AMD A8-3850 2.9GHz Llano APU Review

SiSoftware Sandra 2011 SP3

The Sisoft Sandra 2011 SP3 benchmark utility just came out a few weeks
ago and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. Sandra 2011 comes with
support for Virtualisation (Virtual PC/Server, Hyper-V, VMware) and
GPGPU (OpenCL, DirectX 11 DirectCompute), but today we will be using the
program to look at memory and CPU performance!

Results: Both test systems used the identical G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) memory kit that ran at 1866MHz with 9-10-9-28 1T timings. While the memory kit and settings were identical the memory performance was very different as you can see from the chart above. Sandra 2011 SP3 showed that the
Intel Core i3-2105 having nearly 24GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is
great for a dual-channel platform running 1866MHz with CL9 timings. The AMD Llano A8-3850 processor was just shy of 16GB/s with the same memory kit.

The Sandra Processor Multi-Media benchmark has been a long time
favorite of ours to look at floating point performance on processors.

Results:
The Intel Core i3-2105 ‘Sandy Bridge’ processor was able to perform better than the AMD A8-3850 ‘Llano’ processor in the Processor Multimedia benchmark.

Cryptography has become an important part of our digital life: it
allows us to conduct safe transactions online, certify programs and
services, keep our data secure and much more. Sandra 2010c has a
dedicated benchmark built-in that measures cryptographic performance,
which is important on the new Intel 32nm processors like the Core i7
980X that we recently benchmarked. It includes features like AES-NI!
Intel AES-NI is a new set of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD)
instructions that are going to be introduced in the next generation of
Intel processors, as of 2009. These instructions enable fast and secure
data encryption and decryption, using the Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES), defined by FIPS Publication number 197. The architecture
introduces six instructions that offer full hardware support for AES.
Four of them support high performance data encryption and decryption,
and the other two instructions support the AES key expansion procedure.
Let’s take a look at how this feature impacts Cryptography performance.

Results: When we started this test we thought the Intel Core i3-2105 processor would dominate, but it turns out that this processor does not have AES-NI, so the Cryptographic Bandwidth isn’t anything really that great. The AMD A8-3850 was able to perform better in the Sandra Cryptography benchmark.