AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted And Overclocked

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We've been playing with AMD's Trinity APUs for four months, and they're just now being rolled out to the channel. This time, we take a look at the architecture's efficiency compared to a pair of Ivy Bridge-based Core i3s. Can A10 and A8 stand up to Intel?

Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11

When we talked to Sami about overclocking Llano, he made it clear that his first order of business was tuning the APU’s graphics engine. Our 3DMark results make it clear why. A roughly 15% speed-up would be great news in the games that we tested last week that might have been barely-playable at 1920x1080.

Even at stock settings, the A10 and A8 destroy Intel’s Ivy Bridge-based Core i3s. This is the data we were missing in our June preview, though these numbers and the gaming data we already ran confirm what we hypothesized back then. 

It’s only when we start looking at the Physics subtest, which taxes x86 hardware, that we see Intel’s two physical cores with Hyper-Threading besting AMD’s dual Piledriver modules with four integer cores. 

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
138 Comments Comment from the forums
  • esrever
    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.
    Reply
  • tacoslave
    man getting this in a 17inch laptop with a 12 cell battery would make it an instabuy
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    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.
    Reply
  • DjEaZy
    ... i like the WinZip with OpenCL acceleration benchmark... it shows...
    Reply
  • cangelini
    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.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    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.
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    Chris, it would be great to see some benchmarks of applications that uses the new FMA3 instructions of the Piledriver.
    Reply
  • cangelini
    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.
    Reply
  • techcurious
    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.
    Reply
  • sarinaide
    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.
    Reply