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

[Kai Dowin]

To those who say a cheaper GPU + CPU can beat the APUs should remember that the overall power consumption is far lower in APUs...

Intel G3220 ($69) + R7 240 ($69) = $138 => better price, better power consumption and better performance.

Yes, I told about the HD 7770GE plus Pentium G.
It does consume more energy. Do you actually think that saving US$3 on your power bill is worth trading 1080p gaming for so-so 720p gaming with the A10-7850K?

 

[Jaroslav Jandek]

Intel G3220 ($69) + R7 240 ($69) = $138 => better price, better power consumption and better performance.

It does consume more energy. Do you actually think that saving US$3 on your power bill is worth trading 1080p gaming for so-so 720p gaming with the A10-7850K?

Are you sure you meant to respond to me?
Anyway, G3220 (~40W) + R7 240 (~30W) = ~70W (better than Kaveri).
Any sane person would rather go for HD 7790 (85W, $115) for a combined price of $184 ($11 more than A10-7850), ~125 W and massively better performance.

 

[Aoyagi]

Ugh, you didn't test the CPU side on its own. Disappoint.

 

[Kai Dowin]

Intel G3220 ($69) + R7 240 ($69) = $138 => better price, better power consumption and better performance.

It does consume more energy. Do you actually think that saving US$3 on your power bill is worth trading 1080p gaming for so-so 720p gaming with the A10-7850K?

Are you sure you meant to respond to me?
Anyway, G3220 (~40W) + R7 240 (~30W) = ~70W (better than Kaveri).
Any sane person would rather go for HD 7790 (85W, $115) for a combined price of $184 ($11 more than A10-7850), ~125 W and massively better performance.

I beg your pardon. It was to CommentariesAnd More.

 

[vmem]

Has anyone noticed that Kaveri has about double the transistor count of Haswell CPUs? Kind of crazy, given the performance.

I think the lack of innovation from Intel's side is a sign that this type of technology will not give us any noticeable gain in performance until the fab process further improves.

Make no mistake. Intel CPU architecture is improving as well (QuickSync g3, AVX2, 2 more execution ports and instruction-level parallelism => better branch prediction, superscalar and out-of-order execution, etc.). It is not just die shrinks.

These are what I meant by Intel thinking it is 'not worth while' to push too hard on heterogeneous computer right now, either due to imperfections in the current architecture, too much power-draw, or there simply being not enough space with the current process until we reach another die shrink. I am aware that intel is doing lots of other stuff (though I didn't read much about superscalar and out-of-order execution).

My point is that for all our hate directed at Intel (not trying to be a fanboi here... I am invested in AMD, NOT Intel so there you have it), it's not like Intel is a company of patent trolls and hack-scientists. They have tons of resources and research done accumulated over the years, and all things point to what AMD is doing now may not be deemed 'profitable' for Intel to pursue. This is further reinforced by Kaveri needing so many more transistors to compete with Haswell. Keeping in manufacturing costs in mind, and we have a clear reason why AMD is delaying desktop Steamroller: it is either too inefficient, or too costly to produce to compete with Haswell/Broadwell architectures

 

[TEAMSWITCHER]

AMD is dead to me....

 

[zipspyder]

From Article: "Personally, I’d go for a $75 Athlon X4 740 and a Radeon HD 7750 for close to the same amount of money…at least until HSA-optimized software gives us a reason to favor Kaveri-based APUs."Only problem with this comment, is that you would not get True Audio or Mantle Support. Mantle could provide upto a 20% boost in supported games. You can't get that with a Radeon HD 7750. And if anyone did buy that combo, they would be better off buying the Athlon x4 750 for the same price, but getting an additional 200MHz CPU clock.

Umm...isn't the 7750 gcn based? Why wouldn't it support Mantle?

 

[beerdette]

I would be interested to see the differences between RAM speeds from 1600 MHz to 2400 MHz. I know that the speed has a direct effect to games FPS but I wonder how much it will affect it.

 

[Onus]

At the high end, yes I wouldn't build AMD. But, for a daily driver? AMD offers a very cost-effective all-around solution that quite honestly meets the needs of most people.
Expecting to play BF4 on Ultra with an APU is like expecting to enter a F1 race with the family car. The family car can do everything the typical driver needs; for more specialized tasks, something a lot more expensive is needed. As many family cars as are sold each year, AMD's approach makes sense.

 

[Kai Dowin]

At the high end, yes I wouldn't build AMD. But, for a daily driver? AMD offers a very cost-effective all-around solution that quite honestly meets the needs of most people.
Expecting to play BF4 on Ultra with an APU is like expecting to enter a F1 race with the family car. The family car can do everything the typical driver needs; for more specialized tasks, something a lot more expensive is needed. As many family cars as are sold each year, AMD's approach makes sense.

The problem is that if you want a daily driver that can play games, you're better off buying a Pentium/Athlon + dGPU. The measurable CPU performance will be lower, but the observable performance will be exactly the same for a vast majority of users. The GPU performance, however, will outclass the A10 APU big time.

I like the concept of the APU, but at US$173 it's a no deal.

 

[logainofhades]

In a away this is AMD's Haswell: ok improvements on the desktop end and massive gains for notebooks.

I have to somewhat agree with this statement. On desktop, Kaveri impresses me about as much as haswell did, which is not at all. :lol: Kaveri in laptops should do well. Improved igp on notebook does interest me.

 

[horaciopz]

Well that was a very well writen and pretty good-to-read article, thanks toms. Hey, isnt the A10 7850k an overclockeable processor? I mean, the extra 30bucks will give you the ability to increase the GPUs and CPUs clock of the APU, giving some better numbers. I guess that's the point to put such premium. Actually most AMD processor tend to be launched with inflated prices and then they get cheaper over time.

 

[smeezekitty]

Not impressed with the CPU performance. At this point AMD may actually be better of back tracking and switching back to "normal" architectures like the Phenom 2 used

 

[Cryio]

Clock for Clock, Steamroller is ~20-25% faster than Richland. If we'll ever get a succesor to the 8350, there is where the raw power will be at.Also, the 7850K costs as much as it does because1) it is highly overlockable2) The GPU graphics may not totally be in favor of Kaveri now vs Richland, but give it some time. After a few driver updates + Mantle guess which APU will wipe the floor with all the others. We might even see the A4-A6 APUs outrun the old high-end Trinity APUs.

 

[red77star]

Another boring release

 

[fulle]

I think it's interesting that these IGPUs are essentially HALF of what's in the next gen consoles.... The 384 shaders is half of what the Xbox One has, with 768 shaders, and 512 shaders is pretty much half of a PS4's GPU.A 4 core A10 CPU isn't sufficiently powerful, and would create a CPU bottleneck for me too.Wake me up when they DOUBLE the transistor count on this thing. Not joking. Double the CPU and GPU, and it'd be usable, but right now, it's trash to me.

 

[MasterMace]

was excited for this review, but didn't see important charts. some of the things I wouod have liked to see:-max power draw-FX quads and discrete pairings compared-intel quads and discrete pairings comparedI really would like to know which CPU the APU performs similar to or which discrete graphics card it performs similar to. we all know AMD's graphics are better than intel's.

 

[selfmade_exe]

@Chris Angelini,it would be nice to do a clock to clock (boths cpu/gpu) compare between 7850k and 6800k & 5800k; downclock 7850 & 5800k, DISABLE turbos and power savings, use 1866 ram in 5800k, 2133 in 6800k (same timings in all ram modules)Thats the way to see the exact diference!

 

[Onus]

True Kai, the price certainly matters. Some people buy Civics, and other prefer Mustangs for their daily drivers; I'm not sure who would pay Mustang prices for Civic performance.

 

[west7]

we have to wait again for some apps to support HSA to judge this CPU and the prices of a10 is to high besides this everything is okey

 

[spentshells]

95 watts, that is impressive

 

[gadgety]

Thanks for great review. Very interesting with the dual graphics. Would be interested what effect would have been with dual graphics and the 7850. I find pricing slightly too high for the 7850, but I've read on wccftech there's a 65W A10-7800 in the pipeline with all the 512 stream processors enabled. That would be sweet spot for an sff build.

 

[MajinCry]

@ Jaroslav Jandek, Refer to the A8 7600.Remove the GPU part, and we've got an awesome low power chip. If AMD works with that and manages to superclock it due to the very low TDP, I say we'd have a winner.

 

[Kewlx25]

A per thread performance equal to the Haswell, albeit marginally higher clock speeds. What I didn't like was the almost 100% more energy used during load and idle.That's about a $20-$25 difference in power over the entire year when running 24/7.

 

[smeezekitty]

That's about a $20-$25 difference in power over the entire year when running 24/7.

Which is essentially negligible.