AMD A10-5800K & A8-5600K Review: Trinity on the Desktop, Part 2
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 2, 2012 1:45 AM ESTContent Creation Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS4
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Our Photoshop workload still runs better on Intel hardware, but the gap in performance between the 5800K and 3220 is smaller than it was between the FX-8150 and 2500K last year. While Bulldozer was pretty much unrecommendable, Trinity approaches tradeoff territory.
3dsmax 9 & POV-ray
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
Once again in a heavily threaded FP benchmark, the A10 and Core i3 perform very similarly. POV-Ray is another example of this below:
File Compression/Decompression Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Our multithreaded Par2 recovery test shows AMD with a small advantage over the Core i3 3220, although it obviously can't touch any of the more expensive quad-core parts.
Excel Math Performance
Not all heavily threaded FP applications are easy wins for AMD. In our Monte Carlo simulation benchmark the 3220 manages a decent lead over the A10-5800K.
Our old Sorenson Squeeze test is one area where we see a slight regression compared to Llano. Like I mentioned earlier, this isn't super common but it does happen from time to time given the dramatic architecture difference between Llano and Trinity.
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Spunjji - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
That seems to be a big if rather than a matter of when, though, given the patchy support that's been forthcoming for QuickSync so far! So possibly a valid avenue of investigation anyway. :)eBombzor - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Am I missing something in the benchmarks? Tom's did a CPU comparison with the 2100 and the 8120 (which isn't a whole lot different from the 8150) and the 8120 is near the Phenom CPU gaming wise.http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pent...
Something is not right here, the 2100 dominated the 8120 in Tom's benchies, the 3220 should be better.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Just thumbing through Tom's article, it looks like they're using 1920x1080 with high quality settings (GPU-limited settings) while we're mostly using 1024 and 1680 in order to ensure we're CPU-limited.Rezurecta - Wednesday, October 3, 2012 - link
Who cares about CPU limiting? You're not going to play a game @ 1024. 1680 might be valid, but why not show benchmarks at 1920? It just doesn't make sense to show a benchmark that isn't at a major demographic point.It could be a very misleading benchmark for a substantial amount of readers.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
But it makes amd look better, so it's awesome, and irresistible.Rand - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Why was the overclocking test done on Windows 8 (Image shows Win8), while the performance testing was done on Windows 7 (Test setup lists Win7)?nofumble62 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
This Trinity performance didn't beat i3, let alone i5.AMD statement " i5 performance at i3 price" is a total lie.
ac2 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
It's only true for heavily threaded integer work and AES...But yeah, disappointing...
Taft12 - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
... and gaming on the integrated GPUMySchizoBuddy - Tuesday, October 2, 2012 - link
Legit reviews state that AMD advised them to disable turbo mode else it will throttle the overclock. They were able to overclock it to 4.6 with full stability using a larger cooler.http://www.legitreviews.com/article/2047/18/