AMD APU: How Much Progress Has Been Made?

CPU Benchmarks – Cinebench, Handbrake and WPrime

Cinebench R15

Cinebench is a widely respected benchmark for testing the performance of x86 CPUs. The program allows you to test single and multi-threaded performance as well as GPU performance by rendering with Open GL. Download here.

Cinebench is the go-to benchmark for testing productive CPU performance. Interestingly we see not that much progress has been made since Llano. The step to Bulldozer (A10-5800K) architecture led to a performance decline when looking at multi-threaded performance, Piledriver’s revision with the A10-6800K gave the necessary bump to nudge past the initial 32nm “Thuban-style” A8-3870K. Kaveri actually falls behind the A10-6800K due to a much lower clock speed but all three APUs have improved single threaded performance over Llano which is important for everyday applications.

Handbrake

HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. Download here.

Handbrake is an encoding tool that allows you to covert video files between different formats so it is representative of real-world performance unlike Cinebench. We see every generation of APU brought an improvement although the improvements are fairly small, around 5% each generation.

WPrime

wPrime is a leading multithreaded benchmark for x86 processors that tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton’s method for estimating functions. wPrime is a free utility that is available for download here.

WPrime showed a similar picture to Cinebench, the initial move towards Bulldozer architecture saw a dip in performance. The A10-6800K being a virtually identical part except with some slight refinements still couldn’t catch 2011’s A8-3870K part. Kaveri does manage to beat out the A8-3870K but let’s face it: that’s not by much.