AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

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...?

I like the fact Toms Hardware keeps to new test suites too,but the A10 is hardly slow for a CPU in price-range and is certainly competitive with the Core i3 CPUs in many metrics.

The only things which can be considered a major victory for the IB Core i3,is that they are around 10% to 20% faster in CPU intensive games with something like a GTX680 or HD7970 plus have a lower load power consumption. However,with the newer game engines generally supporting more threads,I suspect the difference will start to decrease over time.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems only Toms Hardware bothered to test the A6-5400K still!!

PDF creation





Music encoding









It looks like in lightly threaded non-gaming tasks,the A6-5400K is around G630 level.

Edit!!

Added some more multi-threaded software comparisons.

Video encoding









Video encoding performance is slower probably due to the module design.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

These two reviews test Crossfire scaling extensively:

http://www.pureoverclock.com/Review-...00k-review/15/

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/878-...lefield-3.html

It seems,hardware.fr consider the HD7660D to be around HD6670 GDDR3 level in the games they tested at 1920X1080.

Edit!!

It seems the Trinity based Athlon II X4 CPUs are starting to appear too:

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/prod...A-AD740X&af=50

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/prod...-AD750KB&af=50

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some of the saddos on the blue place,no one should buy a Trinity CPU because:
1.)You can buy second-hand uber GPUs
2.)You cannot run everything maxed out at 1920X1080

One of them is at it again.LOL.

[DanceswithUnix]

Novatech say they have CPUs arriving today.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/c...eriesfm2socet/

Link may stop working if they work out how to spell "socket"

They only have a few Asrock A55 motherboards in stock ATM though.

[watercooled]

@CAT: What do you mean by 'Video encoding performance is slower probably due to the module design.' - Trinity looks faster than both Llano and Zambezi in those charts?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

@CAT: What do you mean by 'Video encoding performance is slower probably due to the module design.' - Trinity looks faster than both Llano and Zambezi in those charts?

I was comparing the single module PD CPU to the Pentium dual core without HT.

[watercooled]

Ah right. Well I'd expect that TBH; you have one (larger) FPU on the A6 vs 2 FPUs on the Pentium. Even so, the difference isn't great.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Ah right. Well I'd expect that TBH; you have one (larger) FPU on the A6 vs 2 FPUs on the Pentium. Even so, the difference isn't great.

I just realised it only has 1MB L2 cache instead of the 4MB the A8 and A10 have meaning,half the L2 cache per core!! Unless the A6 uses a unique die,AMD should have kept it at 2MB IMHO. Maybe keeping it to 1MB means they can use more faulty A10 dies??

Is still not too bad overall TBH,especially in the "single threaded" benchmarks which some people can obsess over!!

With an unlocked multiplier,I wonder how much the A6-5400K can be overclocked?? I cannot see TDP or power consumption rising as much as the A8 or A10 when overclocked,so around 4.4GHZ on a cheap cooler and a cheap motherboard might be doable,plus the IGP can be overclocked.

I did query the V o r t e z chaps over on Aria whether they could review an A6-5400K,and they said they would see if they could get one. Would be nice if Hexus could review one too.

[scaryjim]

Pricewise the A6-5400K is more competing with the G850/860, although the difference between the Sandy Bridge pentiums is pretty much just 100MHz here and there. The Ivy Bridge Pentiums are quite a bit more expensive, and give you the choice between 2.6GHz 35W, which should be no faster than the 5400K, or 3.1GHz 65W, which will be a bit faster on the CPU but get murdered on the IGP. And they're both more expensive than the 5400K, too - the faster G2120 is over £70

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

TH places the IGP in the A6-5400K only around 10% behind on average behind an A8-3850! With a bit of tweaking,it would make a good budget box to play something like D3 or WoW at lower settings.

Also,had a thought about Kaveri. GCN has x86 addressing,which means bandwith is going to be more efficiently used too,as there should be less contention issues between the CPU and GPU.

[DanceswithUnix]

TH places the IGP in the A6-5400K only around 10% behind on average behind an A8-3850! With a bit of tweaking,it would make a good budget box to play something like D3 or WoW at lower settings.
.

Lol, do you realise an expansion just came out for WoW, and with it much harsher hardware requirements?

Recommended spec is now 8800GT on a 64 bit OS, but frankly my 460GTX is feeling the strain and I had to turn some of the graphics down to get things fluid again.

Might work at 1366x768 if you don't go anywhere busy.

[DanceswithUnix]

Hmm, Charlie says that Intel are up to their old tricks with blocking people from making Trinity laptops.

Last sentence of:
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/03/o...ricing-absurd/

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Lol, do you realise an expansion just came out for WoW, and with it much harsher hardware requirements?

Recommended spec is now 8800GT on a 64 bit OS, but frankly my 460GTX is feeling the strain and I had to turn some of the graphics down to get things fluid again.

Might work at 1366x768 if you don't go anywhere busy.

I said lower settings with some tweaking!! So low at 1280X800 or 1440X900. The IGP is faster than in the one in the A6-3670K. I suspect that is close to HD5500 GDDR5 level. With a bit of overclocking it will be interesing what you can achieve especially since the engine used in WoW is poorly threaded.

Anyway,I expect Blizzard will have to do something about performance. If the minimum requirements get too steep,I expect they might start to lose even more players.

[scaryjim]

Hmm, Charlie says that Intel are up to their old tricks with blocking people from making Trinity laptops.

Here's the article which initially breaks this:

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/02/a...most-expected/

From the 6th paragraph:

They didn’t mention how the funds contractually exclude manufacturers from working with AMD, but that is another tangent.

So, if you want money from the "Ultrabook fund", you can't make AMD laptops. Doesn't mean you can't make Ultrabooks *and* AMD laptops, but I bet it'd be hard to make a competitive Ultrabook without money from the fund, based on the other SA articles about Intel's recent ULV parts.

In fact, I think it's fair to say that Charlie doesn't like Ultrabooks

[watercooled]

Is it just me or have SA removed + closed all comments? Can't say I blame them considering some of the rubbish which ends up posted there...