouldn’t expect a flagship A10 to lose out to last year’s A8. But when you’re pushing floating-point-heavy math, that’s the trade-off you’re going to see.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
237 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mayankleoboy1
    Nice scoop, Chris!
    Reply
  • Youngmind
    This is so exciting! AMD is probably going to dominate the lower-end and give the poor gamers like me more bang-for-buck as their IGP get better and better :)!
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    depending on how its priced, its a really nice alternative for bare budget gaming that opens up a quad core as well
    Reply
  • I can't WAIT for this, HAIL AMD!!!!
    Reply
  • So this means that a 'Crossfired' Trinity APU would beat ANY similarly-priced Intel (CPU+discrete GPU) ???
    Well at least in gaming
    Reply
  • dudewitbow
    JiggerByteSo this means that a 'Crossfired' Trinity APU would beat ANY similarly-priced Intel (CPU+discrete GPU) ???Well at least in gaming
    really the question is what gpus are able to hybrid crossfire with it. the information was never public. not all amd gpus will hybrid crossfire with it.
    Reply
  • Well, where are the Ivy/Sandy i5's and i3's???

    Once they are pitted against each other, that will be A TRUE measure of the APU Trinity's marketability
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    in the OpenCL Winzip benchmark, when openCL is enabled the workload is done only by the iGPU or the CPU as well ?

    i mean what is the processor usage during the benchmark ? are all CPU cores used? or only one?
    Reply
  • cangelini
    mayankleoboy1in the OpenCL Winzip benchmark, when openCL is enabled the workload is done only by the iGPU or the CPU as well ?i mean what is the processor usage during the benchmark ? are all CPU cores used? or only one?Good question--I'll take a look for you.
    Reply
  • monkeymonk
    This is awesome. Glad to hear pile driver is making improvements.
    Reply