AMD A10 6800K review

Posted on: 06/06/2013 03:01 AM

---

^^^ considering the A10 has a graphics chip that you can do something with, whereas the Intel HD 4000 (let alone the HD 2500) is pretty poor for any kind of gaming at all.... I can live with a higher tdp.

The point is - AMD can't.
AMD selling their silicon for only a fraction of what Intel gets, is not by their own choice.
Think about that when you hear Richland is competing with i3, FX is competing with i5 and AMD does not compete with Iris Pro at all.



*for the record I personally do not care about power consumption. If my PSU can handle it then I'm perfectly content. I don't want to hear about saving the polar bears either, mankind will all kill each other long before the oceans rise to swallow the world.

WTF... I mention Power Consumption in CPU thread, and you're thinking screw polar bears and oceans? We're talking about competitiveness, not green Earth.
Not to mention that that selfish rugged attitude is not even funny anymore; it's more like long past annoying. And I'm not very eco-conscious

Posted on: 06/06/2013 03:04 AM

---

... Relative to what? A PowerPC based CPU with 1 core and 2 threads that was used in 2006 (and earlier in 2005 in the Xbox 360)? I always find it hilarious when people think the PS3 is this powerhouse with 9001 cores, they don't seem to be able to grasp the concept of what a core is to understand that the PS3 only has a single one. Anyway, relative to anything used in a desktop it's abysmal.

Saying it in general, it's flexible that it can be changed easily since it was designed to be modular which follows AMD's design principle of M-SPACE. The PS3 had one PPE and 8 SPE (1 reserved for the OS). The PPE was really just a really smart controller was all. The SPE did all the heavy lifting, they were not a "core" per se, but a specialized processing unit, just like the "cores" in your graphics card, they aren't really cores, yet they're sometimes marketed as such.

I like to be realistic. I've had almost as many AMD systems as Intel, I don't particularly care which color logo my chips have. Like I said, my second to last build was an AMD.

Kabini (Jaguar) uses more power than an Intel (IVB) i7-3517u while offering nowhere even close the performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/604?vs=823

Trinity fares little better, it uses up more power than an i7-3517u while also offering inferior performance:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/729?vs=600

ARM still doesn't have "performance" per se. Their top of the line A15 chips perform near the 2006 Intel Core Duo chips; what they do have is lower power usage for that performance (at the moment) while still lacking X86. Atom as it is (which is a horribly dated design) is still competitive with the latest ARM designs (except for the GPU), and Silvermont looks to completely destroy that performance in every way.

The console win for AMD is a victory not over Intel, but over IBM and Nvidia. Besides, the margins there are horrible.

I still have high hopes for Temash, but the lack of any major OEM wins is horribly worrying.

It's likely the GPU cores taking up most of that power consumption. Remember, AMD's iGPU is pretty powerful and are Radeon parts with up to 384 streaming processors. Intel's architecture only has 16 of such units. For Kabini, you get up to 128 stream processors.

We all know that AMD is graphics heavy while Intel is serial process heavy. With proper hUMA support, I'm sure people can squeeze a lot more out of Kabini than they can do now.

I didn't say ARM does at the moment, but they are making headway and at a pretty fast pace while still consuming less power than Intel's current offerings. Once ARMv8 comes out along with the Cortex A53 and A57 next year, ARM is expected to jump in performance. Of course these are just expectations with no publically available solid data.



It remains an issue EVERYWHERE. Power consumption is everything.
If you command power consumption, the easiest thing you can do is trade it for some performance.








http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-a10-6800k_8.html#sect0




I was talking about mobile, all those are desktop processors which are not tweaked for mobile use. It's like me taking Haswell desktop chips and saying that they're not as power efficient as their laptop counterparts.

deltatux

Posted on: 06/06/2013 03:51 AM

---

I think Kaveri (coming later this year) will be the real deal. Steamroller cpu with GCN cores.

Posted on: 06/06/2013 04:40 AM

---

Here is an excellent graph to show AMD's problem:




That shows the amount of energy used to complete a workload.



This means that not only does the Intel CPU run faster and use less peak power, but since it finishes the workload faster it uses up even less energy than is usually noted in graphs.

Not to mention that the new Intel Iris Pro (5200) runs circles around AMD's top APU, including the GPU portion, while using far less energy.

Posted on: 06/06/2013 05:03 AM

---

Saying it in general, it's flexible that it can be changed easily since it was designed to be modular which follows AMD's design principle of M-SPACE. The PS3 had one PPE and 8 SPE (1 reserved for the OS). The PPE was really just a really smart controller was all. The SPE did all the heavy lifting, they were not a "core" per se, but a specialized processing unit, just like the "cores" in your graphics card, they aren't really cores, yet they're sometimes marketed as such.

I don't know anything about M-SPACE (unless it's the shared memory space, what are the odds that's what M-SPACE stands for :wanker , all I've learned about Jaguar however points to it being significantly weaker than even ancient CPUs.

As for the PS3 part...

That's a load of crap though and that's my problem, using that terminology then an ALU or pretty much any other core component is a specialized processing unit that can be "sometimes marketed" as a core. The SPEs were nothing more than off-core mini components. And the PS3 might as well have had 5 in best case scenarios and 0 in 99% of cases because that's what the reality was. 1 disabled for selling defective chips, 1 reserved for "security", 1 for outright spying on you, sending logs of EVERYTHING it can log to Sony's server every time you're connected online whether or not you log in. That's why PS3s with custom firmware would become banned even without logging in.

Sony abused the ignorance and stupidity of the general public and perpetuated the myth that the PS3 has 8 cores while the 5 available vector units were almost never used. I can count on one hand the amount of games I know used the available 5 for a fact, and they're all exclusives. It would sound awfully bad if the general public knew the 360 used the same core type but had 3 of them and 6 threads versus 1 core and 2 threads.

The PS3 had a third of the cores of the 360 and significantly weaker GPU, yet almost every console owner believes the PS3 has more powerful hardware that was never fully utilized.

I know you know this stuff, I just felt like writing it out.

The killer part about this is, those horribly weak consoles seem relatively reasonable now (for the time) compared to what's coming out. I have a toaster with more processing power than the upcoming consoles.