AMD Kaveri Mobile APU, FX-7600P Preview
PCMark 8 And Cinebench Benchmarks
We'll start off the benchmark suite we were able to put together while at the press event, with some standard CPU and multimedia workloads. We won't have our full assortment of benchmark tools here to show you but we can still give you a good perspective on overall performance and what to expect when notebooks hit the market at retail.
PCMark 8 v2 is the latest version in Futuremark’s series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of systems, from tablets to desktops. PCMark 8 offers five separate benchmark tests--plus battery life testing—to help consumers find the device that offers the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for their particular use case. This latest version of the suite improve the Home, Creative and Work benchmarks with new tests using popular open source applications for image processing, video editing and spreadsheets. A wide variety of workloads have also been added to the Work benchmark to better reflect the way PCs are used in enterprise environments.
In addition, we ran the "accelerated" versions of these tests, which makes use of the OpenCL standard for parallel programming and processing. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we don't have Creative test results for you here.
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In addition, we ran the "accelerated" versions of these tests, which makes use of the OpenCL standard for parallel programming and processing. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we don't have Creative test results for you here.
As you can see, the AMD Kaveri-based system put up excellent performance, besting the entire field of notebooks, even Dell's Inspiron 15 with a Core i7-4500U and discrete NVIDIA graphics. However, we should note that the Dell machine has a standard 5400 RPM HDD on board, versus the SSD on board the Kaveri test system and many of the reference systems you see here. Since this test is weighted somewhat by disk IO performance as well, the Dell notebook is a bit hamstrung in this regard. A more direct comparison would be the Dell XPS 13 with Core i7-4500U and Intel integrated graphics along with an equally fast SSD. Here again, Kaveri shows strength but we'll offer a reminder that we're comparing a 35 Watt AMD chip in this case, versus Intel's 15 Watt Core i7 mobile chip. A 19 Watt AMD FX-7500 might be a better match-up with two less GPU cores and a slightly lower clocks speed, which AMD suggests would still beat out Intel's offering.
Cinebench R15 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of processor resources and is an excellent gauge of computational throughput.
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This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.
Here again, AMD's new Kaveri-based FX-7600-P makes a strong showing, beating out the Core i5-4200U CPUs with ease and nipping at the heels of Intel's more potent Core i7-4500U in the CPU test. In the GPU-powered OpenGL test, it was no contest. AMD's Kaveri mobile chip blows Intel's HD 4400 graphics IGP out of the water and even approaches the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M in the Dell Inspiron 15 machine. In terms of graphics performance, this Kaveri mobile chip is over 54-percent faster than the Intel Core i7-4500U in this benchmark.
