Intel i5 vs AMD Quad-Core A10-4600M Accelerated Processor

[R3d]

I would buy the A10 assuming that the battery life isn't horrible. It has much better GPU performance and more cores for multi-threaded CPU performance. The only place it loses is single and dual threaded performance.

It's basically better single thread performance and battery life vs GPU and extra cores.

P.S. the amount of quoted system memory the IGP can use is worthless as a benchmark, they aren't powerful enough to need more than 1GB and probably not even that.

It doesn't. The A10 has the multithreaded performance somewhere around an Intel i3.

The trinity chips still outperform the "true" quad-cores from the previous iteration, though.. At lower power-use.

Stock, maybe. But Llano can be overclocked while Trinity is locked down. Any Llano quad at a conservative 2.4ghz OC will beat the A10 multithreaded.

[Atom Ant]

Nope. The i5 will crush it in multi-threaded performace -- not by as much as in single-threaded, but still by a lot.

AMD pulled a brilliant marketing trick by putting 4 integer cores in there and calling it "quad-core" based on that. It is not really a quad-core processor: a whole lot of important things are shared between pairs of cores ("modules"): instruction fetch, branch prediction, FPU, L1 instruction cache, L2 cache... the only reason to call it a "quad-core" is that the integer units and L1 data cache are not shared. The result is somewhere in between having 4 real cores and having 2 cores with hyperthreading (but since Intel's cores are so much faster to begin with, 2 hyperthreaded cores win in practically everything).

The scientific explanations are might good to confuse people, but end-users do not cares what is under the hood, especially if ain't change anything on the facts. From experience and from other Trinity users the 4 integer cores are just simply better to run more than two programs parallel than 2cores+HT. And if you are remember AMD had a great demo to demolish the power of 4integer cores +IGP, while even the I7 Intel failed to show anything similar like that.

[Althernai]

The scientific explanations are might good to confuse people, but end-users do not cares what is under the hood, especially if ain't change anything on the facts. From experience and from other Trinity users the 4 integer cores are just simply better to run more than two programs parallel than 2cores+HT.

What programs? My work involves some of the most CPU-intensive applications out there and we routinely look at comparisons of CPU architectures as they are released (more for servers than laptop, but since everyone has a laptop anyway and the architectures are extremely similar, the latter serve as advanced notice). Trinity is based on Piledriver which is a minor revision of Bulldozer. There are very, very few programs in which a Piledriver module (i.e. pair of integer cores + associated resources) beats a hyperthreaded Sandy Bridge core (never mind Ivy).

Of course, most applications which are run in parallel (web browser, email client, office) are bottlenecked by storage rather than the CPU so you can certainly get better performance from an SSD (or a faster hard drive) even if you are using an inferior CPU, but this is not what multi-threaded performance is about.

[Atom Ant]

What programs? My work involves some of the most CPU-intensive applications out there and we routinely look at comparisons of CPU architectures as they are released (more for servers than laptop, but since everyone has a laptop anyway and the architectures are extremely similar, the latter serve as advanced notice). Trinity is based on Piledriver which is a minor revision of Bulldozer. There are very, very few programs in which a Piledriver module (i.e. pair of integer cores + associated resources) beats a hyperthreaded Sandy Bridge core (never mind Ivy).

Not sure what kind of "most CPU-intensive applications" are you meaning, maybe not important for 99% of the folks. If you look back the links in my previous post, it shows a situation which can be useful for consumers; one core work with movie encoding, second core play movie, 3rd core with igp play game, 4th core play another movie and the laptop still alive. This is a multithreaded situation where Intel i5 have no chance.

[Helios22]

A10.

just go dual channel RAM

[R3d]

The scientific explanations are might good to confuse people, but end-users do not cares what is under the hood, especially if ain't change anything on the facts. From experience and from other Trinity users the 4 integer cores are just simply better to run more than two programs parallel than 2cores+HT. And if you are remember AMD had a great demo to demolish the power of 4integer cores +IGP, while even the I7 Intel failed to show anything similar like that.

Every single time this topic is brought up you seem bent on ignoring all the actual benchmarks for some reason. In terms of CPU performance, Trinity is slower 99% of the time than even Intel's last gen i5, let alone the current gen. Anandtech shows this, Tom's Hardware shows this, Hot Hardware shows this. Even the benchmarks that you yourself posted in this thread show that an a fast Intel dual core would be faster than a slower AMD quad.

How long are you going to ignore the truth and mislead other people?

[JKnows]

If laptops, I'd buy only Trinity. Cheap, fast, cool, do everything what Intel and more and longer!

[nipsen]

Stock, maybe. But Llano can be overclocked while Trinity is locked down. Any Llano quad at a conservative 2.4ghz OC will beat the A10 multithreaded.

..Going by tomshardware numbers on their test, I doubt that's actually true.

Also doubt the frequency scaling isn't going to be possible to tamper with eventually.

[R3d]

..Going by tomshardware numbers on their test, I doubt that's actually true.

Also doubt the frequency scaling isn't going to be possible to tamper with eventually.

What numbers? And what do you mean by "frequency scaling"?

[Althernai]

I assume that he means you will eventually be able to overclock Trinity just like you can overclock Llano.