Synthetic Benchmarks
We begin with PCMark 8, which should help establish some expectations of the real-world testing.
The Home test is designed to reflect typical productivity workloads, including Web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat.
The Athlon 5350 beats Intel's Celeron J1900 by about 10% in the CPU-oriented version of the benchmark. But when OpenCL acceleration is enabled, AMD's new APU leads by much more. This shouldn't come as a surprise, given the Athlon's super graphics component and its compute potential.
The Athlon establishes an advantage in the Dhrystone module. Both processors are much more evenly matched in the floating-point-oriented Whetstone metric.
The Athlon 5350 fares well in the GPU-accelerated version of Sandra's cryptography benchmark, where plenty of memory bandwidth and AES-NI support are particularly useful. The Radeon shaders are also quite helpful for hashing.
3DMark's Cloud Gate benchmark gives us a synthetic peek into GPU performance. The Athlon carves out a fairly small advantage in the physics sub-test. However, its graphics score almost doubles the Celeron, which in turn affects the overall outcome.
Futuremark's Peacekeeper Web browsing benchmark affords AMD another win, again in the 10-15% range.
Fair warning here: this synthetic benchmark was provided by AMD to demonstrate the company's new GPU-powered JPEG decoding acceleration, enabled in the Catalyst 14.8 beta 8 driver used for this review. Of course, we're most interested in how this feature works in the real-world.
AM1 can be a potential winner in this market
What was the ambient temperature during the testing ? Surely Toms is not testing in an refrigerator ? That idle GPU and CPU temperature at 13 degrees Celsius seems about 10 degrees too low, given that they have to be necessarily above ambient conditions to make physical sense. Perhaps the sensors are not read correctly (wrong offset) ?
For the Dota2 graphs, there seems to be a mistake for the color legend. The difference in color isn't resolution, since the resolution is fixed (right hand top corner of graph at 1080), so my guess is that red/black represents min/avg FPS similar to the 2nd graph on Grid2.
I think that it is safe to say that it can max out angry birds at 4k :)
On-die sensors are notoriously inaccurate at low temperatures. In this case that's obvious, but we can only report what the sensors tell us.
Good catch! Fixed. :)