AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[DanceswithUnix]

Maybe you should start up your own Linux review site and see if you can talk AMD into sending you parts to test...

Hmmm, maybe *I* should do that...

Have come close to doing that a couple of times. At one point when I was deciding which hard drive to buy I found myself with a test program & script I had written and quite a lot of results I had cobbled together. Think I still have a script somewhere to do an automated build of Gingerbread Android on a fresh Fedora install.

I'm sure I have the expertise, it's the copious free time is the tricky part.

Maybe after I have moved house, will have some space for a test bench then as well.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Maybe you should start up your own Linux review site and see if you can talk AMD into sending you parts to test...

Hmmm, maybe *I* should do that...

I would love to try an A10-5700 or A6-5400K in my new mini-ITX system. Hint! Hint! AMD!!

[watercooled]

I was considering doing something similar myself for low power/SFF power supplies which most review sites seem to neglect; I have/have access to most of the gear except a high current DC load, and I don't want to call something a review if I'm just loading supplies with a PC which, aside from not fully loading the PSU, isn't a stable load and could introduce its own noise which could mess up scope shots.

I might have a look on eBay and/or try to cobble together something myself.

But aside from all that, managing websites isn't exactly something I enjoy...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

If I could spare the dosh I would really love to get hold of an A6-5400K and clock the nuts off it!!

I wish more websites would test low end CPUs together.

[Terbinator]

Can these be overclocked via the bus?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Can these be overclocked via the bus?

Not much AFAIK,but probably more than with the Intel CPUs IIRC.

OTH,the A6-5400K,A8-5600K and the A10-5800K all have unlocked multipliers.

[scaryjim]

I would guess it'll be the same issue as with Llano: i.e. it relies on motherboard manufacturers implementing appropriate dividers for the main bus. I know there were a few FM1 mobos where bus clocking introduced instability as you increased the clocks until you hit 133MHz, where a 4:3 divider would kick in and make everything stable again

it's certainly nowhere near as fun to just bump the multi up, rather than messing with the multis and FSB until you find a sweet spot for performance and stability. Must get my watercooling finished so I can start playing with my Pentium DC - I reckon I can get it to 4GHz with a bit of careful fiddling

[DanceswithUnix]

Can these be overclocked via the bus?

With all that fuss AMD made about having a resonant mesh to distribute clocks, I suspect they won't like that.

[scaryjim]

With all that fuss AMD made about having a resonant mesh to distribute clocks, I suspect they won't like that.

Ah, good point, I'd forgotten about the resonant mesh. Wonder if that's why current samples don't seem to be overclocking so well either? Seems it's hard to get them much beyond 4.5GHz on air...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Ah, good point, I'd forgotten about the resonant mesh. Wonder if that's why current samples don't seem to be overclocking so well either? Seems it's hard to get them much beyond 4.5GHz on air...

Most are using the stock cooler it seems,although BIOS support might be the issue. Toms Hardware noted some weird behaviour with their Asus motherboard.

[DanceswithUnix]

Looking at the Ebuyer pre-order "number available" it looks like they have so far sold:

1 x A10 5800K
4 x A10 5700

And none of the others. Are they really selling that slowly??

[scaryjim]

*shrug* how many people are going to be building new PCs on 2nd October? That's 5 units pre-ordered from one retailer who doesn't have any stock, on launch day. Lord alone known how many have been bought from retailers with stock.

I suspect we'll see quite a slow burn with Trinity - the requirement for a new motherboard means it won't be as much of an impulse purchase as a drop-in upgrade, and the improvement over the incumbent APUs isn't anywhere near as big as the improvement from HD4200 to Llano - if you already have Llano there's no compelling reason to upgrade. On the other hand, they're in stores now and stock levels are only likely to go up in the run up to Christmas, which may mean a good holiday season for AMD. It's certainly a very strong hand they've played, and the pricing is pretty much spot on. I'm now going to have to spend some serious time discussing with friends whether "good enough" gaming performance will do - if so then Trinity + high spec ram + GPU overclock is going to save them a fair old whack of money (after all, to get significantly better discrete graphics you'll have to spend pushing £100 extra...)

[badass]

Whoa! Less than £100 delivered for the A10-5800K!

You could build a pretty decent PC for peanuts!

Shame the uATX FM2 motherboards aren't here yet.

Unsurprisingly, the idle power draw of Trinity is amazing. CPU and GPU performance is as expected.
I'd imagine there are now only fringe cases where it makes more sense to go for an Intel CPU at the mid to low end.

[watercooled]

I also hope to see a better/more available range of mITX boards for FM2.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting,in some situations the A10 seems to have much better lightly threaded performance than a FX8150!

PDF Creation.





Audio encoding









Of course the main bottleneck in audio encoding is probably the optical disc drive,but at least in a few lightly threaded scenarios,AMD has made a decent improvement.

[scaryjim]

Acrobat's interesting: there's a big gain there. I wonder if 8150 wasn't reaching its full turbo clock for some reason? The others are in line with the 10% - 15% IPC increase that we already know Piledriver has over Bulldozer. More to the point, that's a good set of tests to demonstrate that the 5800k is pretty much on a par with the Phenom II 980. And it blows past the i7 920 in lightly threaded tests - remember when the i7 920 was *the* processor to buy if you had a high end budget...?