AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview

Name: AMD A8-3850 Llano APU and Lynx Platform Preview - Page 9
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, June 30, 2011, 12:00 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 A8-3850, we didn't expect HD video playback to be an issue but regardless, we looked at CPU utilization playing back the 1080p Flash video clip pictured below. We also fired up an I am Legend movie trailer .mov file with Windows Media Player, an used PowerDVD to play other various formats, while taking note of thread activity in Windows Task Manager Performance Monitor.

Core i5-2500: 1080p Flash Video

Core i3-2120: 1080p Flash Video

AMD A8-3850 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.

We ran this test both with an without hardware acceleration on all of the platforms and the differences in performance were huge. To put it simply, Intel's Quick-Sync technology rocks. With it enabled, all of the second-gen Core processors ripped though the video in 10 seconds. But even without Quick-Sync though, the Intel chips put up good numbers. Intel's dual-cores only slightly trailed AMD's quads. What's interesting to note is that the A8-3850's GPU is actually slower to encode video than the CPU cores--at least with the latest version of MediaShow Espresso.

Tags: AMD, GPU, CPU, Hybrid, Desktop, processor, A-8, Fusion, APU, Llano, A-Series

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