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

Legacy Benchmarks at 3 GHz

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.

We ran 3DPM v2 earlier in the review, and it showed significant gains for Carrizo when running software that is not competing for data in shared cache lines. This older version of that benchmark still has those 'base CS' flaws that a non-CompSci science student might make, and while Carrizo has a small gain in single threaded mode, moving to multithreaded puts some strain on the caches, resulting in lower performance.

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.

On the older versions of CineBench, like the newer ones, Carrizo has some notable microarchitectural advantages over Kaveri and previous versions of the Bulldozer microarchitecture.

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.

For our base ray tracing benchmark in Windows, again Carrizo pulls out a lead. This time it's around 13% over Kaveri or 32% over Trinity/Richland.

TrueCrypt 7.1

Before its discontinuation, TrueCrypt was a popular tool for WindowsXP to offer software encryption to a file system. The version we use for our tests, 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 benchmark itself is a good representation of microarchitectural advantages for base encryption methods.

The AES performance for Carrizo is notably above Trinity/Richland, and pulls a 12% gain over Kaveri as well.

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.

Using slightly older conversion tools shows that Carrizo and Kaveri, when the frames are small, are essentially neck and neck for performance (but still 20% over Trinity/Richland).

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.

The 2MB of L2 cache for Carrizo hurts here. It makes we wonder how much more performance a 4MB cache would provide.