Hardware AMD A10-7800 Review

45watts TDP oO wow

 

I'd have to say... the wattage is actually very nice compared to the i3 systems. AMD was always really far behind that kind of stuff but now they're almost head-to-head with intel. This, to me, is a big deal because at least with desktop systems, the A10 (or, an A8 anyway) and i3 are perfectly balanced choices - it's just a matter picking a processor based on how many GPU-intensive things you do.

 

+1

 

Purely looking at the gaming benchmarks. BF4 on low at 1080p is unplayable and thats just single player so multiplayer is not exactly viable.

The 7850k is only £5 more expensive and offers better performance for games and pretty similar performance for cpu tasks. You would hit the minimum that id consider playable 30fps minimum. If I was buying AMD today thats the chip id pick if I needed a APU

Below would be my recommendations if you had £130 for a chip and gpu.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...ore-32ghz-oc-up-to-45ghz-5-gt-s-dmi-32x-ratio £44

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2gb-...mhz-gddr5-gpu-1175mhz-896-streams-dvi-dp-hdmi £81 ( High quality the card achieves 45 min fps acording to anandtechs own review, On medium 77 on low 98 which is nearly 4x what the apu achieves on low)

For £4 extra you could actually run games at 1080p and not get sub 30 fps. anandtech have ran reviews of similar setups and with the cost of the old mid range now in the low £80 area APUs now need to offer higher performance than they did 5months ago. Not less as is the case here.

Power Usage as Harle and others on this forum have pointed out before ( When defending AMD usauly) matters to so few people that its not something a would be buyer takes into account.

 

Mobile users would care about power usage would they not ? Then again most go the ARM route for low power in mobile devices i think, don't they.

I have never understood why AMD & Intel chase the low power segment so much if I'm honest, isn't that segment of the market all but a done deal ?

 

Sure they do, but AMD was never known for anything that great in the mobile market, aside from having the g-sync idea built-in with laptop LCDs. In fact they didn't even TRY getting into tablets. Intel gets a lot more done per-clock

However, I have to agree that intel's chse in the low power segment seems a little weird. Like I said, AMD doesn't try very hard to get in there, but intel is putting so much attention toward it. The way I see it, they don't want to be beaten out by ARM, a company that is maybe 1/10 the size. What intel doesn't realize is there is no 1-size-fits-all architecture, yet they think x86 is.

 

I find this review really difficult to compare with Intel's chip considering you are reviewing this as an APU and the Intel chip as a pure CPU. What about the results of this as a CPU with a dedicated GPU?

 

Who is going to guarantee Microsoft will have widespread support from day 1 of whatever comes after x86?

No one.

Without a widely used OS to go with why would Intel have poured billions into development of whatever comes after x86 in the past?

What about Android and iOS? Sure they are a success now, but development of a brand new cpu takes several years and it will be a while before Intel catches up.

 

You would not buy this chip to go with another Dgpu as you can buy the fx8320 for similar money if you wanted a direct gpu and it would be alot faster. Low end i3s i5s can be had also and do a similar thing.

Like for like is the comparison I did and other sites did and have shown there is more viable builds at this price point than just a APU.

Intels low budget pentium has really changed the budget market place.

OS development takes as long as CPU development. IOS was 3 years in development before it was released to public.

Andriod was similar and took alot longer to be really useable. ( Andriod pre 4.0 was a broken mess had several pre 4.0 phones still do actually and they are so slow, Despite having faster hardware than there equivelent IOS phones the Iphone 3 and Iphone 3gs )

Intel will assume the market place for Smartphones will continue to grow. There problem like Nvidia is there products will be priced high.

And as ive said before there is only 2 companies making high end phones ( that actually make money) that can afford to use either company. Samsung and Apple niether will use them both hence the low end sales both have seen so far.

Intel stand slightly higher chance of getting in with Apple but they would have to make something that blows away Apples own designs to stand a chance at this point ( Performance, Price, Power Consumption, Intergration been the big 4), Apple has a super efficent chip and code at this point.

People have argued the above fact without any real numbers. Nvidia have reached the point where they have made there own tablet to showcase there platform.

 

£140 gets you this chip and a board ;

we know rollo you don't like anything AMD , but really - you should try the APU`s.

More viable? for £200 for an entire machine you will be hard pushed to get something similar - and don't dare suugest a Pentium anything - I have one and its aweful.

I bought my parents an A10-5800K with some 2133 ram; at 720p (which this is aimed at - so heaven knows why the reviewer even bothered at 1080P) it works and works well - the 5800K plays Elite : dangerous at medium settings - might even get my dad a 6570 for CF , they are cheap enough.

he is happy, what more can you ask?

 

Just re-realized how poor AMD´s chips are, a i5-2400 will beat the 7850K big-time in real world use. And that´s when the 7850K is at 4,4 GHz. Ouch!

Sorry for being off-topic, but it´s such a shame Intel get´s absolutely no competition.

I know, that if you really like AMD, you will be able to find a very specifik, thought out scenario, where an AMD system equals or marginally beats the Intel equivalent system. Probably on some "for-the-price" argument. But you´l be hard pressed to find it, and it wouldn´t really make a difference on your wallet anyway.

If you only want to spend that kind of money, it´s because you don´t really need the device in the first place. If you only have 300 dollars, you should save up some more or get one of the zillions of almost new devices sold on E-bay and elsewhere. There your 300 bucks will get you into a whole other ballpark.

Just my 50 cents.

 

and that i5 needs a separate GPU - using the onchip one will kill any chance of gaming at 720p , which the AMD apu`s can happily do

 

Which is why they have Silvermont and they have Haswell currently. x86 is not an architecture, and it a frame work of processing instructions. Silvermont for low power and Haswell for medium/high power are architectures.

Silvermont currently spanks ARM design in performance and power consumptions. Two issues, Intel is a late comer to market, they don't license there design...until very, very recently and lastly, they don't have the SoC. Their phone chip is slowly wending its way to market and they don't have a combined SoC/modem solution yet, but should soon.

The reason Intel is focusing so much time an attention is because the low power market is VAST even if the margins are tiny. ARM is more like 1/100th the size of Intel based on revenue, but in terms of the number of SoC/processors sold around the world, ARM is actually probably larger than Intel. Its just that ARM produces processor designs, they don't make a single processor (other than prototypes). Samsung, Qualcomm, etc are the ones actually making the processors and it is a multibillion dollar market.

Intel has the resources, infrastructure, fabs and engineering talent to focus on the low power market and take giant losses for years until they can really make in roads and possibly dominate the low power market some day. Not saying they will, but they can manage.

Their low power mobile division took something like a few hundred millions in losses over the last year. The company still managed something like $10+ billion in profit. They can afford to lose a few hundred million year after year until they can turn a profit in the low power market.

 

Actually it'll work just fine in most games at 720p, or at least a current Haswell i3/i5 will. The AMD processor certainly has the edge in iGPU performance, but in compute performance it is very, very far behind. It gets exponentially worse if you go in for a low end Haswell i5 with 4 real cores doing the work. One of those plus an inexpensive board is roughly the same price as the 7850/7850k and a low end board.

AMD certainly has a market for those who want to maximize gaming, have no need for CPU performance and want the cheapest possible system. That isn't necessarily a huge market.

As it stands AMD can't beat Intel in really anything CPU related at any price point. They can, for now, beat Intel in the iGPU market in most price points, but not in mobile. If you compare apples to apples with TDP taken in to consideration, Intel beats AMD in all of the 25w and below segments in both CPU and in general iGPU performance for 17/25w chips. Its only in standard voltage that AMD Kavari pulls a head. Pulls ahead of some Intel chips. All while most of the AMD 17/25w CPUs are crippled with 40-70% of the CPU performance of the Intel chips.

I think two things matter here though, AMD just doesn't have a big market and Intel smashes them on CPU performance, still has a lead in power consumption, mobile is getting bigger and Intel is generally catching up in iGPU performance. Broadwell remains to be seen, but it looks like Intel is probably going to have focused on iGPU performance in a big, big way. Maybe it'll only be incremental, but it also might be doubling iGPU performance.

Who knows, but Intel is showing they are focused on it and since Sandy has come out in 2 chip releases they've roughly tripled iGPU performance. AMD has not improved nearly that much, even if they still have the edge.

 

`very very far behind`


because your doing heavy video coding on an £80 cpu... oh wait NO

try actually using one for 99% of the tasks most normal people use a pc for - watching you tube videos , poking on facebook and light gaming, and you`ll be rather surprised. wish I had one instead of this Pentium im currently using.

 

That's true - I'm not denying that. But even MS has ridiculous expectations. Windows RT, their attempt to get into the tablet market, failed for several reasons (but I'll only bring up 2): First and foremost, it called itself Windows when it didn't run x86 Windows binaries. Second, Windows is so heavy and bloated it could only work on a small handful of devices, and requires double the resources of iOS, android, symbian, RIM, webOS, and linux. While intel is, IMO, wasting a lot of time and money trying to make a one-size-fits-all chip, MS is even more crazy thinking Windows can do the same thing. Being widespread isn't always a good thing.

iOS doesn't switch hardware platforms, and android is technically a VM so it can relatively easily interchange between platforms without breaking compatibility. ARM is losing it's classification of being RISC anyway, so there is beginning to be less of a reason for Android to move to something like x86.


@kent thomsen
Aside from the fact that not everyone needs an i5, or an i3 for that matter, what a lot of people don't realize is AMD's architectures are actually very proportionate to intel's. Look at the die map of an A10, the map of an i3, and the map of an i7. It appears that an A10 has less CPU transistors than an i3, but as a whole, has more transistors than a typical i7. Most of those transistors go to the GPU. That being said, comparing AMD's CPU to anything higher than an i3 is a moot point. It's like comparing an exotic car to a large pickup truck - they could both have an 8-cylinder engine but they're good at completely different things.

 

Android 2.3 was the one that happened to be current when the market for Smartphones really exploded, no matter how good or bad it was, but yes it has improved a lot since then.

How much can the market grow in the future though? In the richer countries we are probably close to market saturation and in poorer countries price is too important to make much profit and as you said, their products will be expensive which isn't really surprising if they follow their usual route of in house development, stamping a fab out of the ground, developing tooling for it and so on.
Arm on the other hand is almost a crowd funded approach, just with companies instead of people contributing and so far its working which leaves AMD and Intel in a difficult situation.

 

AMD Intel and Nvidia all face issues in the tablet / smartphone sector.

Intergration been one of the big ones. Unless your soc includes a modem your not getting business. This lack of integration cost nvidia Samsungs business.

Power consumption other sites have gone into this better than I'd even try to explain.

Performance, the last generation in the IPhone 5s was also very powerful, basically fastest CPU and fastest Gpu performance at its launch.

Price, Apple pays very little for its SOC.

For one of the big 3 above to pick up SOC business from Apple would require a special chip at a very cheap price to be competitive in 2 of the 3 areas.