AMD A6-3650 Llano APU Performance Review

Name: AMD A6-3650 Llano APU
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 02, 2011, 12:14 AM EDT

On the video decode side of the equation, we viewed an assortment of HD movie trailer clips and monitored CPU utilization. With a relatively powerful chip like the AMD A6-3650, we didn't expect HD video playback to be an issue but regardless, we looked at CPU utilization playing back 1080p Flash video. We also fired up an I am Legend movie trailer .mov file with Windows Media Player, and used PowerDVD to play other various formats, while taking note of thread activity in Windows Task Manager Performance Monitor.

Core i3-2120: 1080p Flash Video

AMD A8-3850 APU: 1080p Flash Video

AMD A6-3650 APU: 1080p Flash Video

All of the video clips we played back worked flawlessly and exhibited very low CPU utilization in the single-digits or low double-digits. Full-screen 1080p Flash video is notorious for high CPU utilization when using older drivers or Flash Players, but the situation looks good today. All of the platforms represented here performed very well in our HD Media playback tests, although AMD does offer some video enhancements that Intel does not.

HD Video Encoding Performance

Testing With and Without Intel Quick Sync

Cyberlink's Media Show Espresso is a video conversion tool that imports various video media files types and converts them to other standard video formats for publication, distribution and / or streaming. In this test, we take a 184MB high definition 1080p AVCHD video clip and compress and convert it to a iPhone 4 H.264-encoded .MP4 file. Times are measured in minutes:seconds with lower times representing faster throughput in the video conversion process.

** The Phenom II X4 980 System Used A Radeon HD 6570 Discrete GPU

The A-Series APUs got clobbered in our MediaShow Espresso video encoding benchmarks. Notice, performance is lower with GPU acceleration enabled, versus encoding on the CPU cores alone.

Tags: AMD, GPU, CPU, Hybrid, Desktop, processor, Fusion, APU, Llano, A-Series, A6

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com