AMD APU: How Much Progress Has Been Made?

Power Consumption and Temperatures

Power Consumption

To measure power consumption we use a killawatt meter and measure the total system power draw at the wall. We run three different scenarios for 5 minutes and take the average reading, these are Windows desktop idle, AIDA64’s system stability test and Prime95’s blend test.

Power consumption is where AMD’s APUs have improved the most, we see an overall decline in power consumption since Llano but with a doubling of GPU performance and a 10%~ overall boost in real world CPU performance.

Temperatures

To measure temperatures we run three different scenarios for 5 minutes: Windows desktop idle, AIDA64 Engineer system stability test and Prime95 Blend system load. We take the average maximum core temperature for AIDA64 and Prime95 and take the average minimum core temperature for desktop idle.

The temperature sensors on AMD’s A8-3870K (and FX 8350) aren’t really showing anything that accurate so we can’t draw too much from those results. However, comparing Kaveri to the A10-5800K and A10-6800K (all of which use the same temperature sensor design) shows a decline in load temperatures, this comes from the increasing power efficiency of Kaveri’s Steamroller versus the Bulldozer & Piledriver of its predecessors.