My experience with the AMD A6-9225

[wolf]

I don't even quite know where to start, the machine with this at it's heart was so mind-bogglingly, infuriatingly slow....

Trying to cut a long story short, I had to do a basic photo slideshow with about 300 family photos at a venue, the venue provided a projector, screen and laptop. At the time I got a run-through a few days prior, they demonstrated the laptop working with a PowerPoint presentation, and insisted that 'other laptops' never seemed to work with their projector, and encouraged me to use there's. I wish I had looked at the specs first...

After the first 5-10 minutes of the laptop being so slow I took to task manager, to see a two thread CPU pegged at 94-100% usage constantly, and memory at 85% used. The top processes hogging the CPU cycles we're windows services, each one I tried to kill warned that windows would become unstable, and indeed the first I killed resulted in a crash and reboot.

To get the slideshow up, I'm lucky I cam prepared so I used a USB-C to HDMI adapter on my S23Ultra and fired up google photo's and started the slideshow, it displayed on the projector just fine. While that was going, I tried for a further 45 minutes to make the laptop actually run the slideshow without shitting the bed with zero luck. The photo's app would freeze, or the windows UI itself would freeze, and generally basic actions took 30-60 seconds to complete, so I shut the laptop screen and just let my phone do the work for the next 3 hours.

So, the AMD A6-9225... I google it to find that of course as a design pre-dating Zen being released in 2018 (but being a refreshed design from years before that), I shouldn't expect much, but I found that it roughly matches the multicore performance of the Core 2 Duo P8600, released in 2008! So a 2018 CPU that's now 5 years old, that when it was new performed like a dual core from 10 years previous... To make matters even worse, it appears to be limited to single channel memory only, and the example I had was equipped with a whopping 4GB, of which 512MB appeared to be reserved for the onboard graphics.

I haven't experienced a PC/Laptop this slow in over a decade, and even then they were usually a decent one bogged down with software / full drives/ ram filled with chrome tabs / full of viruses etc. It was an experience I'll not soon forget and one reserved for a certain layer of hell I'm sure. This thing felt like it would have been e-waste when it rolled out of the fab, and I honestly can't think of a great reason why AMD even released it at all... anyone else have the displeasure of using this or a similar product?

 

[tabascosauz]

Isn't that essentially 1 Excavator module? 1M/2T. Kinda tells you all you need to know......contrary to what AMD would like you to think, basically single core; even the A8s and A10s were dual module.

The Bulldozer APUs started out okay but never really got any faster. AM3+ CPUs at least compensated with clocks. Steamroller and Excavator lost freq, and the IPC improvements were not a gamechanger.

To be fair, what makes/breaks entry level laptops is storage performance more than anything else. You can ruin just about anything if you put a spinny drive in it, and make just about anything useful if you put a speedy SATA or NVMe SSD in it. I was just prepping a N3010 laptop to be recycled yesterday and usability wasn't nearly as bad as I thought, thanks to a tiny 32GB Kioxia BG4.

 

[Nuke Dukem]

It sounds like whatever Windows install this was running got too bloated and poorly maintained. It's low-end hardware for sure, but basic usage shouldn't be this handicapped. I'd venture a guess that using debloated/LTSC and properly tuned Windows or Linux and offloading whatever's possible to the iGPU with hardware acceleration (if the drivers work) would help out a lot and make it useable. Basic web browsing, office work and light multimedia shouldn't be this big of a problem even for this hardware.

AM3+ CPUs at least compensated with clocks.

Exactly - while the architecture was designed for high clocks, this was suffocated and castrated to fit in 10/15W.

You can ruin just about anything if you put a spinny drive in it, and make just about anything useful if you put a speedy SATA or NVMe SSD in it.

Absolutely! Come to think of it, OP didn't mention what storage the poor laptop was running.

I honestly can't think of a great reason why AMD even released it at all

Zen existed at the time, but apparently it took a while until it was adapted for ultra low-power CPUs, so that's all they had to work with at the time.

I'm sorry for your bad experience. There's probably millions of people around the world still running these for basic tasks and I hope they manage to get more use out of them.

 

[wolf]

It sounds like whatever Windows install this was running got too bloated and poorly maintained. It's low-end hardware for sure, but basic usage shouldn't be this handicapped. I'd venture a guess that using debloated/LTSC and properly tuned Windows or Linux and offloading whatever's possible to the iGPU with hardware acceleration (if the drivers work) would help out a lot and make it useable. Basic web browsing, office work and light multimedia shouldn't be this big of a problem even for this hardware.

I've used windows 10 on some low specs before but this takes the cake, yes windows 10 can be heavy at times on low end hardware, but damn.

Exactly - while the architecture was designed for high clocks, this was suffocated and castrated to fit in 10/15W.

Certainly a big part of the issue, so constrained by wattage

Absolutely! Come to think of it, OP didn't mention what storage the poor laptop was running.

a 120GB sata SSD, so in that regard I'd call that a fair to favorable pairing for such a slow chip.

Zen existed at the time, but apparently it took a while until it was adapted for ultra low-power CPUs, so that's all they had to work with at the time.

I'm sorry for your bad experience. There's probably millions of people around the world still running these for basic tasks and I hope they manage to get more use out of them.

It really was that bad, I can appreciate this sort of hardware might still run a linux distro great, but a standard win 10 install seemed to generally just have it sweating the whole time, given it didn't appear to be doing any downloads/updates of any kind either.

It has legitimately humbled me a bit, my daily home PC is as per my specs, and my work pc is a surface pro 7, i5, 8gb ram and I complain about that all the time, but at least it's not sinking the entire time. It really feels like a long time since I've used a PC with a cpu so slow, which makes sense given it effectively is as fast an Intel dual core from 2008 now running win 10.

 

[QuietBob]

So, the AMD A6-9225... I google it to find that of course as a design pre-dating Zen being released in 2018 (but being a refreshed design from years before that), I shouldn't expect much, but I found that it roughly matches the multicore performance of the Core 2 Duo P8600, released in 2008! So a 2018 CPU that's now 5 years old, that when it was new performed like a dual core from 10 years previous... To make matters even worse, it appears to be limited to single channel memory only, and the example I had was equipped with a whopping 4GB, of which 512MB appeared to be reserved for the onboard graphics.

Most likely, it wasn't the hardware that was at fault, but the software. This loaner laptop was probably running a crapton of malware on a bloated unmaintained OS. Granted, the specs aren't much by today's standards, but a dual core system with 4 GB of RAM and an SSD can easily be used for web browsing and light office tasks, still.

The A6-9225 has two threads, but weak ST performance. It has a single thread rating of 1157 in PassMark PerformanceTest. For reference, my overclocked Phenom II from 2009 does 1765. But I have a few even slower systems. Just recently I've been tinkering with one of my Win7 min spec rigs -- a 2004 1c/1t Sempron oc'd to 1862 MHz (PassMark ST rating of 508 ) , motherboard integrated graphics from 2005 with 128 MB system memory, 2 GB DDR1 in single channel, and a 5400 rpm laptop drive with 32 MB/s transfer rate.

It boots in under 2 minutes from being powered on to a fully responsive desktop. I spent the weekend playing Undertale on it and surfing the net. It takes a bit of patience, of course. Apps are slow to load, but on the whole this PC is fairly serviceable. Until a few months ago I could even watch YouTube on it, but after the recent updates it now requires a dedicated graphics card. A 2007 OEM HD2400Pro with 256 MB 64-bit DDR2 does the job just fine

As has been said, a clean well-maintained OS will go a long way, and reasonable expectations can give older hardware a new lease on life. Typing this on my 2012 backup FX rig.

 

[Steevo]

All thin form factors are slow compared to a high power actively cooled chip. Yes the AMD APU's tended to suck without tuning, but they responded well to tuning, and memory speed and timings. I had a A8 that I used and swapping the memory and tuning it essentially doubled it speed. A lot of cheap laptop/thin devices were sent out with single channel slow, crappy timing memory.

 

[sLowEnd]

Ouch. Low end Excavator chip. Yeah, that would suck.

 

[wolf]

Ouch. Low end Excavator chip. Yeah, that would suck.

I'm genuinely shocked they even released it, it would have been a turd straight off the fab. And of course win10 can share some blame, but I've used win10 on such a wide variety of systems and none have run remotely this badly after ensuring no apps are hogging the CPU/RAM.

 

[sLowEnd]

I'm genuinely shocked they even released it, it would have been a turd straight off the fab. And of course win10 can share some blame, but I've used win10 on such a wide variety of systems and none have run remotely this badly after ensuring no apps are hogging the CPU/RAM.

It'd probably be alright for a very lightweight thin client; that probably was its intended use case.

The A6 9225 is more like a 1.5 core (A module isn't 2 cores, as AMD learned in court) chip with low clock speeds while utilizing an architecture that needs high clock speeds to deliver ok performance. I can't imagine most people getting a good experience out of that thing in Win10/11. A light Linux distro might work.

 

[wolf]

It'd probably be alright for a very lightweight thin client; that probably was its intended use case.

Clearly laptop makers at least, if not AMD too, saw fit to include it in win10 based laptops, so I'm judging it as such. And yeah I can't imagine many if any thinking it was fine too.

 

[tabascosauz]

Clearly laptop makers at least, if not AMD too, saw fit to include it in win10 based laptops, so I'm judging it as such. And yeah I can't imagine many if any thinking it was fine too.

You also have to remember that AMD basically didn't have any mobile hardware competitive enough to get a single high end/premium win the whole time they were on Bulldozer (Intel bribery yada yada but the fact stands). That's what, 7 years? The only reason to buy AMD was to save some money. AMD was thus seen as only deserving of 720p screens, slow storage, and single channel memory. These were plasticky, chunky $400 back-to-school laptops. I don't think HP gave a damn about user experience.

It took until Renoir (2019/20) until AMD truly broke free of that perception, and now we have compelling AMD products being used in compelling laptop designs.

 

[droid-I]

AMD was thus seen as only deserving of 720p screens, slow storage, and single channel memory. These were plasticky, chunky $400 back-to-school laptops. I don't think HP gave a damn about user experience.

Yes. Had one of those hp AMD laptops here too, a bit weak so to say, but yes a ~10 yr old youngster does not need the latest performance laptops for studies.
And some even had to use Chrome laptops.

 

[DaveLT]

The only and ONLY reason OEMs used AMD was because AMD priced it lower than Intel, actual performance be damned.
I once used had a A10 6700T (Not the same core but it was the lowest power AMD desktop chip at one point) system in the house (not for me) and it was ok to middling on Windows 7 but that was ages ago
And then I came across a laptop 2 years ago with a 9225 as well and I can see why these should be e waste out of the factory... Even a X5 Z8350 tablet is far more responsive (which I had as well, for VERY basic uses)