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You always need to be at least a little suspicious when a company shows you a set of comparative benchmarks. But, as they say, forwarned is forarmed. AMD had a number of systems on show in London yesterday and world famous overclocking expert (and now AMD PR expert) Sami Makinen on hand to show some of the cooler features.
Right now, KitGuru Labs folks are taking the new Trinity APU apart and putting in-depth results together in a variety of useful and interesting ways. But you will need to wait a little longer for that.
What the UK was shown yesterday was a series of demonstrations that put the new A10 5800k next to the Intel Core i5 3550 processor. What was happening at the software/BIOS levels, we can't comment on – but the rest of the physical specifications appeared identical:-
- FM2 Vs Socket 1155 mainboards
- 8GB DDR3 1600MHz memory (2x4GB)
- 450w PSU in an ATX chassis
- Booting and running off an SSD
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Now on to the demonstrations themselves. AMD has been working on a number of bundling deals recently and Sleeping Dogs is one of the latest offers. In our recent interview with Intel's Richard Huddy, he explained carefully that his company's key focus is to create a good ‘straight out of the box' experience. Specifically:-
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So AMD's decision to show a Core i5 against a Trinity A10 5800k ‘straight out of the box' seems reasonable enough, but there are caveates.
Unfortunately, Richard Huddy was talking about Intel HD4000 graphics and in the demonstration given by AMD's Sami Makinen, Sleeping Dogs was running at around 10fps on the Intel system with HD2500 graphics. On the AMD machine, the same part of the same game was delivering 30fps.
Given that Trinity is the best of the APU graphics solutions, it would have been nice to see a head-to-head with HD4000. But that is one of AMD's advantages. Intel does not offer the HD4000 solution until you get to much more expensive processors like the 3570k. So this comparison is fair in the ‘what you get for similar money' sense.
Sami is a master-over-clocker by anyone's standards, so in the next demonstration he showed how easy it was to put a +30% overclock on the Trinity A10 5800k's graphics capability using AMD's desktop tool – which translated into a linear increase in the Sleeping Dogs in-game frame rate to 39fps.
We were then treated to a side-by-side comparison using a piece of photo manipulation software we haven't seen before. Given that Adobe has free 30-day trials for Photoshop CS6, we're not sure why AMD didn't use the industry leading software for this comparison, but the results were still interesting. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgFBYL1OI-8′]
KitGuru says: If the price, availability and CrossFire scalability of the new Trinity products matches the confidence levels being given off by the AMD demo team, then it looks like the sub-£600 desktop space is about to get very competitive. The big question will be how much weight publication editors and – ultimately – consumers give to smooth graphics, as well as how much work software developers do in order to optimise code for AMD's APU architecture.
Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.
Sami was such a great overclocker. im sure he still is
not much of a presentation really. I appreciate its faster than the competiting intel part, but will anyone be running with onboard graphics? Intel CPU and either AMD or Nvidia graphics for most people. unless you are talking about a low power laptop system or something.
Individual system builders know that a low end intel processor with a cheap discrete graphics card will give better performance, but many many budget desktops are sold only containing a cpu with onboard cpu graphics, often lower end intel parts with poor intel graphics.
If AMD can steal that market there is good money for them there.
Yes the benchmark was specifically selected….but a 4X performance difference is massive. I doubt that if you chose a more intel centric benchmark that the performance difference would be so markedly in favour of intel.
You can’t blame AMD for playing to their strengths…it would be foolish not to.
@Fjanas don’t forget that there are other continents that will benefit from this CPU, there are those who don’t have 1080p monitor or simply put that maybe they can’t even afford one, never mind having a dedicated GPU. Think of offices, or budget orientated people, some are just the casual gamer, some want HTPC unlike some FPS freaks who swap their hardware every few months.
The AMD approach should bear fruit as not everyone wants to invest in a discreet GPU just to be able to play games. I have used nVidia and AMD-ATI GPUs in several PCs, but in the last purchase with an AMD A8 I did not bother to add a GPU and was still able to perform all my multimedia tasks and also enjoy Call of Duty, Portal 2, and even Crysis 2. Granted Crysis 2 was not at high frame rates but it is playable whereas the Intel set-up (at the same budget) was clearly lacking. Priced rightly and even cheap Intel+discreet GPU will fail to match the performance and power consumption of the AMD A10.
Helou, one…. it is mot true “Intel does not offer the HD4000 solution until you get to much more expensive processors like the 3570k” Intel HD 4000 is in cheaper I3-3225 CPU….