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

CPU Performance

Cinebench

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.

The CPU story doesn’t change that much with Kaveri. We see similar levels of CPU performance between Kaveri and Richland at the high end but that is still a positive in itself given that we have lower clock speeds with Kaveri. The end result is that the improved IPC of Steamroller is cancelled out compared to Richland due to lower frequencies. However, the performance gain at the 45W envelope compared to the A8-6500T is staggering and a huge achievement. AMD’s Kaveri parts struggle to compete against Intel’s Haswell CPUs – AMD’s best quad core Kaveri part, the A10-7850K, struggles to match Intel’s i3 4330 hyper-threaded dual core part in both versions of Cinebench.

Moving on to the OpenGL part of the Cinebench test and the story is reversed. AMD’s significantly more powerful integrated graphics see them steam ahead of both Intel Haswell parts in both tests. The A8-6500T nearly matches the Core i5 4440 in terms of OpenGL performance. In Cinebench R15 the two Haswell parts weren’t able to run the test due to reference match errors despite having the latest Open GL graphics drivers installed.

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. Download here.

WPrime shows a much more favourable picture for AMD processors than Cinebench. We can see a clear generational uplift from Richland and AMD’s Kaveri parts trade blows with Intel’s Haswell parts. However, the Core i5 4440 still has a comfortable lead. The big surprise is again from that 45W Richland to Kaveri transition, the 45W A8-7600 performs nearly twice as fast as the 45W A8-6500T.

Super Pi

Super PI is a single threaded benchmark that calculates pi to a specific number of digits. Super PI is a single threaded benchmark ideal for testing pure, single threaded x87 floating point performance and while most of the computing market has shifted towards multithreaded applications and more modern instruction sets, Super PI still remains quite indicative of CPU capability in specific applications such as computer gaming. Download here.

In terms of single threaded performance Intel is miles ahead of AMD, nonetheless we still see an excellent improvement compared to Richland. The A10-7850K is 20% faster than the A10-6800K despite having a lower clock speed!