AMD A10 the infernal hashing Hellraiser?

[oldDirty]

The first Test are out and this looks fantastic;



So i think a lot of people are going to love this new AMD Piledriver Generation.

[1713488043]

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[1713488043]

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[rjk]

Now why would CPU+GPU be lower than just GPU by itself? Seems odd.

[oldDirty]

Now why would CPU+GPU be lower than just GPU by itself? Seems odd.

+1
I thing it's because of memory interface/bandwith.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Now why would CPU+GPU be lower than just GPU by itself? Seems odd.

Thermal throttling.  Both AMD and Intel use speedboost.  As long as core is under TDP it will ramp up the clock of core(s) dynamically.

Speedboost has now been extended to GPU core too.  The whole package (CPU + GPU) has a thermal limit.  Using only the GPU (CPU mostly idle) creates headroom which allows "speedboost" to run the GPU faster.

Still I wouldn't say the results are fantastic.   Performance looks to be ~ 1.6x the A8-3500.  Not sure what a A8-3500 gets mining but the A8-3850 gets ~60 MH/s.  So we are talking about 80MH/S to 100 MH/s.

[Ilikeham]

I get 98 MH/S from the A8-3870 @ 900 MHz with DDR3 @ 1866 and that's a Llano with Stars cores and the old 5xxx version of the GPU architecture. I'd expect this to do better at same frequency. No I don't mine on it day in and day out, I just use it as a benchmarking tool to figure out where things are at.

It's not just a question of thermal throttling, Even the new tweaked piledriver memory interface is affected by the limited bandwidth available by sharing a memory controller with the CPU cores and GPU cores. I mean in comparison to a 7750 with GDDR5 it just isn't going to get all the bandwidth it can use if the CPU cores are active as well even at DDR3 2000 as there just isn't enough bandwidth for the GPU alone, never mind the CPU's.

Still they are fun little chips to play with... think about it, for 100 ish bucks you get a nicely capable processor and light game friendly GPU that gobbles up the HD 4000 for breakfast.

Personally I stuck 6870's on the board and leave the integrated beavercreek idle for a friendly desktop interface. Power management is excellent on these.

[ssateneth]

Now why would CPU+GPU be lower than just GPU by itself? Seems odd.

Because the Trinity modifies clocks on the fly the be within TDP. If you use CPU only, it runs CPU at full (or higher) speed. Same with the GPU. if you use both at the same time though, they both run sort of in the middle as far as speed goes

[AzN1337c0d3r]

Still they are fun little chips to play with... think about it, for 100 ish bucks you get a nicely capable processor and light game friendly GPU that gobbles up the HD 4000 for breakfast.

The sad thing is that these CPUs are still competing with mobile Clarksfield/Arrandale where the GPUs are horrid. You won't find HD4000 until you go into mid-to-high level i7-3xxx mobile processors.

[Lethos]

As a Llano owner, it does not surprise me one bit that the Trinity act this way and proves it self quiet well.
I look forward to picking up one of these one day. Like the llano, I hope they come down to a very good price once they hit the laptop market.

[wndrbr3d]

Do we know enough about this proc to estimate mhash/w?

[crazyates]

The A10-4600M has a Radeon HD 7660G (384 cores @ 686MHz) (I'm assuming since it starts with a 7 its GCN)

A 7750 has 512 cores, and at 900MHz gets 136MH/s.

Doing the math from 512 cores -> 384, and from 900MHz -> 686MHz gives us ~77MH/s.

Assuming a 900MHz overclock (just like Ilikeham's A8-3870), that gives us ~102MH/s.

Do we know enough about this proc to estimate mhash/w?

As far as MHs/W, we don't know. But, those GCN are pretty power effecient, so it's bound to be pretty decent. I'm gonna throw it out there and *guess* at under 20W for ~77Mh/s, and under 30W for ~102MH/s.

[ssateneth]

The A10-4600M has a Radeon HD 7660G (384 cores @ 686MHz) (I'm assuming since it starts with a 7 its GCN)

A 7750 has 512 cores, and at 900MHz gets 136MH/s.

Doing the math from 512 cores -> 384, and from 900MHz -> 686MHz gives us ~77MH/s.

Assuming a 900MHz overclock (just like Ilikeham's A8-3870), that gives us ~102MH/s.

Do we know enough about this proc to estimate mhash/w?

As far as MHs/W, we don't know. But, those GCN are pretty power effecient, so it's bound to be pretty decent. I'm gonna throw it out there and *guess* at under 20W for ~77Mh/s, and under 30W for ~102MH/s.

Wow, thats actually really beefy for an integrated GPU. you could easily play modern games on that, with some compromises on quality options of course.

[Coinoisseur]

It's actually VLIW4 cores, so it may not actually be much better than the highest end Llano given it's lower core count. The next APU after Trinity, Kaveri, is supposed to be GCN based.

Anyone know if we can convert MB/s of SHA256 to MH/s?

[crazyates]

The A10-4600M has a Radeon HD 7660G (384 cores @ 686MHz) (I'm assuming since it starts with a 7 its GCN)

A 7750 has 512 cores, and at 900MHz gets 136MH/s.

Doing the math from 512 cores -> 384, and from 900MHz -> 686MHz gives us ~77MH/s.

Assuming a 900MHz overclock (just like Ilikeham's A8-3870), that gives us ~102MH/s.

Do we know enough about this proc to estimate mhash/w?

As far as MHs/W, we don't know. But, those GCN are pretty power effecient, so it's bound to be pretty decent. I'm gonna throw it out there and *guess* at under 20W for ~77Mh/s, and under 30W for ~102MH/s.

Wow, thats actually really beefy for an integrated GPU. you could easily play modern games on that, with some compromises on quality options of course.

I've tried playing SWTOR on an A8-3850, which has the same 6550D as the A8-3870. It's actually not that impressive. Granted this was at 1080 with most settings on Med, but you start running into severe bandwidth issues. APUs are great, but you really need dedicated GDDR5 if you wanna play any games.

[Coinoisseur]

I've tried playing SWTOR on an A8-3850, which has the same 6550D as the A8-3870. It's actually not that impressive. Granted this was at 1080 with most settings on Med, but you start running into sever bandwidth issues. APUs are great, but you really need dedicated GDDR5 if you wanna play any games.

At 1080P, yes. Can't really expect to jump from 800x600 low details integrated performance to 1080P in only a couple of generations. Especially since the DDR4 needed to really increase bandwidth won't be in volume until end of 2013 or beginning of 2014.

Edit: It's a good thing bitcoin hashing doesn't use much bandwidth.

[Lethos]

There is a lot of modern games, that I play on this laptop (Llano based). I admit I've also overclocked the laptop to perform at over 3.0Ghz (standard clock is 1.6), but that is besides the point, the GPU is really what allows it to actually do so much in modern games today that are so GPU based.

With the Trinity, I look forward to seeing how far I can push this one to.

[Ilikeham]

As mentioned it's a 69xx series GPU architecture, not GCN. I totally expect it to perform WITH overclock at about 1/2 of a 7770 in keeping with AMD's targets for these devices from a performance perspective.

Since we're still talking Mining and not gaming , I don't expect it to do any better at all than it's llano counterpart from the previous gen. We already know more or less per shader how fast a 6900 series performs at given frequencies and we already know mining isn't contingent of high RAM speeds.... so it should be easy to extrapolate by number of shaders at any given frequency. It is exactly the same 69xx architecture but with lower memory access speeds and lower base frequency. A 6950 has 1408 stream processors at 800Mhz so take it from there.

For gaming it might clock higher and perform better than a Llano if you use faster RAM but really, if you want to game even medium well you can pick up a used 6870/5850 for a 100 bucks and actually play with some eye candy on at 1080.

Still can't argue with the value proposition it offers though for light gaming at lower than HD resolutions (like laptop 720 /900panels).

[crazyates]

As mentioned it's a 69xx series GPU architecture, not GCN. I totally expect it to perform WITH overclock at about 1/2 of a 7770 in keeping with AMD's targets for these devices from a performance perspective.

Since we're still talking Mining and not gaming , I don't expect it to do any better at all than it's llano counterpart from the previous gen. We already know more or less per shader how fast a 6900 series performs at given frequencies and we already know mining isn't contingent of high RAM speeds.... so it should be easy to extrapolate by number of shaders at any given frequency. It is exactly the same 69xx architecture but with lower memory access speeds and lower base frequency. A 6950 has 1408 stream processors at 800Mhz so take it from there.

For gaming it might clock higher and perform better than a Llano if you use faster RAM but really, if you want to game even medium well you can pick up a used 6870/5850 for a 100 bucks and actually play with some eye candy on at 1080.

Still can't argue with the value proposition it offers though for light gaming at lower than HD resolutions (like laptop 720 /900panels).

I stand corrected, it's not GCN. However, here are the changes that do happen:

A8-3870K - 400 VLIW5 cores @ 600MHz.
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A10-4600 - 384 VLIW4 cores @ 686Mhz.


A 6970 - 1536 VLIW4 cores @ 950MHz = 415Mh/s.

Converting from 1536 -> 384, and we get 103MH/s @ 950Mhz (which is almost a 40% OC). Still not looking that great...

[Pipesnake]

Will A10 use FM1 socket like A8?

[Coinoisseur]

Nope, FM2 socket.

[oldDirty]

News from thg;
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5600k-trinity-apu,3241.html