Features - Roy Taylor Blog: The real price of productivity

[crossy]

There may not be much manufacturing left in the UK, but there is still some demand for CAD/CAM even if the mindset you are demonstrating makes it a struggle getting graphics hardware (or even decent monitors) out of IT managers.

I'll second what scaryjim said - if your IT Manager can't tell the difference between CAD/CAM station and normal desktop then he/she has no business being in that post. That said, from the benchmarks I've seen the APU's that power your "desktop" are probably going to be able to deliver reasonable performance in CAE applications - certainly in the model building and results analysis stages, although I suspect that the actual analyses will still be being processed by something Xeon-based.

Plus point of the APU (from my limited/historical experience) is that the 3D performance is probably good enough that the "desktop" can double for CAD work, meaning that the budget that would have normally gone on a discrete graphics card can (maybe) be diverted to something else, like more memory, disk space etc. CAE seems to have an unlimited desire for both memory and disk!

HP seems to be having a go at AMD based business machines ATM.

All the more reason to move your purchasing business from nasty old Dell to HP then! (sorry, that's about as "corporate" as I can get this morning)

Actually I took a look and Lenovo also offer A4 and A6 based ThinkCentre desktops for businesses, along with four (well priced in some cases) AMD based Thinkpads.

[MaverickWill]

The real issue for AMD is not that their performance is lower than Intel's - it's persuading people that that fact is mostly irrelevant. Years back I filled a complete office with low-end single-core Sempron based PCs. I didn't have a single complaint about any of those computers not being fast enough for the basic office tasks they were used for. Any modern dual or quad core processor will be orders of magnitude more responsive than those PCs, and the bottleneck in office tasks hasn't changed: it's still the users.

Absolutely agree. The majority of processors in this are overkill for what is essentially "Open Word, type letter, print, check email, Facebook when there's nothing else to do". For what it's worth, my current office Facebook/2048 machine is an old Acer with a Pentium E5200. With a quick upgrade to 2GB of RAM, there's absolutely nothing it can't do. It's great, it works, it was dirt cheap.

OpenCL is utterly irrelevant to the point being made in this article (the chosen PC Mark benchmark is one that doesn't heavily favour OpenCL or GPU-based tasks), which is that for basic office tasks you can use a cheaper AMD processor and get the same level of productivity.

Traditionally, yes, PCMark's Work benchmark had no hat in the OpenCL ring. Which is why the 4670K traditionally trounced the A10-7850K in that benchmark. I know the scores between v1 and v2 aren't directly comparable, but the performance gap has shifted from being heavily in favour of the 4670K, to parity. For what it's worth, Geekbench throws up a similar margin to PCMark 8 v1 - results for the 4670K beat the A10-7850K by a fair margin. Likewise with Passmark.

Either there's some shenanigans going on with AMD's results, or PCMark 8.2 is testing significantly differently than it was before. I'm absolutely happy to go with the latter, but if that's the case, that fact needs to be addressed. I can't find anything from Futuremark to tell me how the benchmark has changed.

I think this particular piece is misleading. On the face of it, PCMark 8.2 favours AMD APUs more than its predecessor, and more than other benchmarks. Roy Taylor is trying to say "Productivity is cheaper on AMD because benchmark", in the same way that nVidia or AMD will say "This is the fastest graphics card in the world because benchmark", when they may be behind in most other things.

I get it - Roy is VP of Sales for AMD. He's working with AMD's testing department, to make AMD products look better. I absolutely get that. However, a single canned benchmark result, posted on a website dedicated to high-tech products, to an educated audience with the knowledge and ability to know better, does not a cogent argument make.

[scaryjim]

... For what it's worth, my current office Facebook/2048 machine is an old Acer with a Pentium E5200. With a quick upgrade to 2GB of RAM, there's absolutely nothing it can't do.

When I bought my new laptop, I ended up keeping my old one: it was originally bought as a portable working machine, and it still fulfills that purpose perfectly: I use it for web, email, office, and even some lightish web design/development (using whichever version of VS Express was the latest when I downloaded it!). The innards? A Core-2 based dual-core Pentium ULV running @ 1.3GHz. It's as fast as my top end APU laptop for everything I use it for (helped along by 4GB of RAM and an SSD, mind you), but about half the weight I'd be more than happy with its level of performance in an office PC.

... a single canned benchmark result, posted on a website dedicated to high-tech products, to an educated audience with the knowledge and ability to know better, does not a cogent argument make.

Agreed, quoting single cherry picked benchmark doesn't make a great argument. OTOH, I don't think there is any benchmark that can really reflect the experience of using a PC for office tasks. No doubt Intel will come out with a response showing why it's worth spending the extra money on an Intel-based system, that will use an equally cherry-picked benchmark, that will be equally ineffective in demonstrating the real difference in productivity between systems (which, lets face it, is pretty much nil). But AMD and Intel both need to make money, and I can't see either of them wanting to do that by accepting that their cheapest processor is good enough for 99% of computers - simply because there's virtually no margin in a cheap processor.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

People forget for a lot of tasks the low power CPUs in tablets are fast enough for them,so any reasonably modern desktop CPU is going to be faster anyway. Even when it comes to web browsing things like flash acceleration and offloading of video playback functions by the IGPs,does help a lot. There is also a move towards more and more office applications being GPU accelerated too. More people are also moving towards cloud based applications,where a lot of the heavy hitting is done offsite anyway.

TBH, a lot of tasks are probably more limited by a lack of RAM or I/O considerations nowadays.

[Denis_iii]

Nice, should of added the nail in the coffin by throwing in AMD vs Intel IGP graphics results.
I'll definitely check out A10 7850K and compare to an i3/i5 NUC.

[amd_roy]

hi thank you everyone for posting. I promise you that a lot of us at AMD are reading the replies and taking note.

The real point of the blog is to make the comparison between commercial platforms, where separate graphics cards are seldom used and then make a platform performance comparison together with price. The other point that we would like to draw your attention to is the enormous success of PC Mark 8.2 as a fair and independent benchmark. Businesses, Govts, Municipalities, etc. are taking up PC Mark 8.2 as a way of determining minimum performance needs. http://www.futuremark.com/business/b...opment-program

I cannot promise to reply to everyone here but myself and the team are paying close attention.
thanks

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would be great to see more AMD based SFF PCs in the retail channel though,something akin to this HP Kaveri based business nettop:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/ads/elite-a...-705-mini.html

There are not enough of the Kaveri or Richland ones around,let alone Kabini or Mullins ones!

[GuidoLS]

As far as the US goes, he's kind of barking up the wrong tree when it comes to AMD vs Intel - yeah, Intel may have most of the market covered, but that's due to the fact that 99% of all the computers in the US education system are made by Apple - a company that has pretty much zero dealings with AMD in the CPU/APU market, and barely any in the GPU market.

Otherwise, I can see the argument to where an AMD APU would be a good fit in the business world. But without a stand-alone graphics option, I can see places where it would be a poor fit in certain education areas and certain business areas as well, but that applies to both companies.

[ZaO]

It costs nothing for a guest post from a VP-level executive in a company that all enthusiasts are very familiar with.

Roy likes to foster debate by stridently putting forward his views, much as he did in a previous post - http://hexus.net/tech/features/cpu/5...-apu-category/ - and it's up to you to agree or disagree with it. We allow him to post because he really does have an opinion on matters and doesn't hide behind bland corporate speak.

My personal opinion is that he has a point, but over-reliance on the one benchmark you do well in isn't perhaps the best strategy.

That's the thing I like about this. I hate when suits are so damn careful with how they word things. It's so fake and creepy - so un-human.

I'm not sure about everything else though. I honestly don't know which benchmarks are more fair. He might be right.

All I know is that I will gladly go back to running Amd cpu's as soon as they make something that can perform as well as Intel's chips in games That might not be very relevant to this article, but just saying..

[eugenius]

So how much does it cost to get a "Guest Post" on here?

This just looks like AMD whining that their chips get slaughtered in most benchmarks, and that review sites should only use a benchmark that narrows the gap.

Just my thoughts, I'm not biased to one brand or another, got a mix of Intel and AMD (and ARM) where appropriate.

I gather you wouldn't mind your mortgage or rent going up 40% next month. Good to know!

[TooNice]

Hmm, one thing I wonder if whether most of the people responsible for acquiring new computing equipment are really enthusiasts who would look at *any* sort of benchmarks in the first place. Isn't it more likely that they would go to Dell, go to the workstation and pick something that fits the budget for the number of units they need? I know it's 2014, and I am sure there are enthusiasts who are interested in getting the best value for the requirements, but I wonder if it is the new norm..