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maybe an i3 or i5 would be a more fair comparison. performance per watt is pretty important. (unless intel and AMD have vastly different ways of measuring TDP).
maybe an i3 or i5 would be a more fair comparison. performance per watt is pretty important. (unless intel and AMD have vastly different ways of measuring TDP).
Laptop benchmark without power consumption test is useless unless you want to be plugged in all the time.
Michael had access to this system remotely, so he was not able to measure power consumption through PTS unless he gets someone to unplug the power cable locally.. he explained that on the first page of this thread as power consumption was one of the first things mentioned.
also, for those interested in intel vs amd TDP, there's a nice differentiation here
Just so everyone knows, i'm almost positive that this CPU and I think the others in the A series are going to be K10 based, but all others will be new architectures. With Bulldozer, they're first releasing that as AM3+ as a brand new architecture, but, AM3+ is just a temporary transitional socket. They plan to replace that pretty quickly. Although K10 is pretty old, they did optimize it enough for Llano to the point where I think it makes a pretty decent laptop APU.
It seems to me all of these first generation of new CPU models AMD is releasing are just transitional processors. They aren't their final plans but they aren't just simple recycles of their old stuff either. With the exception of current socket AM3 users with motherboards capable of using AM3+ CPUs, it seems to me that this first generation of processors is AMD's way of catching up and might not be worth getting just yet - their next stuff should be the real deal.
Yeah, they are K10.5 based, the desktop variants look very interesting as well for the HTPC market, I've been reading that the A8-3850 can OC to 3.7Ghz and it's HD6550D scales very nicely with ram bandwidth.
The Fusion APU also boasts a unique ability that dedicated graphics cards can not possess: direct access to unified memory shared between the CPU and GPU, something that makes Zero Copy and Pin-in-Place possible. To understand the advantage, consider how a discrete graphics card works today; texture maps are created in system memory and then transferred to virtual memory in Windows. When the system needs to bind the texture, it first makes sure it?s in virtual memory, then the OS copies it to DRAM, and the DMA of the PCIe bus transfers it to the graphics memory for access. Simply put, there?s a lot of copying going on that can cause significant latency.
But an APU doesn?t need to copy memory contents because the GPU and APU blocks share access to the same memory. Zero Copy can access virtual memory directly. Just update the page tables and point to it; no copying is necessary. Application memory can be pinned in place without copying it through the operating system staging buffers. When very large data sets are involved, the APU can even outrun a dedicated GPU (Ed.: I covered this optimization, which AMD was calling Fast Copy previously, in ASRock's E350M1: AMD's Brazos Platform Hits The Desktop First. Brazos is also able to share that memory space, which was previously separate, and enjoy a latency reduction).
Is this supported in the linux drivers (kernel, ddx, mesa)?
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