AMD 2013 A & E-Series Kabini and Temash APUs


GPU Performance and Power

Next up we have some GPU benchmarks using Cinebench’s OpenGL test and 3DMark 11. The GPUs at the heart of the A4-5000 and low-end Intel platforms we’ve tested here aren’t particularly powerful, so don’t expect playable framerates in any cutting edge games. But gauging relative performance can at least speak to one platform's graphics superiority over another.

GPU Tests: Cinebench OpenGL and 3DMark
Open GL and DirectX Tests

You’ll notice a few red bars in the graphs above. Those indicate tests that wouldn’t run on the Intel platforms. In the tests that did run, the A4-5000’s integrated Radeon HD 8330 GPU was roughly twice as fast as Intel’s HD 3000 engine in Cinebench’s OpenGL test. The A4, however, was the only one capable of running 3DMark 11. The A4-5000’s score of E967 (this was the entry level benchmark) isn’t particularly high, but at least the platform is capable of running DX11-class content.

We also spent some time playing back various video files and found the A4-5000 to perform very well. Various SD and HD videos streamed from a NAS over the network all played back beautifully, and web-based HD content streamed without incident as well.

What you see pictured here is the official Iron Man 3 trailer in 1080p, streaming from YouTube, running in full screen mode on the A4-5000-based white book we used for testing. As you can see in the overlay, CPU utilization occasionally peaked at about 40%, but typically hovered in the 5% - 25% range.

Total System Power Consumption
Tested at the Outlet

Since the notebook we used for testing won't be make available at retail, we didn't do any formal battery tests, but we did monitor power on the machine to see how much juice the platform used under various workloads. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power the system used while idling and while under heavy CPU and GPU workloads. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the processor alone--all of the notebook's components are factored into the numbers here.

Under the absolute worst case scenario, with the notebook’s screen powered on (at 50% brightness) and full CPU and GPU workloads, the machine consumed only 23 watts total. As we stepped down the workload and focused only on the CPU or GPU, power consumption decreased.

What these numbers mean for real-world battery life will vary from machine to machine, but we can say that the A4-5000-based whitebook we tested had no trouble lasting about 4.5 - 5 hours with moderate to heavy use with its 15v / 3000mAh / 45Wh battery. Under lighter use, a full 8 hour work day would not be a problem at all.


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