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Results: Synthetics

AMD's Kabini: Jaguar And GCN Come Together In A 15 W APU
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Although synthetic metrics aren't representative of real-world performance, they do help us drill down into specific subsystems. Let's start by looking at graphics.

The HD Graphics engine in Intel's Pentium B960 does not support DirectX 11, so we have 3DMark Vantage (the green bar) as a secondary measurement. 3DMark 11 does yield viable results on the other two platforms.

Obviously, the Pentium B960 gets outclassed in 3DMark Vantage. Intel's HD Graphics 4000 engine is quite a bit faster in Vantage, though it's only slightly faster in 3DMark 11. AMD's GCN architecture tends to fare best in more modern titles, so this really isn't a surprise to us.

PCMark 7 yields conflicting results. The Pentium gives us the best Overall and Productivity suite scores. AMD's A4-5000 leads in the storage test. And the Core i3-3217U performs best in the Creativity suite.

Cinebench doesn't do AMD any favors; regardless of whether you're looking at single- or multi-threaded performance, the Intel cores are quickest.

The A4-5000 fares well against the Pentium in Sandra's floating-point benchmark. However, it's beaten in raw measures of integer performance.

With support for AES acceleration, the A4-5000 achieves a great result in Sandra's encryption/decryption subtest, moving data as fast as its memory subsystem allows. This is one of those features that Intel strips off for the sake of differentiation. As such, Kabini is handed an easy win.

Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture only supports OpenCL on its CPU cores. Ivy Bridge added support for HD Graphics, though the test only ran in Compute Shader mode for us. Meanwhile, AMD's A4-5400 is able to tackle Sandra's OpenCL workload across its x86 and graphics resources.

LuxMark tells a different story, though. We expect Intel to serve up potent performance from its x86 cores. However, the HD Graphics engine serves up great results as well compared to Kabini's 128 ALUs. It's not exactly clear why AMD's architecture, which is known for its compute alacrity, suffers so badly in this test. The Pentium-based notebook does not work in LuxMark, though its general-purpose cores should support OpenCL.

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  • 0 Hide
    bemused_fred , 24 May 2013 06:49
    The PS4 is built on this? What a shame.....
  • 0 Hide
    MajinCry , 24 May 2013 10:55
    Y'know, I'm curious as to the settings used.
    What was the Texture Filtering (AMD) set at? If it is at quality, no wonder it is chugging. If it's at performance...Ergh.
    Also, what happens when RadeonPro and it's performance tweaks are thrown in? Would setting the mip-maps to performance help at all?
    What about the few optimization settings?
  • 0 Hide
    Cazalan , 24 May 2013 17:36
    CPU World listed that i3 much higher.
    http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_i3/Intel-Core%20i3-3217U%20Mobile%20processor.html
  • 0 Hide
    ivanthechemist , 24 May 2013 22:48
    I am really curious as to how legacy or low demanding games play on this platform. Talking about LoL, DOTA 2, SC2, WoW and so on. This may be a deal deciding factor for some consumers.
  • 0 Hide
    jaslion , 25 May 2013 10:30
    well it is a a4 for a reason just hope the a6 will be better
  • 0 Hide
    selfmade_exe , 27 May 2013 01:04
    1st: 128 ALUs in kabini, how many intel EUs respectively are? I think its just 2 CUs [1 Compute Unit = 64 Unified shaders) if I am correct.
    2nd: the gpu clocks of kabini are standard while intels are variable (favors intel, innacurate results)
    3rd: kabini's gpu is probably bottlenecked by ram speed?