Wednesday, May 11th 2011
AMD A-Series APUs Tested Against Sandy Bridge CPUs at Gaming on IGP
What happens when you pit Intel's "Visually Smart" Sandy Bridge processors against Radeon-enriched AMD Fusion A-Series accelerated processing units? They do terribly at gaming on integrated graphics. Surprise! That is notwithstanding the fact that AMD is pitching its A-Series Fusion APUs to be a lot more than CPUs with embedded GPUs, they're pitched to be processors that make lower-mainstream graphics pointless, and to alter the software ecosystem to be more GPGPU intensive, so applications could benefit from the over 500 GFLOPs of computation power the 400 stream processor DirectX 11 GPU brings to the table.
A leaked presentation slide shows AMD's performance projections for the A-Series GPU, tests included GPU-heavy DirectX 10 titles such as Crysis Warhead and Borderlands; as well as DirectX 11 ready titles such as Dirt 2. AMD's quad-core A8-3850, A8-3650 and A8-3450 were included alongside Intel's dual-core Sandy Bridge Core i3-2100, and quad-core Core i5-2300, Core i5-2500K. The Atom-competitive E350 Zacate dual-core was also in the comparision, perhaps to show that it is nearly as good as Intel's much higher segment Core series processors at graphics.
30 frames per second (FPS) is considered "playable" limit by some tech journalists, but AMD created a range between 25 and 30 FPS to define what's playable. Each of the three A-Series chips scored above 25 FPS in every test, while the A8-3650 and 3850 reached/crossed the 30 FPS barrier. Going by the test results, AMD certainly achieved what it set out to, which is to use its immense GPU-engineering potential to lift up its CPU business. The A-Series APUs should make a formidable option for home desktop buyers who require strong graphics for casual gaming, cost the same as Intel's dual-core Sandy Bridge, and give four x86-64 cores for the same price. AMD's new A-Series Fusion APUs will launch in early June.
Source:
DonanimHaber
A leaked presentation slide shows AMD's performance projections for the A-Series GPU, tests included GPU-heavy DirectX 10 titles such as Crysis Warhead and Borderlands; as well as DirectX 11 ready titles such as Dirt 2. AMD's quad-core A8-3850, A8-3650 and A8-3450 were included alongside Intel's dual-core Sandy Bridge Core i3-2100, and quad-core Core i5-2300, Core i5-2500K. The Atom-competitive E350 Zacate dual-core was also in the comparision, perhaps to show that it is nearly as good as Intel's much higher segment Core series processors at graphics.
50 Comments on AMD A-Series APUs Tested Against Sandy Bridge CPUs at Gaming on IGP
But regardless, I believe these will impact the laptop market most of all. It's amazing how many nice laptops have a "powerful" Intel Core i5/i7, and have no discreet graphics chip alongside them (either due to heat or price). While these APUs will still likely be behind Nehalem in CPU performance, let's be honest in that for >80% of potential computer purchasers, the performance a Phenom II offers is more than sufficient!
In desktop land, if you say buy a Sandy Bridge prebuilt and later decide you wanna do some gaming, then go buy yourself a PCIe graphics card and install it. No problem. However, in laptop land, if you don't buy your laptop with gaming in mind from the get-go, you're screwed, and have to buy a new one. The Llano chip helps to rectify such problems.
:mad:
intel says theres an i5-2300....
Is the A8-3650 an 8 core at 3.65GHZ? I presume not...
www.techpowerup.com/145064/AMD-Llano-Fusion-APU-to-Feature-Radeon-HD-6550-Graphics.html
And whether the suffix refers to clock speed remains to be seen. However, I doubt it because having a prefix that makes little sense and a suffix that makes perfect sense makes no sense. :cool:
:ouseless??
some of us already knew that sandy bridge do well better than Llano on cpu's performance. but the point AMD making this APU is to make balance between general processor execution as well as 3D geometry processing.
some people do want play a game on playable framerates on their laptop or desktop with IGP, that we already know some of SB's laptops and their desktop IGP line-up still struggle to do it..
real test is the price for amd's apu if a quad apu with 400 shaders will cost less than a quad cpu+6570 for example it could be very successful
Dual quadcore (or 8 core!!!) CPUs and Crossfire the built in GPUs?
That sounds like it would sell
You sir, are my new friend!
Heh joking aside congratulations to the AMD team. I know a lot of people were waiting anxiously for these :D