Better With Time? The A8-3870 And Pentium G630, One Year Later
AMD's desktop APUs, which combine x86 cores and graphics resources, emerged more than a year ago. We take a Llano-based A8-3870 and compare its performance from 2011 to what you get today using new drivers, application versions, and OpenCL acceleration.
Benchmark Results: Fritz, 7-Zip, WinRAR, And Adobe Photoshop
We found no differences using 7-Zip a year ago compared to today. It was a heavily-threaded app back then and remains so now, favoring AMD's A8 over the dual-core Pentium.
Finally, truly exciting results! Back in 2011, WinRAR showed Intel with a huge advantage in our workload. Changes made to the program more recently see our two comparison machines much more evenly-matched. Regardless of the architecture under your PC's hood, though, performance is significantly better, so be sure to upgrade!
It is interesting, though, that while WinRAR is more highly-optimized than it was, Intel's two cores win out over the quad-core A8. Perhaps there's work left to do still to fully tax AMD's architecture.
Our Photoshop benchmark runs faster on today's updated systems.
The filters that we apply exploit as many cores as we throw at them, which is why AMD enjoys an advantage. The Pentium isn't far off, though, using half as many cores, a lower clock, and notably less power.
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