AMD Kaveri Review: A10-7850K, A10-7700K and A8-7600

Productivity Performance

x264 HD Benchmark 5.0

x264 HD benchmark is a benchmark that allows you to measure how fast your PC can encode a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It allows for an easy comparison because everyone running it will use the safe video clip and software. Download here.

x264 shows quite a decent improvement in Kaveri’s encoding capabilties despite its lower clock speeds. This would suggest the improved UVD/VCE (Unified Video Decoder and Video Compression Engine) are working to the advantage of Kaveri. Sadly it didn’t improve by enough to catch Intel’s Haswell CPUs which excel at encoding, though in the second pass all Kaveri APUs were faster than the Core i3 4330 which is something for AMD to celebrate.

Handbrake

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

As we mentioned with x264 Kaveri APUs seem to have made healthy improvements in encoding despite having significantly reduced clock speeds compared to Richland. That pattern was again demonstrated in Handbrake. This improvement is likely a result of the improved UVD and VCE on Kaveri, impressively the A10-7850K soars past the Intel Haswell Core i3 4330 and the A10-7700K matches it.

WinRAR

WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file formats. Download here.

WinRAR is a benchmark that loves x86 CPU performance and it showed a decline in performance with Kaveri compared to Richland which is a fairly common theme that’s run through this review – Kaveri is let down to a certain extent by its CPU performance. Intel’s Haswell CPUs had a significant advantage in this benchmark.

JPEG Decoder

The JPEG decoder is a purpose-built benchmark from AMD designed to show how the new Kaveri APUs can leverage a more efficient decoding method compared to the built in Windows decoder. Not available for download.

The JPEG decoder gave very favourable results for all AMD APUs and particularly the Kaveri APUs – hardly surprising considering it’s an AMD benchmark tool. However, it is interesting to see how the new Kaveri APU with AMD’s new decoder can leverage such a significant advantage. Even the slowest Kaveri APU is significantly faster than everything else running the standard built-in decoder.

Adobe Photoshop CC

Just about every creative digital project has Photoshop CC at its core. The world’s most advanced image editing app lets you enhance, retouch, and manipulate photographs and other images in any way you can imagine. Download here.

In productive terms the Photoshop CC benchmark is very important. If you’re into any form of photo editing but you don’t have a massive budget for dedicated hardware then AMD’s APUs make an extremely attractive proposal here. Kaveri APUs leverage significantly more powerful GPU parts in OpenCL compute to blast their way through the Intel competition and Richland predecessors. If you take OpenCL out of the equation then Intel has a significant lead but taking OpenCL out of the equation would be going backwards not forwards, OpenCL acceleration is in Photoshop for a reason. The A8-7600 45W part also looks very impressive, able to beat both the Intel Core i5 4440 and A10-6800K when using OpenCL.

MuseMage

Musemage is the world’s first fully functional GPU-powered photo editing software with advanced features and simple user interface. Thanks to the GPU accelerated filters, musemage has ultra fast speed and real-time visual feedbacks. Download here.

MuseMage is entirely GPU accelerated so I’m not surprised to see AMD’s APUs dominating so much. Even the A8-6500T nearly doubles the performance of the Haswell parts showing just how potent APU graphics can be at compute when you take the CPU out of the equation.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is the free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers. Download here.

LibreOffice showed the most promising results of OpenCL acceleration when using the GPU as the primary compute unit. However, Intel’s CPUs weren’t able to function with OpenCL on the GPU in this program so we have no comparisons. Yet the Kaveri to Richland OpenCL GPU comparisons are still viable and give very impressive results, the A10-7850K is three times faster than the A10-6800K. If we look at CPU performance we can see that OpenCL is pretty much a dud and OpenCL being off gives the best results when using the CPU on most of the parts. Intel’s Haswell CPUs unsurprisingly dominate but Kaveri comes closest to challenging them, not Richland.