Posted on 09/28/2012 5:50:08 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
AMD sent us two APUs to review. First up we have the A10-5800K, which is the highest performing part in the A-series lineup. Then we have the 5600K, which loses 200Mhz of CPU clock speed, 40Mhz of GPU clock speed, and has only 2/3rd’s of the GPU cores that the 5800K offers. Now if those sound like some pretty drastic cuts, that’s because they are. But the thing to keep in mind here is that the 5800K has a base clock speed of 3.8Ghz, a base GPU clock speed of 800Mhz, and 384 GPU cores. This is a formidable amount of raw power for AMD to whittle down into low-end models while still keeping very respectable performance.
I’m hoping some of you will still remember this little gem of a slide from AMD’s 2010 financial analyst day. Velocity is what AMD called it’s yearly APU update strategy shortly before the first APU was released. And while AMD quickly moved past this term, the goal of having the best APU every year is something that AMD is still very focused on. Arguably, AMD has had the best APU every year. Granted it’s only been two years, but AMD has offered APUs that take advantage of the benefits of integration by offering markedly faster integrated graphics, and significantly lower power consumption than traditional solutions.
The two major sticking points that have kept AMD from unequivocally having the best APU, are supply issues and CPU performance. The supply situation seems to have finally worked itself out with Trinity, and is now a far cry away from the low yielding hardships of this time last year. Global Foundries and AMD also renegotiated their contract in March of this year leading to improved relations between the two. In terms of CPU performance, AMD has made some confident strides forward with its Piledriver core, but as has been widely reported, it still lags significantly behind Intel’s Ivy Bridge.
Just to recap some of the changes and abilities of the A-series chips we’ll be testing today, I’m bringing out this slide. The big advancements that Trinity brings are new CPU cores, new GPU cores, and iterative improvements to the supporting hardware.
All of the games in our suite were run at a resolution of 1080P, with DX 11 enabled where applicable, and the in-game quality settings that we chose were the highest that we felt were playable on the 5800K. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is the first game we tested with.
Very Interesting to me....
No Performance numbers on just the CPU .....
fyi
I skipped the first two slides.
Still not ready for prime time. Those frame rates for games were absolutely horrible. Sub 40fps, and the reviewer calls that playable?
Well....perhaps the Masses aren’t willing to spend for a Graphics card that will deliever higher rates.
Of course, if you like sitting on the couch with your feet up, holding a gamepad, you're more a gamer than a sim'mer.
For a Desktop it would seem to be just for a niche value market.
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