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AMD A10-7850K And A8-7600: Kaveri Gives Us A Taste Of HSA

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We've spent the days following CES benchmarking two of AMD's new Kaveri-based APUs. Do the Steamroller x86 architecture, GCN graphics design, and HSA-oriented features impress, or do they come up short against Intel's value-oriented Haswell-based parts?

Results: Adobe CC

As we start testing the applications in Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, a pattern emerges suggesting that two Hyper-Threaded Haswell cores can keep up with Kaveri’s Steamroller modules.

Our Premiere Pro workload encodes a project to .mp4, and doesn’t benefit from OpenCL acceleration. Therefore, we’re left to the mercy of Steamroller, which nudges A10-7850K in front of last generation’s -6800K. Core i3-4330 is just a few seconds faster than AMD’s new flagship though.

The After Effects rendering project we run is also CPU-limited, pegging each of our processors at 100% utilization. But AMD pulls out a win. It’s not clear how the A10-7850K manages to trump Intel’s Core i5-4670K, but it does, if only by one second. Really, only the dual-core Core i3 and 45 W A8-6500T suffer in this test.

You probably already know that we script two different Photoshop tests, each with its own set of filters. The CPU-oriented metric uses threaded routines to tax as many cores as we can expose, while the OpenCL-accelerated benchmark taps graphics resources to speed up an entirely separate workload.

Sorting according to the CPU results, we see AMD’s A10-7850K just ahead of the -6800K. Yes, Intel’s Core i5-4670K is quite a bit quicker, but you’ll pay an extra $70 or so for the privilege of owning it. A much closer contender is the $140 Core i3, which uses two Hyper-Threaded cores to pull within 12 seconds of AMD’s -7850K.

But the Intel chip does quite a bit better in our OpenCL-accelerated metric. In fact, we also see the Richland-based A10-6800K finish up ahead of any Kaveri-based APU.

172 Comments Comment from the forums
  • vipervoid1 16 January 2014 11:54
    Somethings with Diagram u provided at page 9 ~ Core i5 4760k @@Please fix that ~
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere 16 January 2014 12:10
    Yeah, almost all the diagrams refer to the 4760K.

    Given that AM3+ looks like it's done, it would have been nice to see a 6-core chip. Still, one of these may end up in my next laptop.
    Reply
  • cangelini 16 January 2014 12:21
    Will get the charts fixed shortly--thanks for the catch!
    Reply
  • spp85 16 January 2014 12:21
    A10-7850k is slower than A10-6800K ?? WTF. Its all hype than actual performance to the table. Even on OpenCL GPU accelerated apps doesn't have any advantage with A10-7850k over i5 or sometimes i3 CPUs. Hopeless is what I feel about AMD CPUs.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere 16 January 2014 12:23
    12454254 said:
    A10-7850k is slower than A10-6800K ?? WTF.

    I got the opposite impression. Which graph are you looking at?
    Reply
  • Jaroslav Jandek 16 January 2014 12:24
    Thank you for the article (especially the power consumption measurements), Chris. It is definitely an improvement over Richland but kind of boring (disappointingly expectable).

    I really like where AMD is going (HSA, GCN and TrueAudio).Too bad the manufacturing process of GlobalFoundries just can't match Intel's.

    Also, it would be interesting to see the new Bay Trail Pentium or Celeron CPUs (whichever is closer in performance) in the Efficiency graphs.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere 16 January 2014 12:25
    I'm fairly sure that this is on TSMC's 28nm node. GlobalFoundries can't do that yet; this is on the same process used for AMD GPUs currently.
    Reply
  • Jaroslav Jandek 16 January 2014 12:45
    12454280 said:
    I'm fairly sure that this is on TSMC's 28nm node. GlobalFoundries can't do that yet; this is on the same process used for AMD GPUs currently.
    28nm SHP from GlobalFoundries. AMD bought over $1 billion worth of wafers from them in december...

    I guess you have been reading the articles from a year ago about AMD still using TSMC despite promises of GlobalFoundries' new 28nm SHP process.
    Reply
  • jacobian 16 January 2014 13:12
    I don't really believe into the whole HSA smoke-screen. By the time HSA-enabled apps take off, you will be ready to upgrade from your CPU again. The one terrible truth that stands out right now is that at current prices, the flagship Kaveri A10 doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Kaveri A8? Maybe. Richland A10-6790K? Perhaps. But the Kaveri A10 at $180 is a just a joke, specially after all that hype.
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere 16 January 2014 13:16
    CPUs are usually released at ridiculous prices, and come down over a month or two.
    Reply