AMD Benchmarks Zacate APU, 2x Faster GPU Performance than Core i5

[informal]

I think that Zacate may offer Turbo core functionality,but on more limited scale(think 2.2Ghz for single thread usage).

edit: Like i suggested some pages ago,it was intel GMA driver issue(laptop manufacturer's fault since on this model ,the official intel drivers won't install automatically).Anandtech confirmed it,thanks to the poster who provided the link for the update.

I borrowed a Core i5 notebook from Intel (we are at IDF after all) and ran the same tests on it. The performance was much better than what I saw in AMD’s suite.was ....

I brought up the issue and AMD immediately began looking into it. AMD used the latest drivers made available for this particular Core i5 notebook on the manufacturer’s website. Those drivers were version 2104 dated 3/31/10. AMD explained that these systems were configured about a month before launch and they were using the latest drivers available on the manufacturer’s website at the time. This particular OEM didn’t offer a newer version of the Intel HD Graphics drivers via its website. To make matters worse, Intel’s updated HD Graphics driver wouldn't install on the notebook. Some notebook OEMs prefer to provide their own display driver updates. In those cases, the Intel HD Graphics drivers available from intel.com won’t install. Despite only having a single Core i5 machine for all of its press demos for tomorrow, AMD agreed to let us manually install the driver (extract the driver and force device manager to update the driver manually) on the i5 system.

The updated driver brought the IE9 performance tests to parity with Zacate. In fact, it looks like the IE9 benchmark doesn’t scale too far with GPU performance (apparently discrete cards don’t score much higher than what we’ve seen here).

At this point we had an issue. The IE9 benchmarks AMD was showing off weren’t an accurate comparison of the two architectures. While valid for the only driver revision supported on this particular Core i5 notebook, the scores weren’t valid for a Zacate vs. Core i5 architecture comparison. AMD wanted to make sure there was no confusion about the GPU performance potential of Zacate so it allowed us to install whatever we wanted on both systems to validate the GPU performance we had seen.

Take a moment to realize exactly what just happened here. In an effort to convince us (and you) that it had nothing to hide and didn’t deliberately attempt to stack the deck, AMD gave us full access to the Zacate platform to do whatever we wanted. AMD wanted us to be completely comfortable with the Zacate comparison.

Summary:

Batman Zacate(16.5 fps) i5(11.3 fps)

Zacate is 46% faster. Note the disparity of CPU clock speeds on the Zacate and i5 : 1.6 Vs 2.4(2.933Ghz !).

City of Heroes : up to 2x advantage for Zacate,55% on average

N-Body Simulation : ~2.6x advantage for Zacate

AT says that Zacate is in no way optimized at this point in time(drivers,clocks,BIOS),there's still room for improvement.Batman ran for the first time on Zacate system... New driver didn't change the gaming performance of the i5,Zacate was still a lot faster(and up to 2x in City of Heroes ,like before).

So there is no "rigging" of tests,it was just the laptop with i5 that suffered from the GFX driver issue that is not uncommon.