Slashdot Mirror
AMD Trinity APUs Stack Up Well To Intel's Core 3
Barence writes "AMD's APUs combine processor and graphics core in the same chip. Its latest Trinity chips are more powerful than ever, thanks to current-generation Radeon graphics and the same processing cores as AMD's full-fat FX processors. They're designed to take down Intel's Core i3 chips, and the first application and gaming benchmarks are out. With a slight improvement in applications and much more so in games, they're a genuine alternative to the Core i3."
MojoKid writes with Hot Hardware's review, which also says the new AMD systems "[look] solid in gaming and multimedia benchmarks, writing "the CPU cores clock in at 3.8GHz / 4.2GHz for the A10-5800K and 3.6GHz / 3.9GHz for A8-5600K, taking into account base and maximum turbo speeds, while the graphics cores scale up to 800MHz for the top A10 chip."
AMD is finally competitive with Intel's lowest end offerings again!
Yay!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
graphics blows Intel away and what better faster cpu or slower cpu with much better video??
One down.....two to go!
AMD has apparently forbidden testers to write about cpuperformance.
In their NDA-contract it's specified
"In previewing x86 applications, without providing hard numbers until October [something], we are hoping that you will be able to convey what is most important to the end-user which is what the experience of using the system is like. As one of the foremost evaluators of technology, you are in a unique position to draw educated comparisons and conclusions based on real-world experience with the platform,"
and
"The topics which you must be held for the October [sometime], 2012 embargo lift are
- Overclocking
- Pricing
- Non game benchmarks"
So the reviews coming out are only from sources that has decided to go along with those "guidelines". In other words, not complete, I would say extremly biased.
AMD allowed websites to publish a preview of the benchmarks before the estimated date if they only focused on graphics performance. This is an unfair move by AMD.
Read http://techreport.com/blog/23638/amd-attempts-to-shape-review-content-with-staged-release-of-info for more details
(maybe in a couple of weeks you will find that AMD Trinity APUs have abysmal x86 performance compared to Intel CPUs)
Disclaimer: I own a laptop with an AMD cpu inside
Is it the official name of the Haswell packages?
Un-fucking-believable.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Still consuming 140-150 watts at peak load vs intel's ~90. Good to see the graphics numbers coming up though.
The reason I highlight power is that the integrated graphics power could be a huge advantage in a low-end laptop. As long as it doesn't kill battery life.
But does it run linux worth a damn? Inquiring minds want to know. I got boned by buying an Athlon 64 L110/R690M machine for which proper Linux support was never forthcoming. Now I want to see power saving and the graphics driver work before I give AMD money for more empty promises about Linux support.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All prerelease info is like this, same with any reviewer who got the part for free.
What we really need is the consumer reports of computer hardware. Buy it only from normal vendors and don't advertise.
I admit, I am one of the last few ideologues in PC gaming. I would never consider AMD graphic card due to shitty drivers and I would never consider Intel CPU due to socket shenanigans. Yes, I am actually one of the rare few people who upgrades CPUs and cares about socket backwards comparability.
My current gaming rig uses Zambezi 8-core AMD CPU, still adequate but it shows its age. I am disappointed AMD hasn't come up with an upgrade, but I can wait.
My last gaming rig lasted me over 4 years and going. I started with Athlon X2 end ended with Phenom II X4. It is still in use as a media PC, and still capable of gaming.
Maybe it is dumb luck, but every AMD chip I had was running cool, overclocked well and lasted. Every Intel chip I owned didn't overclock well and had problems staying cool.
Meth is a hell of a drug.
I am John Hurt.
I was just wondering if the quality of the video drivers has improved at all since ATI was rebranded to AMD.
ATI was notorious for how awful its video drivers were. My current laptop has a Mobility Radeon X1400. Whenever I play a video that uses Overlay, there is about a 2% chance that it will hard-freeze the system. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on an Intel or Nvidia graphics product.
I also sometimes get system-stopping delays that are several seconds long when running 3D games, it seems to happen just before textures are created, like it has something to do with the game trying to allocate video memory.
But anyway, have ATI's drivers gotten any better?
For the last few years I have only been buying Intel hardware because it just works out of the box with all Linux distros. Is this AMD thing going to work out of the box in Linux?
No, I'm not going to take time to download and install drivers. That crap is for M$ users. Yeah, yeah, I know Intel graphics are not the fastest thing out there. Save it for someone who cares. The Intel graphics are fast enough for the games that I write and play.
Multiple applications open at once cover the multicore need quite nicely. At this point the clock on both is in the good enough territory, for me it would be just price.
Article states, "They're designed to take down Intel's Core i3 chips, and the first application and gaming benchmarks are out."
I3's are meant for basic desktop and doing your homework, not a gaming rig. So they are saying, Hey, our new chip is just as crappy at games as the I3... Brilliant marketting.
No one cares about dedicated graphics cards.... unless they play games.
Or do cuda-enabled research.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
- Non game benchmarks"
I'm all for AMD, but the reason in the NDA is the purest of BS. Either that, or AMD doesn't think people will be using their chips for number crunching, compilation and creative tools in the "real world".
The Intel Core i3 is a dual core chip. They're comparing that to an AMD Quad core chip. Sure, AMD graphics are better than Intel - you know since they bought ATI. They better look out, Intel is now a full process node ahead of the entire industry. They might catch up in graphics performance just by widening the process gap and throwing more transistors at it.
from the 2011 Symposium on Application Accelerators in High-Performance Computing (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2060321/)
"Depending on the benchmark, our results show that Fusion produces a 1.7 to 6.0-fold improvement in the data-transfer time, when compared to a discrete GPU. In turn, this improvement in data-transfer performance can significantly enhance application performance. For example, running a reduction benchmark on AMD Fusion with its mere 80 GPU cores improves performance by 3.5-fold over the discrete AMD Radeon HD 5870 GPU with its 1600 more powerful GPU cores."
So if your interest is in crunching lots of data, you can do it a lot more efficiently with an APU since you don't have to shuttle across the bus.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
AMD has apparently forbidden testers to write about cpuperformance.
Until October 2, when all the testers are all allowed to write about CPU performance. They can do their testing now, and write their report now, and publish on October 2, so on October 2 there will be a whole bunch of complete reports all appearing at once.
It wasn't hard for me to figure out that the date is October 2, because it was plainly stated in both the preview articles I read yesterday. I'll grant you that neither articles linked on this Slashdot story came out with the date, but you could have found it pretty easily.
The rest of your post looks pretty silly when you consider that the embargo ends on October 2. Most normal people would say that 5 days (3 business days) from now is not terribly far into the future.
And your "October [something]" just looks like a disingenuous attempt to fool us. What's your deal anyway? If you are trying to fool us, shame on you. If you are just too lazy to find the date, shame on you.
Given that you gave what appear to be quotes lifted from the NDA, with the date actually redacted, I'm going with the former. Either you are fooling us that you have seen the NDA, or you have seen the NDA and you deliberately edited out the date to try to confuse the issue somehow. Seriously man, what is your deal anyway?
Multiple applications that don't need the disk.
Almost all of my background stuff is hitting disk, especially the backgroundy type stuff.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Oh really? I'll quote and highlight the relevant portion "On 17 April 2007, NVIDIA released the GeForce 8500 GT, 8600 GT, and 8600 GTS for the low-end to mid-range market".
Now please note that the midrange was NOT the 8600 vanilla, or GT, but the GTS. Its a trick nvidia has done for years, they make several cards with the same name but with different letters, so people say "I have an 8600!" while actually having the low rent card. they've done this going back to Geforce 4, where they had the 4, the 4ti, and the MX4000 which while having a larger number was actually equal to a G3 series.
So I'm sorry but you're wrong. I can see how you were confused, just look at how many flavors they made of the 7600 or 8600, I think you are looking at over a half a dozen variants of just those 2 numbers, VERY confusing to the consumer.
This is why I prefer the number schema started when AMD took over ATI, as it couldn't be simpler. the first number is the series, 3xxx, 4xxx,5xxx, the second number is whether its low mid or high, 42xx-43xx for low,45xx-47xx for mid, 48xx-49xx for high, and the next to last number further splits the group, such as 4830 for the low end of the high cards in the 4xxx series, 4850 for the middle, 4870 for the high, and if its a 9 for the third number, like 4890, then its a dual chip design.
Hell of a lot easier than trying to keep up with which is which on the Nvidia side, GS vs GT vs GTS vs GX vs Ti and so on.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
or AMD already know their chip can't compete on the x86/64 side and wins on the integrated gpu side.
Yes maybe so, but they are cheap! A commodity.
That's why Intel still wins in multi and single core benchmarks.... wait what?
But apparently parent end user doesn't remember that Intel had a recall and replaced every CPU that an end user reported to them.
For that matter, Thomas Nicely, the guy who actually did the tracking down of the bug, not you, isn't nearly as bitter as your message makes you appear, and chided Intel for destroying the remaining known defective chips because the defect just wasn't a very big deal to anyone not doing statistical analysis or because the likelihood of anyone doing divides of values like 4195835.0/3145727.0 in floating point while playing a game, using Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or even doing Excel was very, very low. The chance of them noticing was significantly smaller. Doesn't mean that the bug should have ever cleared validation (I have done validation for Motorola chips in my past life, so I have more than a modest knowledge of what is involved in catching things like this), but I think the anonymous coward doth protest too much. Chances are if you were one of the 1% of users who owned a Pentium of that era and were actually affected in a way that you were able to recognize, then you also knew about the recall.
If you really thought that any CPU you owned prior (or since) that time hasn't had known errors in them and yet still shipped, learn how to read publicly available erratas. Those won't scare you, though, it is usually the ones only available under NDA that tend to be the frightening ones.
And I say that as a person who has never bought an Intel CPU in a notebook computer until 2 months ago.
I think you're seeing conspiracy theories where none exist. The place I copied the text from had som text in Swedish there within "[]" since it at least was in the NDA at the time to not mention the date. So I just replaced that with "something" not to confuse people and I thought it important to get the news out there about AMDs shady practices.
Let me tell you something about why they do this. Most people will just see the first "reviews" (as they think). They will skip over all "this is just a preview, AMD has only allowed of game testing" and so on and at most read the conclusion or look at the graphs and be fooled, yes fooled, into thinking "wow! that's a really good processor".
Oktober 2 is far far into the future in that regard. It's like the newspapers publishing something and that "correcting" it a few days later, 99% of the people who's heard about it will beleive what they first heard.
That's we it's a shady and underhanded tactic and you AMD fanbois will cry and bitch to no end about it if Intel/Nvidia ever do the same.
Nvidia: "You can release Battlefield 3 tests@1080p, no other tests until next week"
You: "OH, MY GAWD!!! what cheeeeets!!!!1"
Me: "This is just the kind of shady tacticts AMD pulled."
Nvidia Fanbois: "Nvidia are angels. You're post is silly, everybody can just read about it next week."
I myself have an AMD trinity based laptop and I always do heavy multiplayer gaming on it. I know its performance is better than Core i3 because my friend has a core i3 and a dedicated Nvidia graphics card, but still it can't match the performance of my laptop. AMD has definitely stepped up its product line up in the lower mid range offerings.
Get an SSD. Do that before even considering a new CPU or GPU.