AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, June 30, 2011, 12:00 AM EDT

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Futuremark PCMark 7

Futuremark's PCMark 7 is the latest version of the PCMark suite, recently released this spring. It has updated application performance measurements targeted for a Windows 7 environment. Here's what Futuremark says is incorporated in the base PCMark suite and the Entertainment suite, the two modules we have benchmark scores for you here.

Futuremark PCMark 7

General Application and Multimedia Performance

The PCMark test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance during typical desktop usage. This is the most important test since it returns the official PCMark score for the system
Storage

Windows Defender

Importing pictures

Gaming

Video Playback and transcoding
Graphics

DirectX 9

Image manipulation
Web browsing and decrypting

The Entertainment test is a collection of workloads that measure system performance in entertainment scenarios using mostly application workloads. Individual tests include recording, viewing, streaming and transcoding TV shows and movies, importing, organizing and browsing new music and several gaming related workloads. If the target system is not capable of running DirectX 10 workloads then those tests are skipped. At the end of the benchmark run the system is given an Entertainment test score.

The two PCMark7 modules we ran illustrate the difference between AMD's and Intel's design philosophies. As you can see, the AMD-powered rigs offer better performance in the Entertainment module--which relies more on the GPU--than they do in the overall PCMark test. The trend is reversed on the Intel-based systems due to their relatively powerful x86 cores, but lower-performing graphics cores. Ultimately though, the A8-3850 trails even the dual-core Core i3-2120 here in both tests.