AMD APU: How Much Progress Has Been Made?

Memory Benchmarks – AIDA64 and SiSoft Sandra

AIDA64 Engineer

AIDA64 Engineer is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for engineers. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives. AIDA64 is compatible with all current 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012. Memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Download here.

In memory we see a significant improvement going from Llano to Trinity & Richland but with Kaveri memory actually drops off by quite a lot. In the field of memory there is no obvious improvement to see.

SiSoft Sandra

The SiSoft Sandra memory benchmark is based on STREAM. STREAM is a popular memory bandwidth benchmark that has been used on personal computers to super computers. It measures sustained memory bandwidth not burst or peak. Therefore, the results may be lower than those of other benchmarks. Download a free trial version of SiSoft Sandra here.

SiSoft’s memory test shows something similar, memory performance has stagnated or got even worse. AMD really need to work on their IMC given how their new HSA technology invests lots of technology into the system memory, if the system memory performance is declining then this is going to be a flawed strategy.

Memory Latency – AIDA64 & SiSoft Combined Results

Memory latency showed a boost going from Llano to Trinity to Ricland but then a horrible decline with Kaveri. Again this is something that doesn’t seem right – we have moved forward three generations but gone backwards in memory performance. Fortunately these synthetic memory benchmarks have only a very small bearing on “real-world performance”.