A10-7850K Performance Review

pcjunkie said:
Came away with two things. For mobile this chip should be great. For a new desktop cpu this is pretty much a bust as far as expectations go. If you already have a Richland cpu stick with it...Mantle could change it a bit but you could get the same performance with a Pentium cpu and 240/250 video card.
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Looks like the trend lately from Intel and AMD-- improved power and performance for mobile chips, but little improvement on the desktop side over the previous generation.

We saw this in Ivy Bridge compared to Sandy Bridge, then from Ivy Bridge to Haswell. It looks like we're seeing the same thing from Richland to Kaveri here.

So, for laptops, maybe even tablets, Haswell and Kaveri will make very good mobile chips.

Desktop side? It seems to be a forgotten story more and more as general computing becomes more and more mobile.
 
if you can dual-graphics it with a 7790 that would be very interesting....
 
octoberasian said:
Desktop side? It seems to be a forgotten story more and more as general computing becomes more and more mobile.
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It's not even that. Simply, the "masses" don't need more power. Here every household has already a desktop and even a 6 year old PC is enough for their use. A relative of mine who is a lawyer, still runs Pentium IV 2,X Ghz with 512MB (WinXP) and if you ask him how he feels about it, he says "Well, Word works fine! Why buy a new one?". A friend of mine,high school teacher who surfs, watches video, edits short video clips to make videos for the students and uses Word, Power Point and Joomla, is thrilled with a s939 Athlon x2 3800, 4GB DDR RAM, HD5450 (and Win7x64) that i gave him. His laptop is a 2007 1,8Ghz Intel dual core with inferior specs and GPU and he says the desktop feels like "a monster". He prefers working on the desktop, but he ain't upgrading any time soon. He told me "with this you gave me, i will stay for 10 years!". There isn't high demand for something spectacular, outside gamers and gamers can always buy a better GPU. Where the demand is low, the supply is low. On the contrary, most people don't have tablets or even laptops and they do bitch about battery life when they buy one. So improvement there, has higher demand.
 
The money just isn't in it anymore. Even server farms are going ARM and low-power multi-core.

And even desktop-side, my only aim is to match a PS4 and keep that for years and years while gaming stagnates on that level.
 
well this cements amd's mobile shift they probably have nothing to compete with intel on the desktop/server side till excavator or after...
 
Faethon said:
It's not even that. Simply, the "masses" don't need more power. Here every household has already a desktop and even a 6 year old PC is enough for their use. A relative of mine who is a lawyer, still runs Pentium IV 2,X Ghz with 512MB (WinXP) and if you ask him how he feels about it, he says "Well, Word works fine! Why buy a new one?". A friend of mine,high school teacher who surfs, watches video, edits short video clips to make videos for the students and uses Word, Power Point and Joomla, is thrilled with a s939 Athlon x2 3800, 4GB DDR RAM, HD5450 (and Win7x64) that i gave him. His laptop is a 2007 1,8Ghz Intel dual core with inferior specs and GPU and he says the desktop feels like "a monster". He prefers working on the desktop, but he ain't upgrading any time soon. He told me "with this you gave me, i will stay for 10 years!". There isn't high demand for something spectacular, outside gamers and gamers can always buy a better GPU. Where the demand is low, the supply is low. On the contrary, most people don't have tablets or even laptops and they do bitch about battery life when they buy one. So improvement there, has higher demand.
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Yup, very true especially when software today can be run on something as old as Athlon X2, Phenom II, Pentium IV or Core 2 Duo.

It's "more than enough" for a lot of people on desktop PCs. They generally don't care how fast it is as long as it runs just fine, and runs the software they're still using.

As for games, when something as old as a Phenom II or Core 2 Duo can still run a game made in the last two years up to today, means the processors we have now are more than enough for gaming.

For enthusiast gamers, though, they'll always crave something more. It doesn't seem neither AMD or even Intel will give that. And, game developers are still giving us half-decent console ports. Mantle will change this further by putting less emphasis on CPU frequency and more on CPU threads and GPU performance. I doubt something like Haswell-E will be a big enough jump between that and IVB-E or SB-E. As for AMD, it'll probably be the same until AMD comes out with a new architecture after Excavator, maybe.

On the other hand, mobile processors and SoCs are getting better and better-- more power efficient and more powerful. We have the Tegra K1 and Snapdragon 805, and then later Exynos 6, and whatever Apple is going to come up with this year or next. Intel's Atom is getting better and better especially when the newer models come out.

Look at the PS4 and XONE, the mobile processor cores of Jaguar paired with a powerful GPU are more than enough for showcasing better graphics than the previous console generation. The graphics are comparable to midrange PC graphics or slightly better.

We're practically at the point where what we have now in our desktop computers are more than enough to run games and software released between now and probably three or five years from now. I wouldn't be surprised someone still with an FX 8350 or Core i7 2600K can still run the next Call of Duty game or Microsoft Word released in 2018.

That's really telling of the disparity between software and hardware nowadays.
 
Did i miss something or isn't there anything in UVD4 about HEVC (H265) acceleration? Are they going to hope for a special software decoder that will make use of HSA to accelerate decoding? I find it very weird to to have further fine tuning of H264 and nothing specific about H265... H265 is alive and kicking already and as soon as 4K resolutions become widely used, H264 will feel "too tight" (inadeguate) of a compression algorithm.
 
and then there's this.
HSA-LibreOffice.png
 
octoberasian said:
As for games, when something as old as a Phenom II or Core 2 Duo can still run a game made in the last two years up to today, means the processors we have now are more than enough for gaming.

...

We're practically at the point where what we have now in our desktop computers are more than enough to run games and software released between now and probably three or five years from now. I wouldn't be surprised someone still with an FX 8350 or Core i7 2600K can still run the next Call of Duty game or Microsoft Word released in 2018.

That's really telling of the disparity between software and hardware nowadays.
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I agree with everything. Looking at Kaveri, it would have made a nice refresh for the Piledriver in AM3+. I am sure many gamers would buy it. Probably me too... Shame. But, yes, looking at console specs, even the companies think "why should we give more to the gamers? They already largely beat the console performance and the mass of average Joes won't buy".

AMD basically now targets the "average computer user", which may want a cheap computer, because his previous paleolithic XP era rig got fried and is happy to get a "all in one" , "clever", low budget computer, while being competitive in the more mobile devices.

"Gamers? Well, let them buy a better card! They already beat the consoles, so what more do they want?!"

The problem is, that most software most people use, will never catch up with the hardware's strength, because, it doesn't need to and because, much of such software is also used in big quantities in public structures, who are notoriously slow to upgrade. So for example, a word processor will always try to keep hardware requirements low, to accomodate ancient rigs in public libraries, offices, etc. And even if it didn't try, it would have to be terribly coded to demand anything more than a dual core CPU to run fine... Same for surfing, listening to music. This is the stuff people do. What are you going to do? Force on everyone a music player that uses 4 cores at 100% to play an mp3? :D I had a word processor, ever since i was using Amstrad CPC 6128. So how much "heavier" can you make a word processor? Not enough to justify the upgrade to an 8 core, for sure :D

I am CERTAIN that in 2018 an FX-8350 will still be able to play games! Maybe it won't be the common CPU of choice for american enthusiast gamers, but in other countries, you bet! I have played Shogun 2 on Athlon II 5050e with HD5450 and enjoyed it the same as i do when i play it on a 6 core! You 'd be surprised how much easier non american gamers get satisfied with their older hardware. In USA, because of lack of VAT and discounts on hardware (as well as higher income), you are accustomed to upgrade all the time. In other places of the world, not so. Here in Italy, many gamers are perfectly happy to play with Phenom II/Athlon II and upgrade their GPU and are as happy as an American user who just bought the latest FX-9590. With a FX-8350 currently beating heavily the consoles and AMD not refreshing the desktop line and instead going 4core APU, you can bet people will still be using it 4 years from now to play!
 
omega-x said:
and then there's this.
HSA-LibreOffice.png
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That's very nice result. The main question, is whether AMD will convince software developers to quickly enough make use of HSA or not. I imagine something similar with Mantle.

And of course, i imagine that behind the scenes, an underground war will now begin, between AMD on one side and Nvidia, Microsoft (directX) and Intel on the other side, which i suppose, are all hoping that the "innovations" brought by AMD will end up the features that nobody cared to support and thus, made no difference in real life computing and so why buy AMD and not nvidia, Intel and who cares about Mantle, if everyone supports directX.

Interesting time ahead. Hey, maybe Intel will bribe the hell out of everyone to burry HSA. :D
 
Still waiting to see how well Mantle games play on it.

AMD's got so many moving things so far and if they can get them all to work together...

I'm taking bets that on Mantle games, the A10-7850K will be the fastest CPU out there because of the asynchronous Xfire. (on games which support it, of course).
 
R3MF said:
VP9 - the google owned open codec would be nice too.
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I don't see VP9 becoming mainstream. If not for anything else, because H265 is based in good part on H264 code, which is already the standard in everything. A transition to H265 will be the most natural step and easier to do for industry, as well as home users. VP9 will most likely meet the same fate VP8 had against x264... Google may say that VP9 is better than x264, but it's already fighting a lost war... The ground to cover is very much and H265 is still very immature. It still has very big room for improvement. Current state of H265 is a bit like H264 was 2-3 years before became known to the wider audience. In other words, H265 is just getting warmed up. Google will be running for its money in a couple of years, when H264 flexes its muscles. The efficiency increase between H264->H265 will be much higher than the one there was between Xvid->H264 and will be just perfect for 4K.


According to the experimental results, which were obtained for a whole test set of video sequences by using similar
encoding configurations for all three examined representative
encoders, H.265/MPEG-HEVC provides significant average
bit-rate savings of 43.3% and 39.3% relative to VP9 and
H.264/MPEG-AVC, respectively. As a particular aspect of the
conducted experiments, it turned out that the VP9 encoder
produces an average bit-rate overhead of 8.4% at the same
objective quality, when compared to an open H.264/MPEGAVC encoder implementation – the x264 encoder. On the
other hand, the typical encoding times of the VP9 encoder are
more than 100 times higher than those measured for the x264
encoder. When compared to the full-fledged H.265/MPEGHEVC reference software encoder implementation, the VP9
encoding times are lower by a factor of 7.35, on average.

http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X264_PCS_2013_preprint.pdf
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well there goes the lifting of NDA. as someone who worked directly on this product, its saddens me that the product doesn't bring much needed improvement on CPU core.
the architects are betting on HSA adoption.
 
Regarding the benches at Anand and TR, it seems the performance vs heat and price ramps up fairly poorly from the 45W A8 to the A10, especially in gaming. Still memory bandwidth limited.
The 45W A8 looks like the sweet spot, bang/buck.
 
Anandtech's benchmarks really highlight the importance of more modern game benchmarking techniques.

The 4770R wins out in BioShock on average FPS, but there's at least one frame that took 160ms to get out, while the 7850K (and others) stay below 32ms the entire time. But was it one frame? Ten? Fifty? Who the fuck knows. These numbers are almost entirely useless.
 
cageymaru said:
http://wccftech.com/amd-kaveri-dual-graphics-works-ddr3-memory-based-radeon-r7-gpus/

More BS or truth?
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If this is true, it's another disappointment. Reminds me of the various 790g,880g chipsets that would support CrossfireX, but only with a very limited array of low end GPUs, which practically nobody ever cared to use...

Anyway, i think Kaveri has very little to offer to a gamer compared to FX series. It's a good PC for someone that doesn't have any PC, but no viable upgrade path.

And honestly, even for HTPC, i would hesitate to make a brand new build from scratch, as long as i don't see HEVC acceleration performance. I was expecting UVD4 to offer native hardware H265 acceleration, which would future-proof the APU for future HTPC use. If the HSA implementation is poor, it may end up being a rather poor HTPC choice when HEVC becomes standard and a discreet GPU may be required, making a moot point the whole APU concept.
 
comparing the 7850k vs a 400$ intel cpu is useless.

i d rather someone compare it vs a cheap cpu + dGpu of the same $ value and see where the chip land
performance and power consumption wise.

u keep hearing fx+dGpu. fx4100 99$ + 7750 ddr5 100$ ~ bout 10$ more
anyone see any benchmarks comparing something similar ?
 
I don't think the information available indicates compatibility only with DDR3-based R7 parts.
 
CombatChrisNC said:
I hope BS because that's not what Mantle promised us... Mantle promised that if you're CNG, you can be pulled into the solution- it didn't mention anything about the DDR types.
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You 're right, it's BS. The french here made benchmark with both DDR3 and GDDR5 dGPU:

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/913-10/gpu-dual-graphics-jeux.html

That's good news. It shows a healthy difference, although i am not a gamer to be able to assess if it's completely satisfactory or not.
 
CombatChrisNC said:
I hope BS because that's not what Mantle promised us... Mantle promised that if you're CNG, you can be pulled into the solution- it didn't mention anything about the DDR types.
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Who said anything about Mantle? The article is talking about Dual Graphics.
 
Raudulfr said:
Who said anything about Mantle? The article is talking about Dual Graphics.
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Yes. Mantle is supposed to allow for different kinds of Xfire and no longer just identical cards - or crippling the more powerful card. It's supposed to allow for a 290x to pair up with a 260 and get as much power out of both of them. It's supposed to allow all CNG cores on all devices to work together, very differently that how Xfire currently works. And since Kaveri uses CNG cores on it's GPU, it means it SHOULD be able to work (in Mantle enabled games at least) with any dGPU that also has CNG cores.
 
This is why i love AM3 CPUs. The best bang for buck CPUs ever.

The "old" Deneb 945 @3 Ghz is still holding its own.

21e3vbs.jpg


And the 3.7Ghz Phenom 980 barely loses to the new Kaveri flagship...
 
Faethon said:
This is why i love AM3 CPUs. The best bang for buck CPUs ever.

The "old" Deneb 945 @3 Ghz is still holding its own.

And the 3.7Ghz Phenom 980 barely loses to the new Kaveri flagship...
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You could also look at it from a different perspective and say that the A8-7600 is barely beaten by the 980 Deneb, and the Kaveri has a built in GPU and has about half the TDP.
 
Look, it's been 4 years. That's practically forever in tech. The fact we're even comparing the Deneb core with Kaveri should be recognized as the sham it is.
 
From a total combined FLOPS/watt perspective, it's actually a good evolution. You just have to contort the hell out of things to get that to really show up in any performance test, and theoretical max FLOPS is even harder to hit.

The actual computational power is there, though. Whether that means anything to you or not is another matter.
 
Faethon said:
This is why i love AM3 CPUs. The best bang for buck CPUs ever.

The "old" Deneb 945 @3 Ghz is still holding its own.

http://i42.tinypic.com/21e3vbs.jpg

And the 3.7Ghz Phenom 980 barely loses to the new Kaveri flagship...
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That's more telling about it's Bulldozer/Pilediver/Steamroller successors.

32nm die shrinked Thubans would be interesting.

wonderfield said:
From a total combined FLOPS/watt perspective, it's actually a good evolution. You just have to contort the hell out of things to get that to really show up in any performance test, and theoretical max FLOPS is even harder to hit.

The actual computational power is there, though. Whether that means anything to you or not is another matter.
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You need software which would use it.
And without getting incentive from AMD who will spend time and money to make software optimised for company with 20% of marketshare ?

Even if we can consider this as a likely future of computing that future is not here in 2014 and it won't be here in 2015. It will take years for mass adoption of using gpu parts of cpus to become mainstream.
 
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pgaster said:
You could also look at it from a different perspective and say that the A8-7600 is barely beaten by the 980 Deneb, and the Kaveri has a built in GPU and has about half the TDP.
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Also you can do your rendering directly on the video card with OpenCL. So when Mantle comes around I expect the gpu to assist the cpu in boosting the rendering speed.
 
It's a good idea, but you're right, it's not here today in 2014. Only very few applications truly use both the GPU and the CPU at the same time to accelerate the task. It's a fantastic idea though!
 
NinjaGnat said:
Look, it's been 4 years. That's practically forever in tech. The fact we're even comparing the Deneb core with Kaveri should be recognized as the sham it is.
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Ehh, CPU times seems to be slowing. I'm still rocking my Q6600 that came out in TWO THOUSAND SEVEN and it still plays most games (thank goodness I didn't listen to H forums and get a higher clocked dual core instead as they advised).

That and 2500k still seems like a great processor and it came out 3 years ago, so it's not just AMD.

Not that I'm defending AMD or Bulldozer or even Steamroller though. Pretty darn disappointing seems like.
 
I kinda feel robbed of my new build path :/

Sadly I would have been perfectly happy with this if it had been compatible with an 270x even at the $200 price point.
 
Faethon said:
And honestly, even for HTPC, i would hesitate to make a brand new build from scratch, as long as i don't see HEVC acceleration performance. I was expecting UVD4 to offer native hardware H265 acceleration, which would future-proof the APU for future HTPC use. If the HSA implementation is poor, it may end up being a rather poor HTPC choice when HEVC becomes standard and a discreet GPU may be required, making a moot point the whole APU concept.
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By this time, it could be 4 years from now. I am close to 5 on my current HTPC with DDR2. So I went with Kaveri, mobo, and RAM. With Steam OS coming to life, I am truly excited for this upgrade.
I use Windows Media Center still. I do not have cable but use an HD antenna and get plenty of channels. XBMC is clunky and doesn't seem to work with my tuner card very well.
I don't have anything that needs H265 acceleration. If any of this becomes standard for any new streaming service, be it Google or Netflix, and I happen to use those it could be time for an upgrade by then anyway. haha
And because everyone is hating on Kaveri and Mantle, I will be sure to test BF4.
 
4k video won't be a thing till well into 2015/2016. It's beyond the limits of the human eye anyway, at sane distance. (I still archive everything in 720p........)

Up till then, people can make do either getting some SoC that supports it already as media center, or writing an HSA decoder that will probably handle H.265 swimmingly.
 
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