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

OpenCL GPU Performance

Basemark OpenCL

Basemark CL by Rightware is a comprehensive benchmark tool designed to measure the performance of OpenCL 1.1 implementations on various devices ranging from desktops to embedded systems. Basemark CL uses OpenGL ES 2.0 or OpenGL 2.1 for rendering, depending on the platform. Download here.

Kaveri shows a large jump in performance over Richland and a significant lead over Haswell. In fact the slowest Kaveri part is simultaneously faster than Richland and Haswell in GPU based Open CL calculations – very impressive stuff.

Compubench CL 1.1.3 – GPU

CompuBench is a unified performance benchmarking tool that gives realistic feedback on the performance of various compute API implementations used for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems. Based on CLBenchmark, the first professional OpenCL benchmark on the market, it compares CPUs, GPUs and accelerators of desktop and mobile devices by their compute performance characteristics. Download here.

Kaveri absolutely smacks everything out of the park in Compubench, nearly doubling the performance of Richland in most tests and nearly quadrupling the performance of Intel’s Haswell parts. Of course this goes to show how strong AMD’s GCN-based Kaveri GPUs are at Open CL compute and that the gain in performance made by Kaveri over Richland is more significant in the field of compute than it is in things like gaming. This says to me that AMD’s Kaveri APUs are perhaps better placed for productivity and workstation users than AMD lets on. We should certainly see the Kaveri based FirePro APUs being very popular choices!

Luxmark GPU

LuxMark is a OpenCL benchmark tool. The idea for the program was conceived in 2009 by Jean-Francois ‘Jromang’ Romang. The idea was quite simple, wrap SLG inside an easy to use graphical user interface and use it as a benchmark for OpenCL. Download here.

Luxmark shows a similar story to all the other benchmarks – Kaveri has massive compute potential and even the slowest part offers nearly double the performance of Richland and 50% more than Haswell! For Haswell the performance is actually decent. It might seem strange that the cheaper Core i3 4330 beats the Core i5 4440 but this is of course due to the higher frequency of the iGPU on the Core i3 4330.