Benchmark Results: Sandra 2012
We know that AMD isn't particularly fond of diagnostics like Sandra, which aren’t indicative of real-world alacrity. But it does help us analyze our results by exposing potential strengths and weaknesses.
Llano doesn’t have a lot of the ISA enhancements included in Trinity. However, its efficient architecture facilitates solid performance, despite a 2.9 GHz clock rate.
Support for AVX helps bolster Trinity’s floating-point performance, despite the fact that its two Piledriver modules share FP resources. The more substantial gain happens in integer throughput, which benefits from higher clock rates and four distinct cores.
Trinity includes acceleration for AES encryption and decryption, and the performance of that feature is closely tied to available memory bandwidth. Llano does not support those additional instructions, which is why it lands at the bottom of this chart for AES throughput.
Despite common data rates and timing settings, the Llano-based APU gets more out of its dual-channel DDR3 memory controller than Trinity. AMD’s newer design technically supports higher settings, though, meaning you should be able to get up to DDR3-2133 using one slot per channel.