AMD Trinity APU - A Notebook Platform Performance Review
Performance Benchmarking: Cinebench and Handbrake
CPU-Intensive Performance Benchmarking
The previous two pages basically tested the overall performance of the Trinity APUs and stressed on their graphics performance. How would it fare when put to test on CPU intensive tasks? We have two benchmarks to help relate these aspects with a rendering test and a video encoding test. On these tests, we included the Samsung Chronos 7 which uses an Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge processor in lieu of our Acer M3 machine that wasn't available.
Cinebench
The Cinebench CPU score is derived by putting the notebooks through a test that forces the machines to render an image using the CPU's raw crunching power. Scores are then allocated based on how fast the image appears (the higher, the better). In this case, you can clearly see that the Ivy Bridge processor is head and shoulders above the processing power of the AMD APUs. Even the Sandy Bridge processor was well ahead, but we sort of expected this outcome. The scores definitely indicate the Trinity platform is only slightly more powerful than the Llano platform in terms of CPU horsepower and the bulk of the APU's capabilities went into integrating a capable integrated graphics core. The renewed Bulldozer core within the Trinity APU didn't really seem to matter here as opposed to the Llano's much older tweaked AMD Phenom II architecture.
Handbrake
Handbrake isn't strictly a benchmarking tool, as it's actually a popular program used to encode movie files for use in other devices such as tablets and handsets. However the time it takes to encode a video file is highly indicative of the CPU's broad performance. Hence we have set up the test to encode a large video file, and have the process timed. When it comes to encoding files, it turns out that the top tier Ivy Bridge platform is still very much ahead of a top tier Trinity platform and the same goes for the previous generation top tier Sandy Bridge processor too.
Take note though, AMD has shared with the media that the next latest revision of Handbrake will come with OpenCL acceleration and that should help it take advantage of the built-in GPU to accelerate such encoding tasks. It is one of the many applications that is is receiving GP-GPU updates in time to come that should give consumers a much needed boost to take advantage of the CPU's and GPU's capabilities combined (and hence this is what the HSA proposition is about). Note that the open nature of the API means that Intel and NVIDIA can benefit from these updates too, but it would then depend how capable are their respective graphics engines. We'll probably run another story when we've more application to showcase these differences brought about.
For now, the Trinity APU is slower than its competition, but it shouldn't be a very big disparity if compared with more mainstream Core i3 and Core i5 processor which the Trinity is designed to go up against.