AMD Carrizo Part 2: A Generational Deep Dive into the Athlon X4 845 at $70

Stock Comparison: Legacy Benchmarks

Some of our legacy benchmarks have followed AnandTech for over a decade, showing how performance changes when the code bases stay the same in that period. Some of this software is still in common use today.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

3D Particle Movement v1

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.

Despite 3DPM v1's coding issues, the multithreaded result is a lot closer than I had originally expected.

Cinebench 11.5 and 10

Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.

In both CineBench instances we see the high IPC of the Pentium take a 33-50% lead, whereas moving to multi-threaded puts the X4 845 firmly in the driving seat.

POV-Ray 3.7

POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multithreaded benchmark.

POV-Ray fully exploints all the threads in the system, and the latest AMD microarchitecture helps here as well, pushing the X4 845 beyond the other AMD CPUs in this test and comfortably over the Pentium and low-power Core i3 parts.

TrueCrypt 7.1

Before its discontinuation, TrueCrypt was a popular tool for WindowsXP to offer software encryption to a file system. The almost latest version, 7.1, is still widely used however the developers have stopped supporting it since the introduction of encrypted disk support in Windows 8/7/Vista from 5/2014, and as such any new security issues are unfixed.

The Pentium lacks AES acceleration, which is available on Core i3 parts and up, which explains the Pentium's low performance here. The Carrizo microarchitecture pushes the 65W part ahead of all the other 95W/100W/125W parts.

x264 HD 3.0

Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.

7-zip

7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results.