AMD A10-7850K vs. Intel/AMD CPU/APU Comparison

Besides running the A10-7850K at its stock speeds (3.7 / 4.0 GHz), the APU was also overclocked and re-benchmarked when at 4.4GHz. It was very easy pushing the APU to 4.4GHz without having to worry about stability or thermal issues for the APU. It's quite likely the Kaveri APU can be overclocked further but I'll save that for a later article when having more time due to only receiving this review sample days ago.

All benchmarking was handled via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite that provides for automated, enterprise-grade benchmarks in a standardized, fully repeatable, and cross-platform manner. It also makes running your own performance comparisons easy and to see how the processor benchmarks in this article of all the hardware compares to your own system it's a simple matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1401165-PL-A107850K704. The processor tests were built from source on each system and the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were set to "-O3 -march=native" so that the generated binaries were optimized for each system. This should yield some very interesting numbers considering that most Windows benchmarking and review sites rely upon pre-compiled generic binaries that don't take advantage of all the capabilities of AMD's Steamroller. Later Phoronix articles will look more closely at compiler tuning for AMD Steamroller and its performance impact.