Xbitlabs: Comparison of current APUs

[AtenRa]

Trinity spends about 110mm2 on the GPU part of the die on 32nm process while Ivy Bridge spends only about 40mm2 at 22nm process. Let's say 32nm doubles that to 80mm2.

In mobile, you can see that Trinity holds 20-30% advantage which is roughly equal to the amount they spend on die. Trinity on desktop pulls more power on desktop to get better performance.

Now look at marketshare for both companies. For AMD, about 50/50 is for Desktop/Laptop. For Intel its 35/65. You can see where they focus based on their marketshare.

Sorry but A4-5300 only has 128 SPs (one third of total SPs in the die) and it still outperforms HD4000 in the Core i3 according to the Xbit review. No matter how you see it Intel iGPU is subpar, it is the full node advantage they have that makes them being relative up until now. Once AMD moves to GCN/HSA architecture things will start to look even more ugly for Intel.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

I wish AMD would come up with a dual socket CPU motherboard and allow you to have 8 cores and crossfire the iGPU's. THAT would be interesting.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I wish AMD would come up with a dual socket CPU motherboard and allow you to have 8 cores and crossfire the iGPU's. THAT would be interesting.

Why would you want to go to that expense when a single HD7850 and an FX8350 or 3770k which are already available would outperform it in both cpu and gpu performance?

 

[Arkadrel]

I for one, am looking forwards to seeing what the PS4 APU chip can do.

Once they make a APU for the pc out of it,
and motherboards with GDDR5 on them.

 

[NTMBK]

I wish AMD would come up with a dual socket CPU motherboard and allow you to have 8 cores and crossfire the iGPU's. THAT would be interesting.

Splitting up the memory space between two NUMA nodes would kill all the benefits of having an integrated GPU in the first place.

 

[Gikaseixas]

You do not need to change my post or put words in my mouth. I clearly stated what I meant to say and do not appreciate people changing it.

Surprisingly to you apparently, I would not recommend an intel igp for ANY gaming, except maybe facebook or Pogo type games.

What I said was what I meant: any igp is sufficient for someone who does not game, which is a large percentage of users. If you want to express your opinion, that is your right. Just do not change my posts to reflect your opinion.

Such a drama q...
You can't even acknowledge that these are decent for older games.
It was not an opinion, it's a fact, deal with it or prove me wrong.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Such a drama q...
You can't even acknowledge that these are decent for older games.
It was not an opinion, it's a fact, deal with it or prove me wrong.

You insist on putting words into my mouth. I did not say an intel igp would not play older games, I said I would not recommend it. Why? Because addition of a low/midrange discrete card will give much better performance and make a wider range of games playable.

An AMD apu will make a wider variety of games playable, but will still be limited to older/less graphically intense games, and on current games will not be playable at all or only playable at lowest settings on low resolution.

Why is it so difficult for you to admit that a discrete card will provide a much better experience at a minimal increase in cost and little or no increase in power comsumption, compared to any APU currently on the market?

 

[Torn Mind]

It's real simple. As of now, if you don't mind something slightly worse than a 6670, an APU certainly could be worth your consideration. That is the upper limit of Trinity's GPU performance. If you want more, then the FX-4300 + stronger discrete card is the bare minimum better option because the extra L3 cache does seem to matter.

 

[R0H1T]

With power not being a deciding factor, the AMD offerings trump their Intel counterparts in this segment hands down !

 

[AtenRa]

Just for fun,

AMD Llano 3870K Crysis 3 Low 720p on Samsung 47" 1080p TV.

Power consumption playing Crysis 3 was 115W on the wall.

 

[SPBHM]

Also folks; we're still investigating the claim 7750 crossfired with 5800k - which means a world of difference in recommending things....

Would you take Intel + graphics like 7750? Over APU + 7750 when 7750 can be crossefired with the apu?

I know my answer.....I know what I'd tell my clients to get...the question is what would you do; cause if the 7750 crossfires; 99% chance the 7770 crossfires......

I would never use a 7750 ddr5 in CF with the Trinity IGP,
first is not officially supported, and second you are dealing with 2 vastly different GPUs in terms of performance, so you are limited to poor scaling, and all of the usual AFR problems, it may well give you a 15% boost on a well known (and optimized) benchmark (using an overclocked APU with fast memory), but do you really think it adds anything to the experience? my guess is that it's actually worse than a single 7750, considering this.

 

[VulgarDisplay]

Why would you want to go to that expense when a single HD7850 and an FX8350 or 3770k which are already available would outperform it in both cpu and gpu performance?

Size

 

[Hubb1e]

You guys forget that at 20-30fps Trinity is already a stuttering mess and a lot of people are ok with gaming like that. I've seen a lot of casual gamers playing on low end computers and loving the experience. So crossfire with a 7750 would probably be just fine for them and the extra 10-15% performance would be welcome. The stuttering wouldn't be noticed by a lot of them. Kids with extreme limited budget are best served by a Trinity. They can pull one off the shelf at their local retailer for a family use PC and start to game on them, taking their allowance or grass mowing money to steam for sales on 1 year old games. Portal, Portal 2, Bioshock, Civ5, Diablo3. These are all games that would run well on a Trinity GPU and are nearly unplayable on a HD2500.

And even Tomshardware who wouldn't get off the dual core bandwagon for a long time has stopped recommending dual core Pentiums to gamers and now use the PhII in extreme budget builds. 4 cores or an i3 with hyperthreading are really recommended nowdays. I wouldn't build any gaming rig with less than 4 cores anymore and that will just get worse with PS4 and xBox Next ports.

 

[Phynaz]

Just for fun,

AMD Llano 3870K Crysis 3 Low 720p on Samsung 47" 1080p TV.

Power consumption playing Crysis 3 was 115W on the wall.

Posting youtube videos of games is lame.

 

[Hubb1e]

Posting youtube videos of games is lame.

Seriously? You're not contributing to this thread. He posted the video so you could see the framerates of the game on Llano, not his mad skills at Crysis3.

 

[bgt]

Just for fun,
AMD Llano 3870K Crysis 3 Low 720p on Samsung 47" 1080p TV.
Power consumption playing Crysis 3 was 115W on the wall.

Nice find

 

[inf64]

Thanks for posting AtenRa . It's interesting since it does not look that bad on TV with those settings . And it is perfectly playable IMO.

 

[SPBHM]

You guys forget that at 20-30fps Trinity is already a stuttering mess and a lot of people are ok with gaming like that. I've seen a lot of casual gamers playing on low end computers and loving the experience. So crossfire with a 7750 would probably be just fine for them and the extra 10-15% performance would be welcome. The stuttering wouldn't be noticed by a lot of them. Kids with extreme limited budget are best served by a Trinity. They can pull one off the shelf at their local retailer for a family use PC and start to game on them, taking their allowance or grass mowing money to steam for sales on 1 year old games. Portal, Portal 2, Bioshock, Civ5, Diablo3. These are all games that would run well on a Trinity GPU and are nearly unplayable on a HD2500.

And even Tomshardware who wouldn't get off the dual core bandwagon for a long time has stopped recommending dual core Pentiums to gamers and now use the PhII in extreme budget builds. 4 cores or an i3 with hyperthreading are really recommended nowdays. I wouldn't build any gaming rig with less than 4 cores anymore and that will just get worse with PS4 and xBox Next ports.

I think it's easier to notice the crossfire problems than 15% in this case, also I wouldn't be surprised if in many games it was a lot worse than the result he got on heaven benchmark, if you have a 7750 just disable the IGP.
about the HD2500, obviously the trinity igp is far more useful than that thing for gaming, for me the only real trouble is, if you are not gaming the 2500 is enough, if you are gaming, buying a cheap card like a 7770 makes a lot of sense.... but as I said, I think it can be a good solution combined with other cheap components,

when comparing trinity to discrete graphics is good to consider the entire price, not just CPU vs CPU+VGA, if you use a 7770 you don't really need fast memory, you can get a cheaper CPU (like 750k-5600K instead of 5800K) and so on...

Just for fun,

AMD Llano 3870K Crysis 3 Low 720p on Samsung 47" 1080p TV.

Power consumption playing Crysis 3 was 115W on the wall.

interesting, but it's clear that even at the lowest possible settings in 720P you are easily under 30fps,
also is it overclocked (700MHz? it should be 600)?

and I think this is not the most demanding part of the game for the GPU, so things can get ugly... some used 5770 would really transform that PC,

looking at the tomshardware graphic, and comparing the 6670 DDR3 to the 630 DDR5 I have the impression that this game is seriously limited by memory bandwidth at low settings.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Seriously? You're not contributing to this thread. He posted the video so you could see the framerates of the game on Llano, not his mad skills at Crysis3.

Videos proving that these APUs are sufficient for modern gaming is not what we need. We need facts! Cold. Hard. Facts!

 

[AtenRa]

Thanks for posting AtenRa . It's interesting since it does not look that bad on TV with those settings . And it is perfectly playable IMO.

Is not bad but there were times that fps were diving to mid 20s(25-26fps). Trinity 5800K at 1GHz + 2400MHz memory will be fine even with medium Texture settings.

 

[AtenRa]

interesting, but it's clear that even at the lowest possible settings in 720P you are easily under 30fps,
also is it overclocked (700MHz? it should be 600)?

and I think this is not the most demanding part of the game for the GPU, so things can get ugly... some used 5770 would really transform that PC,

Yes its a bit OCed to 705MHz, i can push it up to 800MHz with this setup but its purpose is HTPC so no need to. Also this is a slim Mini-iTX setup so no extra GPUs

 

[Sleepingforest]

Here's two exceptionally low cost CPU/mobo/RAM/GPU sets. If they were actually budget builds, the rest of the parts (case, HDD, and so on) would have the same costs, so all I'm looking at is the difference between an APU and a CPU+dGPU. I picked the cheapest possible component for the motherboard and the RAM (but the APU got 1866MHz RAM). The Athlon was the cheapest quad core option.

CPU: AMD A10-5800K 3.8GHz Quad-Core Processor ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI FM2-A55M-E33 Micro ATX FM2 Motherboard ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($37.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $217.97

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($64.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ECS A960M-M3 Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($39.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Mushkin Silverline 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($26.98 @ Amazon)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 7750 1GB Video Card ($89.98 @ Newegg after $15 rebate)
Total: $221.94 after a $15 rebate.

So the version with a dedicated graphics card is around $5 more after a rebate, $20 before it. Yet it'll perform 50% better. Sure, the APU is acceptable in games, but why would you get it when the next option is barely any more and performs way better?

 

[Phynaz]

Seriously? You're not contributing to this thread. He posted the video so you could see the framerates of the game on Llano, not his mad skills at Crysis3.

Yes, seriously. Youtube videos trying to prove that a game is playable are lame in my opinion.

 

[Piroko]

Just did a quick check, the price difference would be a bit larger over here (about 30$) but yea, Trinity isn't that good value compared to their own older quad cores. Though that does have to do more with how cheap those actually are, what a value.

But you could build a whole Trinity system around a single 120mm fan @ 7V and still play Crysis on it somewhat, that's a form of simplicity that I'm attracted to.

 

[Hubb1e]

Here's two exceptionally low cost CPU/mobo/RAM/GPU sets. If they were actually budget builds, the rest of the parts (case, HDD, and so on) would have the same costs, so all I'm looking at is the difference between an APU and a CPU+dGPU. I picked the cheapest possible component for the motherboard and the RAM (but the APU got 1866MHz RAM). The Athlon was the cheapest quad core option.

CPU: AMD A10-5800K 3.8GHz Quad-Core Processor ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI FM2-A55M-E33 Micro ATX FM2 Motherboard ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1866 Memory ($37.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $217.97

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($64.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ECS A960M-M3 Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($39.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Mushkin Silverline 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($26.98 @ Amazon)
Video Card: PowerColor Radeon HD 7750 1GB Video Card ($89.98 @ Newegg after $15 rebate)
Total: $221.94 after a $15 rebate.

So the version with a dedicated graphics card is around $5 more after a rebate, $20 before it. Yet it'll perform 50% better. Sure, the APU is acceptable in games, but why would you get it when the next option is barely any more and performs way better?

The Athlon II can't match the A10 in CPU benchmarks so you're trading CPU for GPU performance. The PhII 965 would be a better match, and you'd need a better motherboard for AM3 to support 125W CPUs and all that would raise the price of your AM3 build by $40 which would be enough difference to drop in a 6570 to crossfire with the A10 and now you're nipping at the heals of the 7750.

I don't disagree that the A10 doesn't make that much sense as a DIY gaming computer because then you can prioritize what you want out of your rig. CPU, or GPU performance. But as a general purpose PC to stock the shelves of Best Buy, I would advise a friend to buy the A10 over the i3 if kids were going to be using the PC. The CPU advantage the i3 has over the A10 is marginal while the A10 enables casual gaming that the i3 just can't handle. On mobile, it's a whole different story though. The Intel mobile chips all come with HD4000 and that changes the score. Richland can't come soon enough for AMD if the rumors of significant power savings hold true.