AMD recently launched their Kabini APUs and the A4-5000 has been reviewed by a number of websites. However, I haven’t been able to find a review that compares it to other x86 architectures at the same clocks. I happen to have a notebook with a AMD Llano based A8-3500M in it. This is a quad-core unit @ 1.5GHz, the same clock as A4-5000. Now, A8-3500M also has a boost mode that takes it to over 2GHz for some single-threaded workloads but I disabled that boost mode for this test. My Llano test system is running Win7 Home Premium (64-bit) and has dual-channel 8GB RAM installed. I don’t have a A4-5000 to test, so I referenced Anandtech for Cinebench 11.5 (64-bit multithreaded) and Mozilla Kraken, PCPer for Euler3D and Techreport for 7-zip.
Test results:
| Test | Jaguar | Llano K10 | Jaguar % of K10 |
| Euler3D | 0.971 Hz | 1.41 Hz | 68.9% |
| Cinebench 11.5 | 1.5 | 1.9 | 78.9% |
| Mozilla Kraken | 6512.7 | 5883 | 90% |
| 7-zip (compress) | 3793 MIPS | 5317 MIPS | 71.3% |
| 7-zip (decompress) | 5397 MIPS | 6152 MIPS | 87.7% |
For 7-zip, I just ran it as follows: 7z.exe b 3 -mmt4 -mmd25 as the default number of passes is way too long, but it should give us a decent idea 🙂
Overall, we are looking at between 70-90% of K10 performance at the same clocks in this test, which is quite good for a small dual-issue core. We don’t have any data on how the benchmarks scale with clock speed though. Hopefully that data will become clearer in the future when reviewers get their hands on the A6-5200 which has Jaguar cores clocked @ 2GHz.
Can you try to run x264 HD Benchmark? (results were also on several sites, including anandtech which sadly didn’t specify if they used 5.0.1 or 5.0.0).
It tests integer SIMD (multimedia) performance in hand-written ASM code, and it is also based on real software, so not a synthetic bench.
The lowest performance here presented comes from a benchmark that is, if not excessively, dependent of memory bandwidth (Euler 3d). Could you retest with your Llano machine with a single channel configuration?
Thank you so much for this article! Even after all this time, this has helped me get a notion of my new Athlon 5350’s performance. Looking forward to overclocking it too.