AMD Beema and Mullins APU Performance – 3rd Generation APUs

PCMark 8 – Work Benchmark

PCMark is another benchmark by Futuremark, while 3DMark focuses on the graphics side of the system, PCMark looks at the system from an overall perspective. PCMark has six built-in scenario tests evaluating the system from different viewpoints. We will take a look at the Work test, that uses simple office tasks to evaluate the system. These tasks are some that many will use tablets for such as Web Browsing, Video Chat and opening documents. Like 3DMark, PCMark provides an overall score which we can take a closer look at to see specific test results.

The overall score the AMD Discovery tablets take an early lead, by about 6%. That’s not a significant difference in overall scores, taking a look at the details, the Video Chat encoding and Writing is nearly identical with less than 1% difference in scores, so those do not impact the overall score very much.

When using MS Excel for the Spreadsheet test, the Mullins based APU was about 15% faster than the Atom CPU. For many at home, this probably won’t impact their daily lives, however if you were to look at it from a business perspective, Spreadsheet usage is a necessity and could make an impact.

Web Browsing is something that everybody will do on their tablets, while we are looking at a fraction of a second difference between the two tablets, it does come to a 12% difference in timings with the AMD Discovery Mullins tablet being able to process web pages faster in PCMark 8.