Benchmark Results: Productivity
The Trinity design earns a slim victory in our optical character recognition benchmark, so long as you’re looking at the quad-core implementation. Losing two cores (or a single Piledriver module) hampers performance in a serious way.
Llano assumes a lead in Fritz. Our audience likes to see Fritz included in our suite, but unlike some of our more applicable benchmarks, a loss in Fritz isn’t particularly concerning for us, given its fairly synthetic outcome.
In contrast, compiling Google Chrome in Visual Studio 2010 is the very definition of real-world. And while we can fairly easily dismiss the results from Fritz, the fact that the second-fastest Llano-based APU outmaneuvers the soon-to-be flagship A10 isn’t something you can argue away using references to heterogeneous computing. If you already own Llano, it's going to be hard to compel an upgrade based on results like these.
Another very real-world workload, printing a PowerPoint file to PDF format favors the Trinity-based desktop chips in a very big way. The fact that the A6 APU outmaneuvers the A8 is a good indication that this test is single-threaded, and that its Turbo Core feature is pushing performance up.
In any case, the tweaks made to Piledriver help lock down a commanding victory over Llano.
