AMD Athlon X4 860K Review

AMD advertises that the AMD Athlon X4 860K is (a lot) faster than the Intel Pentium G3258. (See the chart below) We compared it with the G3258(Intel HD Graphics) and the G3258 paired with an Radeon R9-270X.

At the time of writing this review the price of the 860K was app. USD $90 and the G3258 app. USD $70, besides that in case of the 860K you'll have to buy a graphics card.

Athlon Branch:

The Athlon Branch nowadays is limited to the FM(2, 2+) socket(s). It has no (activated?) graphics core, and you'll have to buy a discrete graphics card. In our review we paired it with an Radeon R7 250 and a Radeon R9 270X.

Our retail box indicated had base and boost frequencies as 3.4GHz / 3.9GHz. After installing the cpu the motherboard BIOS settings showed the correct frequencies.

Here's a quote from the the AMD Website:

A small number of AMD Athlon X4 860K processor-in-a-box (PIB) products were shipped between July and October 2014 with an incorrect definition label affixed to the product packaging. This label incorrectly stated the CPU base and boost frequencies as 3.4GHz / 3.9GHz instead of 3.7GHz/4.0GHz. The AMD warranty for end consumers is not affected.

Steamroller Architecture:

This (Kaveri) CPU-Core is based on the Steamroller MicroArchitecture.

The Steamroller Microarchitecture is based on 2-Core modules. The design is called CMT (clustered multi-thread) in which eache module has 2 CPU threads(Cores).

The list below shows the improvements when compared to the 1st Bulldozer Core.

• 25% more of the maximum width dispatches per thread
• Better instruction schedulers
• Branch misprediction rate reduced by 20%
• Bynamically resizable L2 cache
• Improved memory controller
• Improved perceptron branch predictor
• Larger and smarter caches
• More internal register resources
• Up to 30% fewer instruction cache misses

All these improvements will lead to an increased instruction per cycle. Compared to the 1st Bulldozer Core it will have app. a 10% gain.

Bulldozer vs Steamroller in the Benchmarks:

In the benchmarks we've included the AMD A10-5800K (with AMD Radeon HD 8670D graphics), although the (cpu) clockspeeds are a bit different (3.8/4.2 vs 3.7/4.0) it will give you a rough indication (in none graphics benchmarks) of the differences between Bulldozer and Steamroller.