Results: Synthetic Benchmarks
Sporting the same number of Radeon cores (384), it's hardly surprising that all of the A10s score fairly similarly. A slight 44 MHz clock rate increase gives the Richland-based parts an imperceptible speed-up. The Core i3-3220's HD Graphics 2500 engine is ill-equipped to fight off any of AMD's APUs, though we know full-well that HD Graphics 4000 and 4600 do narrow the gap.
The Physics module is a pure measure of x86 processing performance though, and in this one, the dual-core Core i3 finishes in first place (albeit just barely).
Although PCMark 8 launched a couple of days ago, AMD wasn't able to get us the test before we needed to board planes and head to Taipei for Computex. At least for one last processor launch, PCMark 7 will have to do. We don't see this as a problem; the benchmark is build using components of Windows 7, which many enthusiasts continues to use, and is representative of many common desktop workloads.
It's not much of a surprise why AMD doesn't care for PCMark 7, though. The Core i3's two Hyper-Threaded cores outperform AMD's two Piledriver modules in the Overall, Creativity, and Productivity subtests.
Intel's IPC advantage gives Core i3 the lead in Cinebench's single-core test. AMD comes surging back in the threaded component of this test, though, as its four integer pipelines outperform SMT technology.
Intel's Core i3-3220 returns higher integer and floating-point results in Sandra's Arithmetic module, though the A10-6800K isn't far behind in either metric.
Intel has a bad habit of using important features to differentiate its processors. The Core i3s, for example, arbitrarily lose AES-NI support. So, the Core i3 performs dismally in this measurement. Meanwhile, AMD's APUs process instructions as fast as they can be fed from memory, resulting in the great AES256 numbers.
This is an interesting result. Intel's two x86 cores deliver the top OpenCL-based result in LuxMark. All three Radeon-based graphics engines fare roughly the same when we limit processing to the GPUs. And the A10-6800K scores a first-place finish with both the CPU and GPU working cooperatively.
Remember, though that we're only testing Intel's HD Graphics 2500 engine. If you want some interesting data from HD Graphics 4000, check out this page in The Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Desktop Enthusiasts Yawn. The A10-5800K's numbers match almost identically. But HD Graphics 4000 and 4600 kick performance up significantly, suggesting that a Core i3-3225 would make a big difference in this test.
