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

Results: Productivity

ABBYY’s OCR software is very well-threaded, so Intel’s quad-core -4670K tears through it with aplomb. Improvements made to the Steamroller architecture kick into gear and facilitate a second-place finish for the A10-7850K. The next three processors land quite close, while the A8-6500T is way in the back.

Thus far, a majority of our tests have shown the A10-7850K to be fairly comparable to the -6800K. Meanwhile, the A8-7600 at its 65 W setting is remarkably strong against the higher-power parts. Curious as to how the lower-power part would fare at 45 W, I ran it through FineReader and came back with a result of 188 seconds. That’s 61% of the time it takes AMD’s A8-6500T—another 45 W part you should be able to find for about $112.

Our Google Chrome compile job in Visual Studio is quite demanding. Even the lowly Core i3 smokes through it ahead of AMD’s dual-module Kaveri-based APUs, though.

Knowing that this test fully taxes each SoC’s CPU complex, we would have guessed that the Steamroller-powered Kaveri would beat Richland. And we’d be right. The difference is subtle, but A10-7850K is a bit faster than -6800K, which is in turn slightly quicker than the 65 W A8-7600.

Printing a PowerPoint file to PDF happens in one thread, and the results of our benchmark are right in line with what previous metrics tell us to expect. Haswell dominates, Steamroller and Piledriver achieve parity with efficiency and clock rate balancing each other out. Meanwhile, the 65 W A8-7600 gives up a tiny bit of performance in the interest of lower power.

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.
  • vipervoid1
    Somethings with Diagram u provided at page 9 ~ Core i5 4760k @@Please fix that ~
    Reply
  • Someone Somewhere
    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
    Will get the charts fixed shortly--thanks for the catch!
    Reply
  • spp85
    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
    12454254 said:
    A10-7850k is slower than A10-6800K ?? WTF.

    I got the opposite impression. Which graph are you looking at?
    Reply
  • Jaroslav Jandek
    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
    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
    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
    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
    CPUs are usually released at ridiculous prices, and come down over a month or two.
    Reply