AMD's Trinity APU Efficiency: Undervolted And Overclocked

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proffet

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question, which do you prefer an i3-2120 or i5-2300.?
or the Ivy Bridge versions, doesn't matter, same concept.
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]proffet[/nom]question, which do you prefer an i3-2120 or i5-2300.?or the Ivy Bridge versions, doesn't matter, same concept.[/citation]

The i3s can't be overclocked more than marginally right now, so it's an easy choice. The point was that if they could, then the locked i5s would be a more expensive yet inferior choice for most modern games. For future games as they get more well-threaded, the i5 would get progressively superior and would overtake the highly overclocked i3 when overclocked through Turbo, but it would still be more expensive and by that time, anyone who wouldn't still be happy with the overclocked i3 would probably be upgrading soon if they haven't already. It's the same reason for why people who don't overclock would buy an i3 instead of a Phenom II x4. The i3s have generally superior single and dual-threaded performance in a stock versus stock comparison, but generally inferior highly threaded performance to Phenom II x4s.
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]army_ant7[/nom]I did notice that, but, as we know, TDP doesn't necessarily mean it will consume that much electricity or generate as much. Because the K-series are also unlocked, you can adjust them (undeclocking and undervolting in this case) to beat or meet those non-K APU's in terms of power and heat. You could also adjust it to be as powerful as your system solution can handle/has to be (in heat, noise, and/or power consumption). I'm thinking this should be true since they are of the same architecture or possibly the same chip configured differently. The K-series might even have higher binning.Even regular people would look at the clockrate and think it's better. Maybe the lower TDP rating would appeal to them more if they aren't aware of what I said above, or this could be a marketing scheme for AMD to increase initial sales because people might think it's a deal to get the more powerful APU for the same price as a weaker one.[/citation]

The lower TDP, for better or worse in real-world, is why the 5700 is cheaper. Overclocking/underclocking/undervolting is also generally not accounted for in pricing because most people don't overclock, especially the majority of the target audience of the APUs. The pricing usually isn't about what you can do with the parts, but what the parts do for you without you altering the settings. As the end of your post said, it's mostly about marketing.
 

army_ant7

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I agree with what you said about pricing and also that a lot of people don't overclock. I sort of acknowledged that in my previous post. Though with what I highlighted above in bold, that's the thing, the A10-5700 costs the same as the A10-5800K, for now, but this is release price. Same with the two A8's, those two are priced the same as well. :)
 
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Benchmark the Intel Core i3 is with a dedicated GPU equivalent to AMDs Trinity and then tell us what Intel's power consumption vs performance ratios are. As others have said, at this price point Trinity is hard to beat.
 

army_ant7

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I appreciate that. :) There was another thread in the past where I considered you as not agreeable (not in your points but in your manners), though you seem pretty alright to me now. I hope we can all stay this way. Less (personal) conflict, more intellectual, entertaining, and friendly discussions even if opinions conflict. :)
 

proffet

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agreed, I'm just opinionated at times and other times I more 'messy' than anything.
:)
 

mlscrow

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Not that the article is misleading in any way, but being an enthusiast and being brave enough to admit that I am an AMD fan (I support competition, because it leads to lower prices for consumers, like me), even I can't help but notice the, not so much unwarranted, but rather pity praise that Tom's has given AMD in this article. Maybe the author is like me and has felt bad for AMD and all the mistakes they made and the heat they got for those mistakes over the past few years, leading to their brush with dismantlement, and thus wanted to provide something positive for AMD for once, but regardless of whether or not that's truly the case, the positive tone of the article does seem somewhat forced. Just my .02¢
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]mlscrow[/nom]Not that the article is misleading in any way, but being an enthusiast and being brave enough to admit that I am an AMD fan (I support competition, because it leads to lower prices for consumers, like me), even I can't help but notice the, not so much unwarranted, but rather pity praise that Tom's has given AMD in this article. Maybe the author is like me and has felt bad for AMD and all the mistakes they made and the heat they got for those mistakes over the past few years, leading to their brush with dismantlement, and thus wanted to provide something positive for AMD for once, but regardless of whether or not that's truly the case, the positive tone of the article does seem somewhat forced. Just my .02¢[/citation]

Given that the article doesn't compare two systems that are built ideally for the same purpose, I don't think that the article's tone matters much.
 

decembermouse

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[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.[/citation]

I would love to read this article. If you get a chance to do this, could you include Trinity chips at stock settings, undervolted, and maybe overclocked?

One thing I love to do with AMD chips is to change the highest P-state (the idle P-state), by altering the divider say with K10Stat software, so that it's a lower clock speed. 400MHz idle speed instead of 800MHz per core, for instance. With a quad- or even dual-core, just using a newer browser and Word, Excel, Firefox/Chrome, or other basic applications, this can be plenty of power. This comes with a commensurate decrease in voltage of course, which can also mean that laptop fans no longer need to run because often at a lowered P0, the CPU/APU doesn't put out enough heat to reach the threshold for fan spin-up. You can do this on desktop as well as laptop systems with AMD chips.

I often change the next-highest P-State to bridge the gap between 400MHz and whatever the default next step up in clock speed would have been.

800MHz --> 400MHz
1600MHz --> 800MHz or 1200MHz
2200MHz --> 2200MHz as usual, typically
And so on.

That's just an example of what I do, not a recipe for any particular chip. This technique has improved battery life for a number of my friends with AMD laptops.

I'd love to see overall system power consumption with this approach, compared to stock and regular undervolted (but not underclocked), if you have the time... thanks!
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]decembermouse[/nom]I would love to read this article. If you get a chance to do this, could you include Trinity chips at stock settings, undervolted, and maybe overclocked?One thing I love to do with AMD chips is to change the highest P-state (the idle P-state), by altering the divider say with K10Stat software, so that it's a lower clock speed. 400MHz idle speed instead of 800MHz per core, for instance. With a quad- or even dual-core, just using a newer browser and Word, Excel, Firefox/Chrome, or other basic applications, this can be plenty of power. This comes with a commensurate decrease in voltage of course, which can also mean that laptop fans no longer need to run because often at a lowered P0, the CPU/APU doesn't put out enough heat to reach the threshold for fan spin-up. You can do this on desktop as well as laptop systems with AMD chips.I often change the next-highest P-State to bridge the gap between 400MHz and whatever the default next step up in clock speed would have been.800MHz --> 400MHz1600MHz --> 800MHz or 1200MHz2200MHz --> 2200MHz as usual, typicallyAnd so on.That's just an example of what I do, not a recipe for any particular chip. This technique has improved battery life for a number of my friends with AMD laptops.I'd love to see overall system power consumption with this approach, compared to stock and regular undervolted (but not underclocked), if you have the time... thanks![/citation]

There are stock, overclocked, and undervolted comparisons, but the results are probably kinda skewed by the ridiculous PSU.
 

army_ant7

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To anyone it may concern, I just want to point this out. When Chris said this:

I think this was the outcome:


 
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What an enormous achievement by AMD, their best of the best are now almost on par with Intel's worst of the worst from last generation. Congratulations AMD's engineering team, you must be proud.
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]Tracker821[/nom]What an enormous achievement by AMD, their best of the best are now almost on par with Intel's worst of the worst from last generation. Congratulations AMD's engineering team, you must be proud.[/citation]

This is not AMD's best, i3s aren't Intel's worst, these are clearly far superior with their IGPs while trading blows in CPU performance, and AMD's engineering team clearly did a good job with what they had. They improved on graphics performance and CPU performance without needing to increase power consumption (in fact, it seems to have gone down, especially at idle) and without needing a new process technology. Beyond that, the i3s that were compared here are from Intel's current generation. The only thing that you were accurate about is that AMD's engineering team should be proud of the improvements made and no one here needs someone to point out that it was obviously sarcasm.
 
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Has anyone come across real world power consumption figures for either the A8-5500 vs A8-5600K or the A10-5700 vs A10-5800K. These have different TDPs, 65W vs 100W and slightly different clocks. But I'm wondering whether the K ones are really that bad in general or it's partially that they wanted more headroom since the K ones are to some extent designed to be overclocked. Of course the different ratings means that you may get unlucky and get a fairly high consumption K processor because of binning but still may be relevent. I'm somewhat out of date and not familiar with how turbo works, but I'm guessing the higher binning means it will stay at turbo for longer so a proper test should also try limiting the K to be the same as the non K just to see if that's the primary reason for any differences. (Ideally also limit the frequencies.)

Most reviews seem to be of the Ks I presume because that's what AMD sent out for testing.
 

luciferano

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[citation][nom]Nil Einne[/nom]Has anyone come across real world power consumption figures for either the A8-5500 vs A8-5600K or the A10-5700 vs A10-5800K. These have different TDPs, 65W vs 100W and slightly different clocks. But I'm wondering whether the K ones are really that bad in general or it's partially that they wanted more headroom since the K ones are to some extent designed to be overclocked. Of course the different ratings means that you may get unlucky and get a fairly high consumption K processor because of binning but still may be relevent. I'm somewhat out of date and not familiar with how turbo works, but I'm guessing the higher binning means it will stay at turbo for longer so a proper test should also try limiting the K to be the same as the non K just to see if that's the primary reason for any differences. (Ideally also limit the frequencies.) Most reviews seem to be of the Ks I presume because that's what AMD sent out for testing.[/citation]

TDP is Thermal Design Power. The 5800K's might be higher so that it can hit high Turbo frequencies without its power consumption increasing beyond the point of throttling. If so, then it would only use somewhat more power except at load where each model probably reach for their full TDP.
 

scannall

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Ya know, if AMD were to manage to make Trinity workable in multiple CPU scenarios it'd be a pretty cool thing. 4 A-10's on a motherboard, with the GPU's Crossfired might be a great deal of fun to play with.
 

melbguy99

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I am going to ask a noob question so please be nice. Why does this article benchmark AMD Quad-core processors against Intel Dual-core processors? Surely that is an uneven contest?

In the benchmarks the AMD processors beat the Intel processors for multi-threaded tasks, but is that not a misleading test because AMD had 4 processors and Intel only had 2? Surely the results would have been different if the AMD Quad cores had gone up against Intel Quad cores?

I must be missing something very obvious. Can someone please explain?
 

army_ant7

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A valid question. :) I believe the answer to it is "price." Just to elaborate, if AMD is able to offer this specific quad-core for the same price as that specific Intel dual-core, then you'd compare which is more worth buying, which I believe is the point of making this article, aside from the leisure of reading about both competing with one another. Intel's current quad-cores are a little up there in price compared to AMD's offerings. :)
 

melbguy99

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Ahhh, thank you very much! That makes a lot of sense! :)
 

ashman2k2

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For a fair comparison of power consumption, the Intel system should be equipped with discreet graphics comparable to the AMD APU. I suspect in that scenario the Intel solution would consume more power. This is the whole idea behind the on die GPU of the AMD APU.
I really love how some people have begun looking at idling power consumption...this is a BIG DEAL!
When it comes to fair comparisons of Energy usage one must be wary...eg. Ethanol, hybrid vehicles #FirstLawOfThermodynamics
 

youssef 2010

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[citation][nom]abitoms[/nom]Chris, and team, a few things I - and probably others- would like to see here;1. overclocked/undervolted benchmarks for the i3 parts2. dedicated gpu game benchmarks at 1440, 1680, 1920 for the A10 and the A83. More OpenCl benchmarks with and without dedicated GPUs for the i3 parts as well as the A10 partsp.s. I realised I was getting thumbed up and down for this. do these seem like too many requests? nobody has covered trinity like toms and that too with superb writing quality. is it wrong for me to get greedy to read more of their stuff? :) i'm addicted to this stuff is all. now if you'd excuse me, I have an F5 button to press.[/citation]

Core i3s can't be overclocked. Don't know about undervolting though. Aside from that, I can't imagine why anybody would thumb you down for this.

Instead of pressing F5, you can install an automatic refresh extension. I'm using chrome and that add-on is great when you need it
 

army_ant7

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Just want to point this out. As was mentioned previously, you can technically overclock an i3 using BCLK, though I don't think it's recommended. :)
 

jakey1995abc

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Will I be able to use this in my laptop if I can find a way to cool it, my laptops current processor is AMD A10-4600M and the laptop is a Samsung NP355V5C-S01UK. please I'm in desperate need of a processor that might be compatible. :(
 
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