[Notebookcheck] AMD A10-4600M APU Benchmarked

Trinity is finally here. In comparison to Llano, it is much improved and has a new architecture despite having similar structural dimensions. We're definitely pleased by the improved power usage while idle, an important area that AMD clearly has the advantage on over Intel.

The Radeon HD 7660G chip sets new standards for IGPs and leaves the brand-new Intel HD Graphics 4000 behind in the dust. In our benchmarks, the IGP was able to reach the level of a Mobility Radeon HD 5650. Also worth mentioning: the great GPU Compute performance (with OpenCL & DirectCompute) should open up new doors for novice programmers and general users.

The integrated Video Transcoding unit (AVC) tries to compete with Intel's QuickSync, but the overall performance boost is not enough to dethrone the Intel encoding solution.

The new Piledriver CPU cores offer AES, AVX and FMA3. Unfortunately, the cores themselves could not match Intel's high-end processors. The multi-core performance is at about the same level of Llano processors, whereas the single-core performance is significantly higher. Intel's processors are much faster and on average the A10-4600M is only as fast as an old Core i3-2310M (entry-level dual-core CPU). We were hoping for more.

AMD stresses the aggregate performance of the Trinity system as a whole instead of the individual CPU. The PCMark and PCMark 7 results of our test model show that the A10-4600M can hold its own with high-end notebooks.

Overall, the AMD A10 APU is at the level of entry-level Intel CPUs, but with a much stronger IGP. However, as soon as a dedicated GPU comes into play, the CPU cores could become a key bottleneck.