Topic: New AMD APUs... [AMD A8-Series] (Read 18109 times)

Something I thought was interesting, and sorry for the necro-action . . . but i think this topic best fits my post .  ..

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/--c8SVI3WFHk/UWdEgybLKfI/AAAAAAAAAKI/vRkhLd8h0ho/s1152/GUIMiner.jpg

I am mining two workers on the same GPU. Apparently there are two different types of hardware, other than the CPU on this APU. One is [0.0] Beaver creek. The other is [0.1] Turks. Typically when not using my desktop I get between 100-104.9 MH/s. Supposedly this APU has "dedicated graphics", in that the GPU part of the APU has a dedicated 1GB( GPUZ shows only 512MB) of memory. Something like a daughter card usable only by the on CPU graphics . . .

Anyhow when I run with the flag -f 0, I *can* get up to ~114.9MH/s, but the screen lags something horrible, and it just seems that accepted shares slows down considerably. Yeah I do not know what that is about, but if fact, I would have to say because of over stressing the GPU. You can see in the screenshot the APU does run pretty hot, but not hot enough to bother me.

Flags:

[0.0] -v -f 80 -w64 all processors set to affinity
[0.1] -v -f 60 -w64 all processors set to affinity.

Increasing the working set seems to have a detrimental effect, if anything. e.g. -w128, removing the vectors flag decreases performance by around 10% If I add another worker to either of the on APU devices, I can get an additional 4-5MH/s per, but heat does go up, and in fact the fan pretty much stays on high all the time. It seems I can only add two workers per device. Overclocking the CPU has little to no effect.

Anyway, if anyone would be so kind to quote or link this post to the post listed above I would be grateful.

EDIT:

Obviously the Image is edited. This has been edited only for sanitizing reasons only. e.g. do you really need to know my computer name, username, and user information for my workers . . . ?

http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-59345759-Z585-15-6-Inch-Laptop/dp/B009AEPS4K/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1355294804&sr=1-1&keywords=z585

I have a slightly lower version of this, and I can pull 80 MH/s without nay tweaking. I can probably get much higher with a little clock nudging and miner optimization.

Just upgraded my A6 to an A8.
The A6 got ~30MH/s.
The A8 gets ~100MH/s - mainly due to it being unlocked and overclocked.

If anyone wants a low water mark for the APUs, I fired up some miners on my E350 powered laptop. 950KH/s on the CPU portion and 11.5MH/s on the GPU side. I didn't run it more than a couple minutes for obvious reasons. At least it can push Fallout 3 on Medium setting on the screen's full resolution using Wine on Ubuntu 12.04

That was the GPU part of the APU.  The CPU part sucked, lol.  And seeing as how this is a customer machine that's being delivered Monday, I don't think I'll be mining with it...obviously.  Also it'd lose money on electricity.  I believe this chip has 384 cores so my findings in the benchmark make sense.

By the way, according to GUIMiner, the name of the GPU section of the chip was "Devastator."  Strange.  That was the original codename for the entire 7000 series of GPUs by AMD though.

Yeah.  I am curious, what does the apu component of the chip get Desolator?  I had a llano which did about 70mhs which is about the same as a Radeon 5570 card clocked all the way up....

Just don't mine with the CPU please.. you don't want to waste all that energy

My A10 system officially got like 4.2MH/s with the CPU (lol) and with the Open CL miner 72.1 MH/s at stock speeds with no flags.

EDIT: I finally found some better flags that someone else recommended and now it's 88.2 MH/s

Yeah, I've been there, lol.  I got some really cheap 1866 from Crucial on my A6 system and it got a WEI of 5.9 and I verified its running speeds.  It had really low timings too.  The FSB to NB ratio and the stated NB ratio did not at all match what the board and chip's specs said though so I think they're BSing it somehow.

The vastly superior Gskill set I just picked up rated at 7.4 but most people on newegg reported 7.9 but only in i5 and i7 systems so I assume running at 1600.  This latest A10 setup had a funny FSB:NB ratio too and we're talking about the unmodified stock XMP profile loaded so it's not my configuration that's to blame.  For comparison, my last 1600 CL9 setup on an Ivy bridge i5 from Gskill got a 7.8 so I'm thinking AMD is just fluffing up their numbers on their latest chipsets and there's some oddity going on with the real numbers.  This latest one with the A10 was on the A85X chipset and the board specs said it took 1866 without overclocking.  Regardless, I only buy high end stuff if it's on sale because of the minimal increase in overall performance.

I'll try and run a mining test today.

I bought really expensive 1866 speed last year because I thought it would be good to run at max speed, but I read some video game results that show performance drops off dramatically after 1333, with only a slight improvement of 1866/1600.  Just an interesting tidbit.

I should come here more often   I have an A6 APU black edition at a 4.0GHz thoroughly tested overclock as a demo system at my shop and just built an A10 system yesterday.  The 1866MHz memory is still on its way here in the mail but I'll stick some 1600 Ballistix in it temporarily, install Win7, and let you know what it gets for mining speed.

That'd be great, i'm very interested in seeing some Trinity results.

I have one of the new APUs in a system I built last month, the numbers were not great.  I'll see if I can find the screen shots from testing it.

I've got an A6 in the laptop I'm using right now.  It averages at about 25MH/s, not much really.  But fun to start out with.

I also have a 2.9 ghz llano a8 3850.  I can get about 68mhs from it with the flags -v 128 -f0 from guiminer.  It is interesting because then I can also add up to 3 video cards to motherboard, I don't mine using the cpu at all.

You know, you are absolutely right about that.  They shouldn't matter.  A friend of mine tried a 3870K on stock settings and got 70Mhz.  Checking on the Bitcoin wiki they show 100Mhz, but they overclocked the CPU.  Memory was only at 1667.  I jumped to conclusions because of the graphics performance and its reliance on memory speed.

I amend my original statement, for everyday 3D graphics performance, these chips scale linearly with memory clocks.  Also for scrypt mining if you are into that (LTC).  BTC should not be affected.

The bitcoin hashing algorithm isn't memory intensive at all, so I doubt it would scale much with higher memory speeds if anything at all.

These chips also scale linearly with system memory performance.  So try and get your system memory as fast as you can for best performance.

Considering it is sharing the die and TDP with the cpu, it isn't bad.

100mh/s?

That's barely better than my 3870.