SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU, memory and GPGPU tests.
SANDRA shows off some very interesting results, at first it is clear that the A10 7850K does have a high IPC compared to Richland and Trinity APUs but suffers a little from the 3.7-4.0GHz clock speed compared to the 3.9-4.2GHz, however, in multicore efficiency and Memory bandwidth, we see a marginal improvement that makes gains on the Intel CPU. The largest shortcoming of the CPU side of the APU is the floating point operations as seen in the Processor Multimedia testing, with Intel having a clear lead. However, AMD are trying to fill this gap in performance using the GPGPU side, if AMD improve further upon HSA features, it would be very beneficial to have the GPU handling the floating point operations. The ones to compare for this would be the CPU MultiMedia result to the GPGPU Results.
Memory latency has increased a fair bit with the A10 7850K too, though this could be due to the hUMA (Heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access).
