AMD A12-9800 Review: Infecting The AM4 Platform

[Julio Franco]

While we wait for Zen-based APUs, AMD released Bristol Ridge through OEMs late last year, it recently became available on the retail market and this caught the attention of many. The AMD A12-9800 costs $110 and along with promising pretty decent integrated graphics performance, you can take advantage of it on a new AM4 motherboard.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1486-amd-a12-9800/

 

[ET3D]

Thanks for the review.

Wow, a 20. Haven't read the YouTube comments to see if anyone called you an Intel shill yet.

What really killed me was how much power this supposedly 65W CPU takes. I know Bristol Ridge is a mobile chip and inefficient at high clocks, but that 65W feels like 'alternative facts'.

I would have loved seeing the Excavator core coupled with a larger cache. From old tests on Anandtech it does seem to have a big IPC lift (30%+) over previous construction cores when the cache doesn't hold it back.

Anyway, as I said on YouTube, the A8-9600 might be of some minimal interest. I did entertain buying it, and later upgrading to Raven Ridge, but I think I overcame that impulse. I do hope that Raven Ridge ends up a lot more impressive (both on mobile and on desktop).

 

[Guillermo Belli]

Wow, that's rely bad. I remember reading an article shortly after launch last year and it did not seem that bad, but that's because what was before was even worse.

I'm impressed by the progress made by Ryzen. I was considering using Bristol Ridge for low cost office computers since early this year, but it was impossibly to buy. After reading this, well, I'll just wait until the Zen APUs hit the market.

 

[fps4ever]

Yikes. It's hard to argue the facts here. AMD needs to get the Ryzen based APU's out as soon as they can but we know how that goes.

 

[dickdon71]

I'll buy it for no more than a dollar!

 

[seeprime]

Wow, that's rely bad. I remember reading an article shortly after launch last year and it did not seem that bad, but that's because what was before was even worse.

I'm impressed by the progress made by Ryzen. I was considering using Bristol Ridge for low cost office computers since early this year, but it was impossible to buy. After trading this, well, I'll just wait until the Zen APUs hot the market.

Zen APU's are scheduled for 2018. I think releasing this A12 APU for AM4 does indeed "infect" the platform with a low performance item that should have been put on the FM2 platform.

 

[amstech]

Anything AM3 based is terrible for most application's, even the A8/A10 stuff is atrocious. Not a good work CPU, give me an i3 anyday.

 

[mosu]

The title is correct, why on Earth did AMD do that?

 

[veLa]

Pitiful.

 

[andy06shake]

No market then no point really.

All parts like these serve to do is drive up the cost of other, better CPU, considering they need to cover their overheads somehow.

One would imagine the production facilities that produce such redundant components would be far better tasked in other areas of productin also.

 

[Vrmithrax]

Ugh, that's not pretty. The only reason I could see for grabbing one of these obvious stop-gap hack jobs would be if you were building a system intended for a Zen APU, and just wanted a place-holder to limp along until then. But even then, lack of full spectrum memory support would probably kill that thinking as well.

I really don't know what AMD was thinking, here. They had such positive momentum going with Ryzen and Threadripper. I guess they're not used to it so they had to shoot themselves in the foot?

 

[GreenNova343]

Huh...my previous comment (1st one, BTW) about the testing setup showing a Socket FM2+ board being used to test the Bristol Ridge APU has disappeared...but the article has been corrected. Oh well...

In either case, yeah, I'm not seeing anything here to really be happy about. I suppose it might be nice to see how these compare to their Kaveri & Carrizo predecessors -- I know you reviewed the A10-7800 before (https://www.techspot.com/review/856-amd-a10-7800-kaveri/), but the test setups were different (A10 used an R9 290X, A12 used the Titan Xp), & the applications tested weren't the same (no common games, A10 used Excel 2013 vs. Excel 2016 this time; A10 converted a 720p .MKV file to .MP4, A12 converted a 4K H.264 file to H.265 with HandBrake; etc.). I know there wouldn't be much use for it -- Bristol Ridge APUs don't work in Kaveri-compatible motherboards, & vice-versa -- but it would be interesting to see if the switchover to DDR4 (& any other improvements in the new motherboard architecture) provided any sort of benefit to the Excavator-based APUs.

 

[erickmendes]

SHAME

 

[Cryio]

No A10 7890K vs A12 9800? I would've like to see how much have things really improved in 2 generations.

 

[ManuelV]

I don't get it, this cpu is all about the igpu, not about the cpu processing power and only got a couple of test agains a discrete gpu and a low end cpu. My guess is this processor kick *** for everyone that is gonna game with the cpu.

I have a doubt about the amd apus, I haven't had one amd processor in a while but, what is more important for everyday computer usage?, the cpu or the igpu?, amd apus are like 1/2 the power of the intel processors but had almost twice the gpu performance.

 

[ET3D]

One would imagine the production facilities that produce such redundant components would be far better tasked in other areas of productin also.

Not really. Most of the market has moved to 16nm and below. These are 28nm so they don't really take away from any worthwhile production.

Part of the reason these look so bad is that the Pentium G4560 has been released. When these APU's were first released to OEM's their low end competition wasn't that hot.

As desktop chips, at this point, these just fill the low end space. They're don't have a lot of place in the market, but I'm guessing some people might still buy them as placeholders. Not that it makes much sense at this point. (It made some sense a year ago, when they were first released.) For mobile, AMD still doesn't have anything better, so it still makes sense to produce them.

 

[ET3D]

No A10 7890K vs A12 9800? I would've like to see how much have things really improved in 2 generations.

Far as I've seen, the A10-7890K is faster. AMD focused on low power with Bristol Ridge, and for desktop it's quite inefficient and not that fast.

If you're interested in the performance of the Excavator core vs. previous generations, this Anandtech article (which uses Carrizo) is quite good.

 

[ET3D]

I have a doubt about the amd apus, I haven't had one amd processor in a while but, what is more important for everyday computer usage?, the cpu or the igpu?, amd apus are like 1/2 the power of the intel processors but had almost twice the gpu performance.

CPU power is more important for everyday use. GPU is useful for certain tasks, and of course for games. Intel GPU performance isn't that bad (the G4560 has half the cores of higher end CPU's, so its performance is a lot worse than the G4600 or better). Sure, it's still often lower than AMD's, but from my point of view the main benefit of AMD here is better drivers.

 

[ET3D]

What I'm really interested in is OpenCL tasks with double precision calculations. It's been said that AIDA64 GPGPU tests show very high double precision performance, and I wonder if that's also reflected in real world tasks.

 

[Vulcanproject]

What an absolute pile of junk! AMD need to hurry up and sort out their APU lineup, because that is where big time OEM money is for volume desktop and mobile chips.

I'm waiting for a laptop and hoping that they can turn out a 4 core Ryzen based CPU with decent Vega graphics on it for a good budget and power consumption.

 

[Sarcasm]

Maybe if this was $60 it would have been a decent purchase, but at $110 it's pointless.

 

[JohnnyStone]

Maybe the idea is to use them in a micro ATX form factor where you mainly want the GPU for media or playing the odd game.

I've used an old Athlon for that purpose, but using the onboard graphics. It is still good enough to play Survivalcraft smoothly at least. Its not Doom, but for sure better than Intel IGP. So there might be a reason to buy this...

 

[BlueDrake]

It's a very depressing time to see this come so far, and be rather lackluster because Ryzen really shows how much has improved. Also you might want to check the gaming benchmark charts, someone posted the game information on the wrong charts. Had me confused for a moment, when I was checking things.

 

[mailpup]

Huh...my previous comment (1st one, BTW) about the testing setup showing a Socket FM2+ board being used to test the Bristol Ridge APU has disappeared...but the article has been corrected. Oh well...

FYI, if you point out an error in an article and it is subsequently corrected as in this case, your post will usually be deleted since it is no longer necessary. Happens all the time and thanks for your correction.

 

[supyo]

Why in the hell does AMD bother releasing a product like this? A steaming pile of garbage. It wasn't good in 2012 and it sure as hell isn't good in 2017. Just stop AMD. You embarrass yourself as a company and brand releasing s*** like this.