Overview of AMD A4-5000 single-chip system

AMD A4-5000 - the processor with four cores, is used mainly in budget devices. The device is not just a central processor, but a single-chip system (or SoC). In addition to the cores used for computations (as in the usual CPU), it includes an integrated HD 8330 graphic accelerator, I / O ports, a south bridge and a DDR3 memory controller.

Architecture

AMD A4-5000 is available in two versions: Kabini is installed in laptops, Temash - in tablets. At the heart of both lies the architecture of Jaguar, which replaced its predecessor Bobcat. As AMD experts say, the device has become more productive by 15% per clock.

In addition to this improvement, the compute kernels now use the latest versions of the SSE, AES and AVX instruction sets. Due to the fact that the processor is produced on a 28-nm process technology, it is possible to reduce power consumption, but at the same time increase the frequencies.

Performance

Still, the cores work at 1.5 GHz. The speed of applications, in which there are no multi-threaded optimizations, is rather low and approaches the SoC of the last generation as much as possible. To catch up with your closest competitor from Intel is not possible. But everything changes when all the nuclei are working on the process at once. In this case AMD A4-5000 overtakes even Core i3.

Summarizing, it should be said that this single-chip system has enough power to provide comfortable operation of multimedia and office programs. But with heavy tasks and games this device can not cope yet.

Graphic arts

As it was said earlier, in the AMD A4-5000 SoC the graphics accelerator HD 8330 is built in. It includes 128 stream processors, the GPU frequency is 500 MHz. The average performance of the video core is at the level of HD 7470M and Intel HD 4000, so an acceptable FPS from games released later than 2013 will not be achieved.

Testing

One can not consider a single-chip device using classical tests. In AMD A4-5000, the characteristics are not too high, but this processor is aimed at the mobile market, and its power consumption is only 25 W. Accordingly, during the load you need not only to consider FPS, but also pay attention to energy saving.

Games

Running F1 2012, you can see that the SoC of AMD significantly lags behind its competitors in terms of performance, but it consumes much less energy at maximum load. The difference with i3 is about 14 watts.

Web surfing

Viewing pages on the Internet is a less demanding task, both in terms of the load on the video subsystem and the CPU. The difference decreases noticeably.

As the AMD A4-5000 processor overtakes the more powerful Intel products, the latter approach the power consumption to the solution from AMD. However, although not much, but A4 shows itself more economical in this test.

Multimedia

All modern platforms are equipped with hardware decoder H.264. Therefore, web surfing requires more power consumption than watching a video. The processor does not participate in such tasks. In this test, there are no leaders or outsiders, the economy of A4 is similar to competitors.

AMD A4-5000. User Reviews

As you know, synthetic tests do not always reflect the whole point. To understand how well the device works, you should work with it for a while. Having studied the opinions of users, you can understand that the processor is great for those who need the maximum battery life of the device and at the same time - it does not require the greatest performance.

Those who want to enjoy the novelties of the gaming market are not too flattering to describe AMD A4-5000, their reviews are almost always negative. However, it should be noted that this processor is not in the line of gaming. The manufacturer explicitly states that the primary tasks that are solved with its help are the reduction of energy consumption.

conclusions

It is difficult to say whether the present generation of single-chip systems from AMD has a great chance of success. Of course, recently more and more tablets and laptops, assembled on the basis of A4. Here are just the devices of this lowest price range, albeit with the Windows 8 operating system on board.

Given that today the mobile device market is full of devices on Android and iOS, it is unlikely that a large number of users will pay attention to the A4. But it should be noted that if AMD specialists can squeeze out of their brainchild the maximum performance comparable to the products of competitors, while still benefiting from others in terms of power consumption and price, the popularity of devices with the A4 processor will increase dramatically.

It's strange that in the AMD A4-5000 CoS, the characteristics of which should allow achieving greater performance, the system of unified access to RAM (HUMA or heterogeneous unified memory access) is not used. With it, the total system memory is used by the CPU and GPU without unnecessary cycles of data copying. This solution eliminates significant delays in the processes performed on a single-chip device.

HUMA could bring AMD products to the leading positions. And yet, judging by the news of the high-tech world, this technology will not be used in Karbini and Temash.