AMD's 785G Chipset - Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

Heavy Multitasking: Our typical workday at home.

The vast majority of our benchmarks are single task events that utilize anywhere from 23MB up to 1.4GB of memory space during the course of the benchmark. Obviously, this is not enough to fully stress test our 4GB memory configuration. We devised a benchmark that would simulate a typical home situation and consume as much memory without crashing the machine.

We start by opening two instances of Internet Explorer 8.0 each with six tabs opened to flash intensive websites followed by Adobe Reader 9.1 with a rather large PDF document open, and a nice game of video poker banished to the taskbar. We then open Bibble 5 with our standard test setup, and CyberLink Espresso with the YouTube HD conversion file, Microsoft Excel and Word 2007 with large documents, Hulu TV, and finally Photoshop CS4 with our test image.

We wait two minutes for all activities to cease and then start playing Legend of the Seeker via Hulu HD TV at 1280x720, start the photo conversion in Bibble, and then the HD transcode in Espresso. Our maximum memory usage during the benchmark is 3.37GB with 100% CPU utilization across the two threads.

Thanks to the hardware decoding offload in Espresso, our AMD 785G DDR3 platform finishes our two tasks 40 seconds before the Intel G41 configuration or for our percentage trackers, AMD is over 9% quicker. Looking at the individual scores, the Intel system walks away in the Bibble test but falls short in the Espresso application.

We did experience a few stutters with the Intel G41 system during heavy action sequences in our HD video feed that were not present on the 785G even though our Espresso test sequence was off loaded to the GPU. Throughout all of our testing, it was this one test that impressed us the most with the 785G platform, especially its video playback capabilities.

While the Intel platform was 9% slower, it also consumed almost 8% less energy.