First Radeon HD 8000M GPU Benchmarked

J. Dzhugashvili writes "As Slashdot noted earlier this week, AMD has a new line of mid-range Radeon GPUs aimed at notebooks. The chips are based on the Graphics Core Next microarchitecture, and they're slated to show up in systems early next year. While the initial report was limited to specification details, the first review of the Radeon HD 8790M is now out, complete with benchmark data from the latest games. The 8790M is about 35% smaller than its 7690M predecessor but offers substantially better gaming performance across the board. Impressively, the new chip has similar power draw as the outgoing model under load, and its idle power consumption is slightly lower. Notebook makers should have no problems making the switch. However, it is worth noting that this new mobile GPU exhibits some of the same frame latency spikes observed on desktop Radeons, including in games that AMD itself has sponsored."

Comments

Even AMD thinks AMD CPUs suck

[Guspaz]

The subject might look like I'm trying to troll, but... I'm actually referring to TFA. AMD sent the TechReport reviewer a Gigabyte Z77 motherboard with an Intel i7-3770K processor. So it says on the first page of TFA.

AMD... sent an Intel processor... to review an AMD GPU...

Talk about lack of faith in your own products.

Re:Even AMD thinks AMD CPUs suck

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they cross license.

Re:Even AMD thinks AMD CPUs suck

[cbhacking]

Depends on your definition of "suck". Price-for-price, AMD and Intel are fairly comparable right now (each one is better at some things, sometimes embarrassingly so, but in most cases they aren't far apart). However, Intel's line goes a lot higher than AMD's. A top-of-the-line AMD desktop processor is currently around $200 (less on sale, which isn't hard to find this time of year). A top-of-the-line Intel CPU will run you over $1000, and that's on sale. The 3770K isn't top of the line, but it is well over $300 on sale. Note that that's not including the cost of the motherboards either, which also seem to be higher for Intel chipsets.

To people who want the absolute best performance and money is no problem, Intel is the current king. Since the goal of the benchmarking is to test the graphics processor, they wanted to make sure that the performance wouldn't be CPU bottlenecked.

I'm saying this by way of giving you the benefit of a doubt, but since anybody who pays attention to current benchmarks and hardware prices knew it already, it really does in fact look like you're trolling.

Re:Even AMD thinks AMD CPUs suck

[Rockoon]

Anyone who has spent some time listing their alternatives within any sort of normal budget margin knows that there will be a lot of AMD chips under consideration and very few Intel chips under consideration.

Re:Even AMD thinks AMD CPUs suck

[Guspaz]

I'm not trolling, and I've owned a few AMD CPUs in my day (four, I think? Does the Geode count?), I was just flabbergasted that AMD would send out Intel CPUs to review their GPUs with. I mean, eating your own dogfood is kind of a fundamental thing, and when you do something like this, it sends the message that your own products aren't good enough for the purpose. I chose an inflammatory title to highlight how ridiculous this is.

I would actually argue that AMD only holds an advantage at the extremely low-end, below the $40 pricepoint (you can get a dual-core sandy bridge for about that), and even then only if you don't care about power. I feel bad for AMD, because I owned a long string of AMD processors, and they were fantastic products. I started on the K6-2 and ended on the Athlon XP, and they were all great. With the Athlon 64, they really hit it out of the park, and had a fantastic run, and then... nothing. It didn't help that Intel had a fantastic chip with the Conroe, but AMD had flop after flop that wasn't even up to their own previous standards. They managed to get some of the worst problems under control to produce decent chips again, but by then they had fallen far enough behind Intel that they could only compete on price, and that approach was driving them bankrupt (hence the whole selling off Global Foundries).

I don't WANT Intel to dominate the CPU market, but AMD just isn't a credible competitor anymore. They haven't been able to compete on the performance front for years, their server chips have kept some of the hope alive but at this point need twice as many cores just to stay anywhere remotely performance competitive, their power efficiency hasn't been competitive for ages, and while their APU stuff has turned out some interesting products, they have a pretty limited market since they have better GPU performance and worse CPU performance than comparable Intel products, and Intel's GPU performance got "good enough" for the kinds of uses that you'd find those chips in anyhow.

In terms of competing on the ultra-low end prices, now ARM is starting to creep up in that market, and AMD is being sandwiched in-between. I think they're a more credible competitor to Intel at this point, but with Microsoft crippling Windows 8 on ARM by refusing to allow you to run Win32 apps not made by Microsoft, we're never going to see ARM competing for the desktop or laptop market (unless Windows 8 is a big enough flop itself). We might see ARM make inroads into the lower-end of the market, which could be enough to keep Intel on their toes, but that doesn't really leave much room for AMD...

CPUs take years to go from concept to market, and I really do hope that AMD has something fresh in the market that puts them on a competitive playing field with Intel. Being a full process node behind Intel hurts, but the power savings we see from die shrinks on Intel's products isn't enough to make it completely impossible to compete from one process node behind. So I do hope that we can bring some competition to the x86 CPU market in the future, but at the current point in time, they don't really have anything worth buying over its Intel counter-part, and sending out Intel's products to review AMD's GPUs really isn't helping things.

Joseph Stalin is dead

[Nimey]

You can't fool me, submitter!

Re:I guess this is how x86 will continue

[glsunder]

The 486 was the first x86 cpu that was:
pipelined
had cache (8KB)
had built in FPU (387)

Basically, they took concepts that were being done in risc processors and used them in the x86 world.

Following up... Pentium brought superscalar design, and IIRC, pipelined fpu. The Pentium MMX brought integer SIMD. The Pentium 2 brought Out of Order design.

Re:Does it matter?

[tibman]

You need some new games : )

Re:I guess this is how x86 will continue

[ghinckley68]

Sorry your wrong. The SX used a 16bit data bus and the DX used a 32bit data bus. No 386 had a FPU.

Re:Does it matter?

[tibman]

I've got three for you to try out.
1) Natural-Selection 2 for 25$ (with no deal) on steam.
2) DayZ, which is a free mod for Arma II Combined Operations (Arma2+expansion) for 30$ (with no deal) on steam.
3) A slightly older game called Metro 2033 for 20$ on steam.

You can find most of the games 50% off during sales, like the one going on right now. Though, if you'd rather sit on the floor and play with a bit of string.. have at it.