The Llano Desktop Preview: AMD A8-3850 CPU & GPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 14, 2011 12:00 AM ESTGPU Performance: Between a Radeon HD 6450 & 5570
I grabbed some of our most recent GPU testbed data for the Radeon HD 6450 and the Radeon HD 5570, the latter of which is architecturally most similar to the Sumo GPU in the A8-3850. If you're wondering how much sharing memory bandwidth between the GPU and four CPU cores impacts performance, it's pretty significant. The HD 6450 only has 160 cores compared to 400 on the 6550D, while the 5570 has 400 cores running at 750MHz.
Note that these scores are taken with DDR3-1333, however if we push the memory bus all the way to its limit on desktop (DDR3-1866) you end up with performance that's somewhere between a 6450 and a 5570. AMD's branding makes sense in this case (6550D).
Overall the Radeon HD 6550D in AMD's A8-3850 APU performs a lot like a discrete Radeon HD 6450 card. For a GPU that ships integrated with all high-end A8 APUs, I really can't complain. The real question is how does it stack up when compared directly to Sandy Bridge, which brings us to our next page...
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Quizzical - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
What memory clock speed was used for those benchmarks? A Radeon HD 5570 wouldn't perform like a 5570 either if it were stuck with 1066 MHz DDR3. 1866 MHz DDR3 would presumably be less of a bottleneck.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
DDR3-1333, expect to see more testing with higher memory frequencies for our final review :)Take care,
Anand
dertechie - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I can't say I didn't expect to see memory bandwidth start to become an issue here.This may be a problem if it really does end up being bandwidth-heavy and OEMs cheap out on RAM. I fully expect to see some very good OEM builds that complement it with good parts, and some hideous ones that use DDR3-1066 or DDR3-800 and just choke the life out of that GPU.
DanNeely - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
I think you're being a bit overly pessimistic. Between the much smaller number of 1066 (30) vs 1333 (179) desktop memory products listed on newegg (no ddr3-800 at all), and the fact that Dell doesn't offer anything below DDR3-1333 on their cheapest crappiest ddr3 boxes it appears that 1333 is the slowest DDR3 still being produced.Meanwhile the pricegap for 2x2GB is only ~$5 on newegg for 1333 vs 1600, so if faster ram actually does help performance it's reasonable to expect a decent number of vendors to offer it.
duploxxx - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
it's good to share this information already, provides a lot of information, but I do feel you clearly need to enter in this preview what specs are used. People will go for the first idea always, although the APU is fine, I think it will gain quite some performance on the 1866 mem which is fully supported.ET - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
1866 memory will have to go down in price significantly to be viable for an entry level PC. Still, it would be interesting to see performance with 1600, which seems to be the new standard.Tanclearas - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Yeah. The $10 to $20 premium on 4GB of DDR3-2000 memory is just way too much to expect people to come up with...Sadly though, you're right. Many manufacturers will cheap out on the RAM even if it does severely impact performance.
Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Given the importance of memory bandwidth, cant you stick some other speed ram in there and give as an estimate of overall average FPS vs ram speed?Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Reload page 3 :)Take care,
Anand
mczak - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - link
Ahh nice. 40% more memory bandwidth nets you 20-30% (mostly 20% though) more graphics performance.Could you throw in some ddr3-1600 numbers? The cpu is still in the value category, ddr3-1866 isn't there yet (but ddr3-1600 is). Though extrapolating from these numbers, I'd expect ddr3-1600 (plus 20% memory bandwidth over ddr3-1333) to offer around a 13% improvement over ddr3-1333 - not too shabby.