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AMD Unveils Elite A-Series APUs With Enhanced Performance, Improved Efficiency
MojoKid writes "AMD has just announced a new family of Elite A-Series APUs for mobile applications, based on the architecture codenamed 'Richland.' These new APUs build upon last year's 'Trinity' architecture, by improving graphics and compute performance, enhancing power efficiency through the implementation of a new 'Hybrid Boost' mode which leverages on-die thermal sensors, and offering AMD-optimized applications meant to improve the user experience. AMD is unveiling a new visual identity as well, with updated logos and clearer language, in a bid to enhance the brand. At the top of the product stack now is the AMD A10-5750M, a 35 Watt, 3.5GHz quad-core processor with integrated Radeon HD 8650G graphics, 4MB of L2 cache and a DDR3-1866 capable memory interface. The low-end is comprised of dual-cores with Radeon HD 8400G series GPUs and a DDR3-1600 memory interface."
That qualifies as one of those inventions that make you wonder why it had to be invented... The utility is quite obvious.
seriously show me numbers
also 9.6W for decoding MPEG is pretty horrendous but this is because I'm guessing they have to power the whole of the GPU rather than a simple specialised unit
where is the benchmark ?
regards
John Jones
Only in single-threaded tasks. You get into multi-threaded and AMD begins to win outright.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
We buy lots of them for our HPC cluster. We can get four 16-core CPUs in a 1U box. Each core is slower than an Intel core, but the price performance ratio is higher by a factor of two. Of course this only helps if your jobs are very paralyzable or you have lots of users (both of which apply to us).
Because AMD unlike Intel (nawadays) makes next gen chips available for previous gen motherboards. So total cost of ownership is substantially lower with AMD than Intel. I got 3x performance boost on a several year old system this way. Because their motherboards are cheaper and use normal RAM (RDRAM debacle, anyone?). Because Intel has tried and failed to screw the enthusiast consumer for decades (except for that celeron 300 -> 450 thing, that rocked). Because their multithreaded performance is better, because their 8 core chips are cheaper, and some of us run an operating system and compute jobs that take full advantage of multiple cores. Because some of us _like_ AMD, and their continued existence means lower CPU prices for everyone.
Maybe that's why.
andy
Likewise for our database clusters. We use open-source software (MongoDB, Redis, Riak) so hardware cost matters - if you use Oracle or something like that, software costs dominate. If you want large 4-socket servers, AMD offers much better value than Intel. And if you want lots of small 1S servers, AMD wins again, because the E3 Xeons only support 32GB RAM.
You've never run a video transcode or compiled anything, have you?
I transcode Fraps recordings and upload them to Youtube, transcode bluray video for my Nexus 7, my MythTV backend often has transcode and commflag jobs queued that could run in parallel with no performance loss if it had more cores. 7-Zip will happily multithread compression tasks across dozens of cores. None of that is particularly exotic.
When you say "real world shit" you're talking about games, right? Be aware that there are things other than World of Warcraft that will tax a CPU, and they aren't imaginary or hypothetical.
AMD don't have anything that can compete with Intel's top end on single thread performance, but for the mid-range and lower end parts of the desktop market their products are quite competitive. Building a basic computer for a relative, or an office PC that's never going to do anything more intensive than run Word and play Youtube videos? AMD's APUs offer quite a lot of power for not a lot of money. Not everyone has a use for an i7-3970X.
you should be glad people buy amd chips anymore, its the only true competition for Intel.
I buy AMD because well...fuck Intel.
In all honesty the performance different is negligible anymore, but ive had my quad core amd for awhile, its sturdy, it does what i need and i can overclock it....I have never been disappointed in a AMD cpu, intel however...i had a few shitty ones from them. I wont buy ATI however, i hate those video cards.
so just be thankful that the market is what it is, if intel had a monopoly you would be paying alot more for a shittier cpu.
This x1000.
In 2010 I bought an AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition and a motherboard I could afford. I ran it as a quad core (unlocked cores) at 3.3ghz until that motherboard died. The only one I could get in a pinch did not have a southbridge that would unlock my other cores. I still ran it at 3.4ghz without issue.
Fast forward to 2013 and I just bought a new motherboard with DDR3 ram (8gb of it, double the 4 I had before) and unlocked my cores again. Its like a new computer.
I took the old mobo and ram and bought a cheap AMD processor for $55 (Athlon II X2 3.4ghz, VERY servicable!) and gave that to my son who was still on a P4 3.2ghz. We're both happy. AMD is cost effective for those of us who aren't made of money and still want decent computers. I love them for it.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
http://ark.intel.com/ is very helpful in this regard.
Good-bye
Video transcoding, while not representative of the average computing task, is still definitely "real world shit" and much moreso than simply incrementing counters.
The 3570k is not mid range, it's high end. The only substantial difference between it and the top i7 chip is hyperthreading and that isn't always useful. In some workloads, it's actually a hindrance. The types of workloads that favour hyperthreading are generally where the AMD chips are competitive with the i7 anyway.
so just be thankful that the market is what it is, if intel had a monopoly you would be paying alot more for a shittier cpu.
But Intel CPUs are cheaper today than they were when AMDs were objectively better in the Pentium-4 space heater era.
AMD isn't their major competitor, ARM is.
The vast majority of software that exists won't max out an AMD E-350 netbook chip. Put things in perspective here: we're talking about the minority of software that will actually tax a system.
A lot of programs are single threaded or do almost all of their work in a single thread, and don't really benefit from more cores. Other programs scale almost linearly with number of cores. I was only making the point that software that takes advantage of many cores isn't as rare as the great grandparent seems to think. AMD's multi-threading advantage with its 8 core chips isn't just something that AMD fanboys babble about, there's real benefits in real software that people actually use.
I'm not sure which to blame - I've no known easy way to figure it out - but when I turn off WCG with BOINC (full-time at 100%) and I play Civ V under Crossover XI on a 64-bit Linux using a AMD 1090 I can see all cores being used. Loads range from ~30% to max. I like to see that I'm getting my money's worth out of those cores.
I've been glad to have run a Phenom quad, a Phenom II quad, and now the hexa-core off the same mobo because it saved me money.
Well, that's the thing.
If you're in the 4 socket space (40 cores intel IIRC, 64 cores AMD), then you're probably in the market for something pretty parallelizable. Which means of course that AMD doesn't reallt have the disadvantage.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"I can testify that this is simply bullshit (as in a bold-faced lie)."
No. It was rhetoric. The grand parent picked the E-450 as an example. While it was admittedly a poor example, he/she did not mean for you to take this as a literal description of the E-450's prowess.
The point, which you missed, was that you don't need either a Core i5 or an AMD Bulldozer to surf the web and write documents. This point is true regardless of the poor choice of example. For the vast majority of software out there a $60 cpu will do just fine (think modern Pentium or high-end Celeron).
In Crysis 3, the AMDs look good:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Crysis-3-PC-235317/Tests/Crysis-3-Test-CPU-Benchmark-1056578/
Only the really expensive Core i7-3960x (800 Euros or more on my side of the Atlantic) beats the FX-8350. And with a TDP of 130W, it is similar to the FX in heating your PC.
Other games are already moving towards being designed for more parallel processing. For instance X:Rebirth by Egosoft, currently in development. The CEO said in an interview that a quad core is recommended, they will have at least three main threads and several smaller ones.
So the days of well scaling games may be closer than you think.
C - the footgun of programming languages