AMD AM1 Kabini Part 2: Athlon 5350/5150 and Sempron 3850/2650 Tested
by Ian Cutress on May 29, 2014 2:00 PM ESTCPU Synthetic Benchmarks
Content Creation - Cinebench
Based on MAXON’s CINEMA 4D animation software, Cinebench is used to determine the CPU and graphics performance via OpenGL. The software has gone through many iterations over the years, and here we use versions 10, 11.5 and 15 to compare single-threaded and multi-threaded CPU performance. As the generations increase, the software becomes more multithread aware and scales better, however for consistency with older results we keep the version 10 results in our database.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Console Emulation –Dolphin Benchmark: link
At the start of 2014 I was emailed with a link to a new emulation benchmark based on the Dolphin Emulator. The issue with emulators tends to be two-fold: game licensing and raw CPU power required for the emulation. As a result, many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant post to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53; meaning that anything scoring better than this is faster than an actual Wii for processing Wii code, albeit emulated.
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mikk - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link
G1820 is missing or at least a cheap Haswell Pentium.hojnikb - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link
Yes that would be really great, since those chips are price about the same.jospoortvliet - Sunday, June 1, 2014 - link
These do use far more power.On that note, why on earth doid the reviewer compare power usage over idle (never seen that particular metric at anandtech?!?) While not mentioning the idle power (according to various other sites, the amd's sport significant lower idle power). I don't like to think so but this is probably the only power metric to make the atoms look remotely good... Why was it chosen?
savagemike - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link
I agree completely. If I were building a budget desktop right now that is exactly the chip (or similar) which I'd be comparing these to.MikeMurphy - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link
I can buy a G3220 Haswell Pentium running at 3.0ghz for $60. I was really hoping this would make it into this review!!Stuka87 - Thursday, May 29, 2014 - link
The G3220 is a 53W chip. These are 25W chips. They do not compete with each other.HisDivineOrder - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
Atom chips are 10W chips. These Semprons are 25W. They do not compete with each other.See how that doesn't impact the fact that people are talking about more than just wattage? ;) Some people just want to know what the best VALUE is per dollar and these low end options are all in the running.
Why limit yourself to just discussing wattage-appropriate? Especially when those Semprons are already over twice the Atom chips in terms of watts.
bsim500 - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
"The G3220 is a 53W chip. These are 25W chips. They do not compete with each other."Intel's TDP is way overstated on its dual-cores. My "55w" i3 pulls about 32w in reality (measured at the wall, not calculated). I've seen Haswell Pentium's that are sub-30w, (full speed not the slow "T" variants). They are very definitely in the same bracket. In fact, at stock 3.4GHz, with a -0.15v undervolt, I can get my "77w" i5-3570 down from a measured 59w (1.1v) to around 47w (0.95v). At 3.0GHz at 0.83v, you're looking at 36w 4T / 25w 2T (for an i5). AMD's Kabini's are still on 28nm vs Intel's 22nm, and you'd be surprised just how low you can go with undervolting the latter's "big cores".
silverblue - Friday, May 30, 2014 - link
The point is moot as AMD is known for overvolting its processors; an article on Kabini would be very interesting.lyeoh - Sunday, June 1, 2014 - link
Which is why this article needs some actual power consumption benchmarks.