Benchmark Results: Adobe CS5 And 6
Our well-threaded Photoshop CS6 benchmark definitely appreciates the quad-core APUs, favoring two Trinity-based chips over Llano. It’s only when one Piledriver module is stripped from the design that performance plummets.
This is one of those very real-world tests that AMD likes to talk about—applying filters to your work in Photoshop can clearly keep you waiting a while. And if you go the dual-core route, you’ll literally be waiting around twice as long for the task to finish up.
I’d hope that any serious video editor using Premiere Pro already knows the application’s GPU acceleration (enabled via CUDA) is the way to go. If not, though, more CPU cores are the way to go in this threaded app.
Once again we have a very real-world piece of software being used in a very practical way: rendering a finished project. Surely, AMD would agree that the dual-core 65 W APU wasn’t designed for this sort of workload, as it’s simply decimated.
The quad-core APUs do quite a bit better, and the Piledriver architecture easily leverages its clock rate advantage and improved IPC to maneuver around Llano.
But because I already drew one reference to how much better AMD’s integrated Radeon graphics are than Intel’s HD Graphics, I feel it’s equally important to point out Ivy Bridge’s superiority in x86-based workloads. The $210 Core i5-3550 gets this job done in less than half of the time.
Our After Effects workload doesn’t take nearly as long. However, it reflects a similar performance story. Two Trinity-based APU models outmode the A8-3850, while the dual-core A6 trails by a large margin.
