Results: Content Creation
Based on our earlier exploration of per-cycle performance, we know that AMD’s Steamroller architecture yields a nice speed-up in 3ds Max. And even though A10-6800K enjoys higher frequencies, the A10-7850K and A8-7600 (65 W) still turn in slightly better results.
The top Richland-based APU trades blows with Intel’s Core i3-4330, incidentally at the same price. AMD’s A8-7600 isn’t available yet, but once it is, we expect it’ll impress at around $120. We’d have a much harder time arguing in favor of the A10-7850K for $50 more when it’s only marginally faster.
Both 3ds Max and Blender might be considered heavy lifting for low-cost PCs. But that doesn’t stop Intel’s dual-core Core i3 from performing surprisingly well in our render project, besting AMD’s dual-module Kaveri APUs. The A10-7850K narrowly beats AMD’s A10-6800K, while the A8-7600 lands just behind Richland’s quickest incarnation.
Benchmarks make it pretty clear that it’s worth stepping up to Core i5 (or better) if you’re into more demanding content creation apps…at least for now. After all, this would seem to be the type of workload AMD is talking about when it extols the virtues of HSA.
A pure CPU test, Maxon’s Cinebench strictly gives us the difference between host processing performance. Steamroller, operating at its manufacturing process-limited peak and base clock rates, turns out to be slower than A10-6800K.
No surprise—the Haswell-based chips are faster than Piledriver and Steamroller in a single-threaded benchmark. It’s less expected to see Core i3 in front of the APUs, though.
The same thing happens in Sony’s Vegas Pro 12 as Intel’s CPUs take first and second place, while A10-6800K slides past the Kaveri-based APUs. This is an OpenCL-accelerated workload, so it’s strange that AMD’s latest doesn’t turn in stronger numbers. But when we turn off OpenCL and run the same benchmark, completion time nearly doubles. So hardware acceleration is definitely helping, just not as much as we would have thought given AMD's more modern graphics architecture.
