The new AMD A8-7600 APU is an unusual chip to lead a product launch. Typically, AMD and Intel both sample the highest end of their new product lines, focusing on improving top-level performance and catering directly to the enthusiast market. With this launch, AMD is instead targeting power efficiency and maximum performance per watt. The company's new 45W chip is substantially faster than the old, Richland-based family of APUs , and it challenges Intel for the low-power desktop space.

Kaveri is the most important launch for AMD in years, for three principle reasons.

Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA): When AMD bought the graphics manufacturer ATI in 2006, it laid out a plan for the future in which GPUs would be built directly into the CPU die. Over time, these GPUs would serve as more than graphics processors they'd become specialized co-processors capable of taking over a significant chunk of the graphics workload. AMD launched its first APUs with on-die graphics processors in 2011, but the data sharing that the company promised has taken years to bring to market.

The products in the Kaveri line are the first chips that can offer HSA compatibility. That means the CPU and GPU share a common memory space instead of passing data strictly through shared caches. In that sense, these are the first "true" Accelerated Processing Units (APUs).

Mantle: Mantle is AMD's new graphics API that will be supported for gaming on all APUs that include a GPU based on Graphics Core Next. While no Mantle products have been released yet (and performance can't be evaluated), it's a critical part of AMD's gaming platform in 2014, and Kaveri is the first GPU to support it. More generally, AMD is promising significantly improved performance for Kaveri APUs in gaming thanks to the new graphics core.

The Steamroller CPU core: Steamroller is AMD's first major core redesign in almost three years. The previous APUs (Richland and Trinity) used a modified form of AMD's Bulldozer CPU architecture. While they improved on Bulldozer's initial lackluster launch, the core had too many problems to be quickly repaired. The Steamroller core inside the Kaveri APU is based on a modified Bulldozer approach that decouples some of the architectural elements that the old design shared.

There's a fourth interesting feature baked into the new A8-7600 chips, though it takes a bit of a back seat to these first three: Variable TDPs. End users will be able to select a Thermal Design Power envelope from within the BIOS. If you want the chip to use less power and run cooler and quieter, you can specify a 45W TDP. If you want more headroom, specify 65W, and the same chip will closer to its maximum defined Turbo Mode.

Multiple AMD Kaveri-class chips will have definable TDPs, but the A8-7600 is the first chip tuned for this mode.

Why is AMD Leading with A Mid-Range Chip?

AMD's decision to lead with a 45W CPU is unusual enough to deserve some discussion. As desktop sales continue to shrink, manufacturers have been experimenting with smaller form factors and low-power boxes that pack significant gaming horsepower into a relatively small space. According to AMD, the A8-7600 is aimed at enthusiasts who want to create their own Steamboxes, HTPCs, or other diminutive systems without sacrificing on graphics horsepower or compute capability.

The other reason AMD is focusing on a 45W TDP CPU for launch is that it's a much stronger competitive bracket for the company. AMD's old 45W desktop APU was the AMD A8-6500Ta chip with a 2.1GHz base clock and a 3.1GHz Turbo Mode, with 256 shader cores clocked at 720MHz. The A8-7600, in contrast, has a 3.1GHz base clock, up to a 3.8GHz Turbo Mode, and 384 GPU shaders, up from 256. Exactly what sort of clock rates the A8-7600 hits will depend on the user-configurable TDP. At the defined 45W TDP, the A8-7600 will vary its maximum clock speed between 3.3 and 3.7GHz, with an average clock speed of about 3.4GHz. At 65W, the chip's average clock rate creeps up to around 3.55GHz. Even with this fairly low maximum Turbo clock, it's clear that Kaveri brings far more raw performance to the table than the older AMD 6500T.

The principle Intel competition for this match-up is the Haswell-based Intel Core i3-4330($395.27 at Amazon). The Core i3-4330 is a 3.5GHz dual-core CPU without Hyper-Threading. Its price of $139 matches neatly against the A8-7600's $130.

Performance

We tested the A8-7600 Kaveri and Richland-based A8-6500T in an Asrock FMA2A88X-ITX motherboard with 8GB of DDR3-2133 installed. The Haswell-based Intel Core i3-4330 was tested in a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-D3H motherboard . with an identical 8GB of memory. No discrete GPUs were usedall of the systems were tested using their integrated graphics.

In the Cinebench R11.5 test, the A8-7600 scores a 0.90 in the single-threaded benchmark test and a 2.97 in the multi-threaded test. That's a significant improvement over the AMD 6500T's 0.7 and 1.97, respectively, but it falls far short of the dual-core Intel Core i3-4330, which turns in results of 1.55 and 3.84, respectively. In the new POV-Ray 3.7 rendering test, the AMD 6500T took 9 minutes 58 seconds to render a scene compared with the A8-7600's 6:25.. The Intel chip, however, still narrowly won the test, at 5:56.

Our Photoshop CS6 rendering test showed a smaller improvement for the A8-7600 ( 5 minutes 49 seconds s to render all our custom filters, compared with 6:35 for the 6500T), and again, the Core i3-4330 pulls ahead at 4:09 Photoshop, it should be noted, has long been a poor test for AMD's Bulldozer architectureit doesn't use enough application threads to respond well to AMD's design implementation, and it prefers high-efficiency single-threaded processors over a greater number of cores.

In the popular encryption program TrueCrypt, the A8-7600 ekes out a significant win, at 135MBps performance in the Serpent-TwoFish-AES encryption scheme. That's far faster than the 6500T, which only hits 90MBps, and a fair sight quicker than the Intel Core i3-4330, at 114MBps. The PCMark 7 application suite shows the A8-7600 leading the AMD 6500T by 15% (4,532 versus 3,938), but the A8-7600 APU is clobbered by the Intel Core i3-4330's score of 6,138. AMD claims that PCMark 8 is a much better test for APUs, since it uses OpenCL acceleration, so we ran that test as well. The gap between the two companies closes to roughly 14%, but Intel still leads the test overall.

In gaming, AMD turns the tables around on Intel to an impressive degree. In 3DMark 11's Performance preset, the AMD 6500T and Intel Core i3-4330's HD 4600 graphics tie things up at 1,266 and 1,263 points, respectively, while the A8-7600 puts up a score of 2,080 points. In the 2011-era game Batman: Arkham City at 1,600-by-900, Medium Details, with DX11 enabled, the A8-7600 managed a steady 31 fps compared to 19 fps and 20 fps for the AMD 6500T and Intel Core i3-4330, respectively. That puts the A8-7600 at somewhere between 50 to 60% faster than the 6500T's GPU performance.

Finally, there are the HSA applications that AMD distributed to check overall system performance. The simplest and easiest to test of these was a simple JPG decoder program that in software mode for the Intel and AMD Richland APUs and in hardware on the Kaveri APU. It took 14.6 seconds to display all files for the A8-6500T, 8.02 seconds to display all files for the A8-7600 using has, and 9.13 seconds to display all files using the Core i3-4330. The A8-7600's software performance came in at 12.81 seconds, so we saw a 38-percent speed-up for AMD in using HSA (as opposed to conventional CPU-only rendering) and a 12% performance advantage over Intel.

It's too early to draw conclusions about HSA from the performance in a handful of test applications, so we'll just say thisit's good to see this capability finally shipping in real products.

Better Competitive Positioning

First, the good newsthe A8-7600 is a huge improvement over AMD's previous 45W part. It outperformed the AMD 6500T on every front, sometimes by enormous margins. Single-thread performance for the new A8-7600 is 15 to 20 percent faster, while multi-threaded performance is as much as 40 to 60 percent faster. GPU performance is also significantly improved, by 30 to 40 percent, over the old core. These improvements help explain why AMD wants to position the A8-7600 at a $130 price pointwhile that's about 15 percent more than the $115 list price on the 45W AMD 6500T, the A8-7600 is a much better deal in terms of its price/performance ratio or performance per watt.

Unfortunately, for all the A8-7600's notable improvements, it's a mixed matchup against the Intel Core i3-4330. AMD blows past the Intel chip in gaming tests and OpenCL support in programs like PCMark 8's Creative suite help close the gap, but in anything CPU-centric, the Core i3-4330 pulls ahead. It's 70 percent faster in single-thread Cinebench and 34% faster in the multi-threaded version. If AMD had kept the price of the A8-7600 at $115, the nearly 20% price gap between it and the Core i3-4330 would have made it much easier to overlook these deficiencies, but at $130 vs. $139, they're a real concern.

Whether the A8-7600 is going to meet your needs depends entirely on what kind of chip you're looking for. If you value the lightweight gaming performance and good-enough CPU figures, then the A8-7600 is a better chip than anything Intel currently offers. If you want a balance of CPU and GPU performance, however, you'll need to look carefully at the kind of applications you want to run. While HSA and Mantle are both solid PR points, neither technology is shipping at the moment and we'll need to see performance figures in final software before recommending you buy into either ecosystem.

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