AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted And Overclocked

Features
By
published

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: Compression Utilities

WinZip used to be decidedly single-threaded. Slowly, Corel has done a better job of optimizing the compression utility’s engine, and it’s now able to utilize multiple cores to some degree. Nevertheless, Intel’s chips take the win ahead of AMD’s Trinity-based APUs. This is probably because even the "optimized" WinZip 16.5 still doesn't take full advantage of multi-core chips, as I showed in our Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition review.

That’s not the whole story, though. AMD and Corel worked together to enable OpenCL support in WinZip 16.5, which you can enable on platforms with AMD’s graphics hardware installed (even though Nvidia and Intel support OpenCL on their respective products).

So, we have benchmark results under the same workload with OpenCL turned on. It’s clear that any disadvantage AMD might have suffered in the previous chart is more than made up for with OpenCL enabled.

Of course, if the Photoshop CS6 benchmark is any indication, Intel’s Core i3s will quickly regain ground as soon as Corel exposes support for competing platforms, which it plans to do.

WinRAR is unable to tax AMD’s hardware fully, resulting in a win for Intel. The difference isn’t particularly bothersome. Though, given the amount of power AMD’s chips consume while active, the conversion to efficiency makes this outcome more severe.

We use 7-Zip on our own workstations, not only because it’s freely available, but also because the utility effectively utilizes our hardware. A fairly even finish shows that AMD’s additional processing resources and notably higher clock rates more than make up for a loss in instruction throughput per clock cycle, if just barely.

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