Trinity vs Ivy Bridge

[liolio]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5969/zotac-geforce-gt-640-review-/9
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6332/amd-trinity-a10-5800k-a8-5600k-review-part-1/3

Crysis Warhead 1680x1050 Performance quality, Frost bench

640 review - 99.8, Trinity review - 100.5

Dirt 3 1680x1050 Medium quality

640 review - 69.7, Trinity review 71.4

Shogun 2 1680x1050 Medium quality

640 review - 55, Trinity review 54.8

Based on those results it looks extremely likely to be the same cpu as was used in the GT 640 review, which was an i7 3770K. The 7660D and Gt 640 would probably be very closely matched using the same cpu.

Your assumption, drivers alone can explain the differences.

I disagree, and the recent techreport review concludes similarly -
http://techreport.com/review/23662/amd-a10-5800k-and-a8-5600k-trinity-apus-reviewed/8

2 cores just don't cut it, and it's only going to get worse. If you want something cheap to pair with a 6670 you can always buy a Phenom II and overclock it. There basically isn't any reason to go with a Pentium.

Well that is your take, it could (as it is not for quiet some games) be true but with a quiet sucky GPU anyway you may take the hit and leave with it.
As for the phenom II, I can't no longer find them on newegg, though you have Athlon II (llano part with disabled IGP and some older parts) in that price range.
I would say that it could be kind of even, as those old CPU neither support the last version of the SIMD isa (true for the Pentium). None of those cheap confs are actually forward looking no matter how you look at it, we speak about really budget.

If AMD sells Athlon III (based on vishera or trinity) for cheap (so cheaper than the a10 series) it could indeed be the indisputable best choice for real low budget. Anyway the fact that you come with older architecture (AMD) is imo a testament that something is not OK in AMD product line.
SImply if some one want to stick with AMD he has no intensive to upgrade and he has been locked in that situation for a while

 

[jimbo75]

Your assumption, drivers alone can explain the differences.

Not a chance.

Well that is your take, it could (as it is not for quiet some games) be true but with a quiet sucky GPU anyway you may take the hit and leave with it.
As for the phenom II, I can't no longer find them on newegg, though you have Athlon II (llano part with disabled IGP and some older parts) in that price range.
I would say that it could be kind of even, as those old CPU neither support the last version of the SIMD isa (true for the Pentium). None of those cheap confs are actually forward looking no matter how you look at it, we speak about really budget.

If AMD sells Athlon III (based on vishera or trinity) for cheap (so cheaper than the a10 series) it could indeed be the indisputable best choice for real low budget. Anyway the fact that you come with older architecture (AMD) is imo a testament that something is not OK in AMD product line.
SImply if some one want to stick with AMD he has no intensive to upgrade and he has been locked in that situation for a while

My point was simply that Pentium's are horrible gaming cpu's and there is no justification for them being forwarded as some kind of decent alternative to the Trinity quads. Dual cores are awful for most games and the i3's just about keep themselves ahead of the true quads because most games still aren't properly threaded. It's been a slow change but it's now definitely coming and I have little doubt that in say, a years time, a Trinity A10 will be beating the fastest i3 in many AAA titles.

 

[liolio]

My point was simply that Pentium's are horrible gaming cpu's and there is no justification for them being forwarded as some kind of decent alternative to the Trinity quads. Dual cores are awful for most games and the i3's just about keep themselves ahead of the true quads because most games still aren't properly threaded. It's been a slow change but it's now definitely coming and I have little doubt that in say, a years time, a Trinity A10 will be beating the fastest i3 in many AAA titles.

Well I may agree with that, I re read the tech report reviews. In game like BF3 and Crysis 2 it tanks but so are older AMD parts. So it is not only about cores counts. (the Pentium does particularly bad on 99% parts, I guess when parallelism is readily available to exploit it doesn't have what it takes to exploit it). It could have something to do with some unsupported SIMD instructions I wonder.
Still BF3 and Crisis 2 are properly multi-threaded and the core i3 wins. I would not expect miracle down the road and it's a clear win on quiet some games available now.
I acknowledge I read the review a bit too fast wrt to the pentium performances.
The whole thing is if you are on really budget, no matter what extra may bring Trinity/piledriver vs Pentium/athlon II the GPU in trinity is still a more significant bottleneck. Discrete GPU with GDDR5 are still significantly ahead and once you blend in the CPU they might still pull ahead (not matter the CPU bottleneck).
For me the APU still fight to find their place in the desktop realm, even when AMD sell its highest bin part @ 130$ (imo quiet a disaster for the company...).

If I were to buy, I would most likely wait for some possible Athlon III (PD/trinity based as the last athlon II llano based with the IGP killed) saved some bucks to invest on a discrete GPU. Either way save a bit more and get a core i3 and a discrete GPU.
Usually I go with AMD for the reason Universal truth used against me... (nice) and may be accept light trade off. But there is no way I would take my opinion on matter, more politics than anything else, for a fact in the context of a discussion or to give advices.

The A8-5600K is offer great bang for bucks (as can't beat by spending a couple extra tenth of Euros/Dollars/ etc.) but honestly most gamer in the occidental world can and do spend more even on a low end conf so the point is a bit moot.

I can't see that as good for AMD, following your line of thinking or mine, we might agree that spending 75$ on a Athlon II x4 641 and 85$ on hd 6670 is a better solution that buying the A10 5800K for 130$. As I said above even on budget, 30 bucks ain't much and the benefits in games is worse every penny.

 

[jimbo75]

Well the thing about adding extra $'s is you have to end somewhere. As it currently stands you can definitely make a better gaming rig with an i3 + 6670.

The i3 3220 is a $130 cpu, and the 6670 is another $50. The A10 is $130, and prices will drop over the coming few months until it's nearer $100. Prices on the 3220 and 6670 won't be dropping any more.

That's the thing - if you are desperate to prove how APU's are bad value then there is no better time than now to be pointing it out when the latest one has just been released. What happens though when the 6670's disappear leaving only 7750's at ~$80, and the A10 is available for $100? This will generally be the case over most of the coming year.

 

[Alexko]

As long as TSMC's 40nm wafers remain significantly cheaper than their 28nm ones, the 6670 won't disappear from the market.

 

[jimbo75]

That's something AMD will have to have a long hard look at and make a decision over. It's pretty bizarre that in all of these discussions it's always Intel + Radeon that is being held up as better value. Really they might be better off just pulling those 6770's asap and making the APU choice a lot more straightforward.

 

[rpg.314]

That's something AMD will have to have a long hard look at and make a decision over. It's pretty bizarre that in all of these discussions it's always Intel + Radeon that is being held up as better value. Really they might be better off just pulling those 6770's asap and making the APU choice a lot more straightforward.

I think they might be making more money on 6770 than on trinity.

 

[Alexko]

I think they might be making more money on 6770 than on trinity.

Plus, they don't want to just hand over the low-end market to NVIDIA.

 

[jimbo75]

Hm I remember seeing numbers back last year which had the Llano ASP at ~$70, so that's more than the end cost of the 6670 now. I'd think it's unlikely that the 6670 is making more money than Trinity, even with Trinity being double the size. I think I remember seeing a gpu one as well but can't recall the ASP on the 6670.

edit - found the link http://investorvillage.com/mbthread.asp?mb=476&tid=10759150&showall=1

Maybe they should leave the 6670's as OEM only. The actual numbers of off-the-shelf 6670's being sold can't be that high now surely, but so long as they are they will always be held up as being a good reason not to go with Trinity.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Cards are needed for upgrades, or replacing dead cards. Many people do that, non enthusiast users, they want to run some new game, let's say Diablo 3 even if it sucks, but their 9300GS or Intel graphics (pre HD2000) doesn't cut it.

That cheap 6670 is a ddr3 model anyway, which can't beat possibly beat an APU, here I can get a gddr5 model for 79 euros.
If AMD leaves the market then any potential buyer will get a gt630 instead, or a gt640 when it moves down in price. This is only giving away mindshare to your competitor.

 

[Snyder]

Me too.

The A-series seems like a better fit for mini ITX systems, where you can build a capable Wii-sized PC for your kids, that does reasonably well in games.

Cheers

Agreed. If only the peak power draw weren't so high...

 

[CarstenS]

Practicall all that need more CPU power than some old pentium II had. Those on that run well on old pentium II do not use multiple cores.

So, no high single-thread performance needed for image editing.

I'd love to be educated on this one. Care to throw a few names except for those I mentioned? I was using XNview, which for example doesn't use more than one core itself. Also Gimp 2.8 (latest official stable etc.) won't do that for sharpen or lens distortion which I just tried. I know about the GEGL-Version which tries to use the graphics card, yes. But that version is not really stable yet - and besides, Gimp is not what I'd call an easy to use, casual program. So please go ahead.

 

[ninelven]

I think they might be making more money on 6770 than on trinity.

Perhaps, but it can't be very good to compete with oneself with two different products that each require their own R&D. The ROI will obviously suffer.

I suppose it is an OK situation for now as the 6770 was previous generation anyway, but I think it would be wise for AMD to leave the low-end gpu market soon (provided the bandwidth issue gets resolved).

 

[Blazkowicz]

I looked around for geforce 7025 mobos, intending to buy a used one. this one is nice and funny
http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00130510.html

If you're broke you can attempt this.
have a nice rig with :
two leftover IDE optical drives for $20 less than one SATA optical drives
a sempron @ X2 or athlon II or fx 4320 (you can have athlon II X3 450 @ X4 at about the price of pentium G or AMD A4) or even old crap
backup geforce 6100 video, made for legacy gaming at 800x600 but should be able to display unaccelerated full screen youtube, has linux drivers (recently put in a legacy branch that will be supported for some time)

 

[nikos64]

I looked around for geforce 7025 mobos, intending to buy a used one. this one is nice and funny
http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00130510.html

If you're broke you can attempt this.
have a nice rig with :
two leftover IDE optical drives for $20 less than one SATA optical drives
a sempron @ X2 or athlon II or fx 4320 (you can have athlon II X3 450 @ X4 at about the price of pentium G or AMD A4) or even old crap
backup geforce 6100 video, made for legacy gaming at 800x600 but should be able to display unaccelerated full screen youtube, has linux drivers (recently put in a legacy branch that will be supported for some time)

No... This is a monstrosity from the past.
Better take a look at this:
ASRock 960GM-GS3
DX10 class iGPU, HT 2600 MHz (5.2 GT/s) etc.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Maybe they should leave the 6670's as OEM only. The actual numbers of off-the-shelf 6670's being sold can't be that high now surely, but so long as they are they will always be held up as being a good reason not to go with Trinity.

Really? That seems like a pretty anti-competitive and stupid option. If 6670 + desktop CPU truly provide more performance for better ultimate cost, why would we be encouraging eliminating that?

Honestly I'm with tech report on this one... trinity and other integrated graphics solutions are extremely interesting in laptops and mobile where the writing is already on the wall that they will eliminate all discrete solutions, but in a desktop I just don't see the market. It's clear that having "some" graphics to run windows, etc. is desirable, but beyond that the area/power is (much) better spent on a better CPU for non-gamers. And any gamers who still buy desktops will buy a discrete GPU.

 

[UniversalTruth]

...So you're talking about 3D graphics image quality and using HQV2.0 to back that up?

3D image quality... Like this?

Just kidding.

Intel could sell a 100 euro i5 if it wanted, by the way, this would make for a quite different market (AMD would disappear and sell only E-350)

Sorry, I didn't mean to troll anyone when I said that you desperately wanted duopoly nvidia- intel. I hope moderators will not be angry on me again.
Just wanted to tell that if we all unite and buy only AMD products, if we support them, then the chance that they will grow and be a very strong competitor to intel will significantly increase.
I know it's kind of utopia, but dreaming and trolling are completely different things. Moreso when the dream is so positive.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Just wanted to tell that if we all unite and buy only AMD products, if we support them, then the chance that they will grow and be a very strong competitor to intel will significantly increase.

On this note I'm thinking of starting my own CPU company, and I'm sure if I can just get enough people to agree to buy my CPUs exclusively that I will eventually make better ones than the competition. I'm going to be the nicest person ever and sell them super-cheaply so this will be a win for everyone in the long run. If this sounds good to you, PM me and I'll send you payment details for preorders.

 

[jimbo75]

Really? That seems like a pretty anti-competitive and stupid option. If 6670 + desktop CPU truly provide more performance for better ultimate cost, why would we be encouraging eliminating that?

I'm sure I said "they", not "we".

Honestly I'm with tech report on this one... trinity and other integrated graphics solutions are extremely interesting in laptops and mobile where the writing is already on the wall that they will eliminate all discrete solutions, but in a desktop I just don't see the market. It's clear that having "some" graphics to run windows, etc. is desirable, but beyond that the area/power is (much) better spent on a better CPU for non-gamers. And any gamers who still buy desktops will buy a discrete GPU.

That will be the case so long as nothing improves over the coming few years. However you have to realise that AMD has a lot more to offer in regards integrated graphics. If The 7660D was powered by anything remotely close to Ivy Bridge cores it would be in another league. Now add some packaged DRAM and you're in yet another league. You need only look at the performance/watt of the 7750 to see where AMD could be when they actually start trying instead of saddling the gpu with a failed server chip and DDR3. And that 7750 draws about 40W max load - I see no reason why AMD's ultimate goal isn't to have 75W+ gpu on an APU.

 

[I.S.T.]

3D image quality... Like this?

Just kidding.



Sorry, I didn't mean to troll anyone when I said that you desperately wanted duopoly nvidia- intel. I hope moderators will not be angry on me again.
Just wanted to tell that if we all unite and buy only AMD products, if we support them, then the chance that they will grow and be a very strong competitor to intel will significantly increase.
I know it's kind of utopia, but dreaming and trolling are completely different things. Moreso when the dream is so positive.

Congratulations, you're using an ages old picture taken with hardware that hasn't been manufactured for years.