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Benchmark Results: Productivity

AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted And Overclocked
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This well-threaded optical character recognition task hands AMD’s A10 and A8 a victory that gets extended through overclocking. Intel’s Core i3 are effectively not overclockable, so what you see is what you get.

The Ivy Bridge-based parts don’t need a clock rate advantage in single-threaded benchmarks, though. A file conversion from WAV to MP3 formats in Lame uses just one core in each chip, again illustrating how much work each Core i3 core can get done per clock cycle. If only these were quad-core parts…

There’s a similar situation in iTunes, where even a boost to 4.4 GHz leaves the A10-5800K behind Intel’s 3.3 GHz Core i3-3225 and -3220.

The AMD APUs come out ahead in Fritz, which could be due to a combination of higher clock rates, more cache, and improvements to how branch midpredicts are handled.

In AMD Desktop Trinity Update: Now With Core i3 And A8-3870K, we saw interesting results from Visual Studio 2010. First of all, A8-3870K scored a first-place finish, letting us know that the old Stars-based architecture is able to outmaneuver Trinity’s Piledriver x86 cores in specific tasks.

Also, the Sandy Bridge-based Core i3-2100 managed to edge out A10-5800K. It comes as no surprise, then, that a Core i3 centering on Ivy Bridge and running 200 MHz faster extends Intel’s lead in this very real-world benchmark.

Even overclocked to 4.4 GHz, the A10-5800K can’t quite keep up.

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Top Comments
  • 41 Hide
    esrever , October 2, 2012 6:50 AM
    Most PC are idle or semi idle when people have them on. 90% of the time I use my PC, I do web surfing or watch video or a text editor for work, my pc is not loaded with benchmarks 24/7. If you look at idle power consumption, the trinity APUs are amazing. They easily beat out intels offerings. If you are looking at the power consumption over a month, the trinity will be much more energy efficient than the i3 for most people.
  • 37 Hide
    mayankleoboy1 , October 2, 2012 7:02 AM
    Quote:
    In the end, then, both Intel and AMD are offering you an experience. Which one do you pick?


    At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
  • 29 Hide
    cangelini , October 2, 2012 7:03 AM
    esreverMost PC are idle or semi idle when people have them on. 90% of the time I use my PC, I do web surfing or watch video or a text editor for work, my pc is not loaded with benchmarks 24/7. If you look at idle power consumption, the trinity APUs are amazing. They easily beat out intels offerings. If you are looking at the power consumption over a month, the trinity will be much more energy efficient than the i3 for most people.

    Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
Other Comments
  • 41 Hide
    esrever , October 2, 2012 6:50 AM
    Most PC are idle or semi idle when people have them on. 90% of the time I use my PC, I do web surfing or watch video or a text editor for work, my pc is not loaded with benchmarks 24/7. If you look at idle power consumption, the trinity APUs are amazing. They easily beat out intels offerings. If you are looking at the power consumption over a month, the trinity will be much more energy efficient than the i3 for most people.
  • 11 Hide
    tacoslave , October 2, 2012 6:58 AM
    man getting this in a 17inch laptop with a 12 cell battery would make it an instabuy
  • 37 Hide
    mayankleoboy1 , October 2, 2012 7:02 AM
    Quote:
    In the end, then, both Intel and AMD are offering you an experience. Which one do you pick?


    At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
  • 10 Hide
    DjEaZy , October 2, 2012 7:03 AM
    ... i like the WinZip with OpenCL acceleration benchmark... it shows...
  • 29 Hide
    cangelini , October 2, 2012 7:03 AM
    esreverMost PC are idle or semi idle when people have them on. 90% of the time I use my PC, I do web surfing or watch video or a text editor for work, my pc is not loaded with benchmarks 24/7. If you look at idle power consumption, the trinity APUs are amazing. They easily beat out intels offerings. If you are looking at the power consumption over a month, the trinity will be much more energy efficient than the i3 for most people.

    Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
  • 18 Hide
    mayankleoboy1 , October 2, 2012 7:05 AM
    AMD should team up with developer of 7zip to accelerate it on APU's. That will make Trinity look better. A lot of people use 7zip. And most of the installation setup exe files are compressed using LZMA algorithm.
  • 19 Hide
    mayankleoboy1 , October 2, 2012 7:11 AM
    Chris, it would be great to see some benchmarks of applications that uses the new FMA3 instructions of the Piledriver.
  • 16 Hide
    cangelini , October 2, 2012 7:27 AM
    esreverMost PC are idle or semi idle when people have them on. 90% of the time I use my PC, I do web surfing or watch video or a text editor for work, my pc is not loaded with benchmarks 24/7. If you look at idle power consumption, the trinity APUs are amazing. They easily beat out intels offerings. If you are looking at the power consumption over a month, the trinity will be much more energy efficient than the i3 for most people.

    So, it's probable that we're seeing a difference in configuration. It looks like Anand is using the Gigabyte A85X board and perhaps an older driver version. I'm on the MSI board and Cat 12.8, with a different Intel setup as well. On the Windows desktop, after 10 minutes on each config, I get 59 W for Intel and 67 W for AMD at idle.
  • 14 Hide
    techcurious , October 2, 2012 7:35 AM
    Chris, for the sake of completeness, any chance you could undervolt the i3-3225 at stock speeds and run the power consumption/efficiency tests on it? ;)  ...to reveal how low the i3 can be pushed with some tweaking as well, and create the opportunity for a more fair comparison with the undervolted Trinity results.
  • 7 Hide
    sarinaide , October 2, 2012 7:46 AM
    Thanks Chris, another great article to pass time over. You really need to comment on the forums more and more so to help out against the blatent belligerence against what AMD are trying to achieve and how they are looking to achieve it.

    Hopefully this articale can start to filter around particularly for the budget users which A-series is premised to target.
  • 5 Hide
    Anonymous , October 2, 2012 7:57 AM
    So now that we got that out of the way...............where is the hybrid xfire chart so we know what's the max discrete card that will be supported? And while you're at it, when you find that out can you check to see if there are any significant gains when setting up a discrete + discrete + 7660 triple hybrid xfire set up, or even a quad hybrid xfire set up (3 discrete cards + 7660) of if either of those are even possible? After seeing that write up on how the dual 7750's performed, I'd love to see what trinity's version of hybrid xfire can pull off.
  • 14 Hide
    m32 , October 2, 2012 7:57 AM
    I could get rid of my family computer with a dedicated gpu and just slap an A10k in there. Most of the time it is just used for web browsing and such, so it would be an killer for my family and friends that don't need an lot.
  • 26 Hide
    bulldozer83 , October 2, 2012 8:17 AM
    The_TrutherizerNice article, but I must say that much as I enjoy the over clocking stats from AMD; To be fair to Intel their part should also be over-clocked to make this a sporting comparison. I believe the two would be more or less equal, except for AMD's APU being considerably more capable at handling gfx tasks. And yes... As some people have stated we really need benchmarks where a discrete gfx card is used in conjunction with the APUs and HD CPUs as I believe this is what most people will do currently.


    overclock the locked Intel chips? how do you suppose they do that? they weren't testing against Intel K series unlocked chips.
  • 0 Hide
    Nintendo Maniac 64 , October 2, 2012 8:19 AM
    Wouldn't it be more fair to compare the i3 power consumption to the 65w Trinity APUs (such as the A10-5700) rather than the 100w ones?
  • 26 Hide
    americanbrian , October 2, 2012 8:34 AM
    Umm, WHY DIDN'T YOU SHOW THE GAME BENCHMARKS WITH THE OVERCLOCKED GPU SETTINGS!!!

    I can't be the only one who was waiting for the money shot of what is the difference in performance when you clock up from 800Mhz to >1000Mhz.

    SUCH AN OVERSIGHT. UNFORGIVABLE!
  • 2 Hide
    americanbrian , October 2, 2012 8:36 AM
    I mean really, why not show people what they want to know? I WANT TO KNOW.
  • 10 Hide
    theconsolegamer , October 2, 2012 8:45 AM
    Where's the gaming benches of the retail APU?
  • -3 Hide
    chesteracorgi , October 2, 2012 9:30 AM
    Given the results of head to head comparison in gaming, I'm interested in seeing them compete in transcoding, and comparisons when paired with discrete GPUs. Presently AMD Trinity seems to be the runaway winner for laptops, but a poor option for desktops.
  • 12 Hide
    abitoms , October 2, 2012 9:36 AM
    Chris, and team, a few things I - and probably others- would like to see here;

    1. overclocked/undervolted benchmarks for the i3 parts
    2. dedicated gpu game benchmarks at 1440, 1680, 1920 for the A10 and the A8
    3. More OpenCl benchmarks with and without dedicated GPUs for the i3 parts as well as the A10 parts

    p.s. I realised I was getting thumbed up and down for this. do these seem like too many requests? nobody has covered trinity like toms and that too with superb writing quality. is it wrong for me to get greedy to read more of their stuff? :-) i'm addicted to this stuff is all. now if you'd excuse me, I have an F5 button to press.
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