What is normal here is that Intel CPU-APU owners trying to fight the proofs of something they should wish. Mantle's ability to diminish the CPU load in games. Hey guys, don't you wish your 8-threaded cpus would do more things at the same time except for losing cycles because of directX's inefficiency?
This would be nice, but it's not happening in this benchmark. If the benchmark could use 8 threads, then we would expect ~80% more performance from the Intel CPU since it has double the number of cores/threads. This is why people like I are skeptical about these results, because a threaded workload would still heavily favor the Intel CPU. It's almost as if this benchmark is constrained to 2-4 threads and is using a weak discrete GPU in order to shine the best light on the APU as possible. Note, I'm not doubting that Mantle can improve performance, just the benchmark's claim that Mantle makes CPUs of different performance tiers in other applications perform equally in games.
Correct. But then AMD would crossfire if some GPUs were used. Do we have the system specs to clarify this?
I doubt we'll get that information until after the NDA of January 14. However, I also doubt Crossfire with the iGPU was used; after all, wouldn't the AMD system be on top if it had two GPUs instead of one? That wouldn't be a very good PR slide if the advertised system with double the GPUs still performed worse than the competition.