- Aug 4, 2007
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It's just sad that a $100 AMD APU still beats a $400 Intel i7 (and every other cheaper Intel CPU) in graphics performance. It's especially annoying considering the reality that the AMD APUs pull off this feat with exactly 0MB of L3 cache. It's just insanity that Intel's graphics solution requires 128MB of really expensive eDRAM just to match or slightly beat an AMD APU that doesn't have any on die cache for the GPU... It doesn't even make any sense, when you think about - Intel Iris Pro doesn't make any sense outside of notebooks and even then, it's way too expensive for what you get.
Using normal online retail prices for new products (becuase 99% of humanity doesn't live near a "Microcenter"... ), in the "cheap but quite functional casual gaming desktop" category, you can't beat and AMD A8-7650K ($109 CND) in value for the dollar with any other setup. Even the A10-7860K at $139 CND is tough to beat with a CPU/GPU combo, given how crummy dedicated GPU prices tend to be for GPUs that can match the APU performance.
Now, imagine if we could buy an Intel i3-6100 at it's current retail price of $154 CND only it came with 512 Radeon shaders rather than its crap Intel graphics. That would be the king of budget PCs, hands down.
How about a new "Pentium Pro" that has 3.0GHz + HT, no turbo, and 384 Radeon shaders at $119 CND. It would, without question, beat every AMD APU in its price range.
And all that said, nothing will change until AMD releases Zen APUs that have IPC similar to the current gen Intel CPUs. Then we'll finally get that nice combo of good CPU performance and good GPU on a single chip, which is something that has a lot of value to mainstream desktop and workstation users.
It would be a real kick in the pants to Intel if AMD releases a quad core, eight thread APU at 3.4GHz, with 512 shaders, for $200 CND - that's basically i7 CPU performance with around twice the GPU performance, but at half the cost... So much room for improvement from Intel here, but I sincerely doubt they'll ever increase the value for the dollar in this regard.
Edit: Added the depressing link to newegg.ca that shows DDR3 R7-240s at $80+ CND. The Nvidia prices are worse...
Using normal online retail prices for new products (becuase 99% of humanity doesn't live near a "Microcenter"... ), in the "cheap but quite functional casual gaming desktop" category, you can't beat and AMD A8-7650K ($109 CND) in value for the dollar with any other setup. Even the A10-7860K at $139 CND is tough to beat with a CPU/GPU combo, given how crummy dedicated GPU prices tend to be for GPUs that can match the APU performance.
Now, imagine if we could buy an Intel i3-6100 at it's current retail price of $154 CND only it came with 512 Radeon shaders rather than its crap Intel graphics. That would be the king of budget PCs, hands down.
How about a new "Pentium Pro" that has 3.0GHz + HT, no turbo, and 384 Radeon shaders at $119 CND. It would, without question, beat every AMD APU in its price range.
And all that said, nothing will change until AMD releases Zen APUs that have IPC similar to the current gen Intel CPUs. Then we'll finally get that nice combo of good CPU performance and good GPU on a single chip, which is something that has a lot of value to mainstream desktop and workstation users.
It would be a real kick in the pants to Intel if AMD releases a quad core, eight thread APU at 3.4GHz, with 512 shaders, for $200 CND - that's basically i7 CPU performance with around twice the GPU performance, but at half the cost... So much room for improvement from Intel here, but I sincerely doubt they'll ever increase the value for the dollar in this regard.
Edit: Added the depressing link to newegg.ca that shows DDR3 R7-240s at $80+ CND. The Nvidia prices are worse...
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