AMD A10-9620P vs Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6

AMD A10-9620P

The AMD A10-9620P is a mid-range APU of the Bristol Ridge series (7th generation of APUs) with 4 CPU-cores (two Excavator modules) clocked at 2.5 - 3.4 GHz. In our tests the A10-9620P even hit 3.6 GHz.

It was announced in 2017 and is based on the same silicon as Carrizo but with more and refined features. It is a ULV-chip with a TDP of 15 Watt and integrates a Radeon R5 graphics card (384 shader cores / 6 compute cores) and a dual-channel DDR4-18600 memory controller. As Carrizo its a full featured SoC that offers all I/O ports on the chip.

The A10-9620P is a bit faster than the old 15-Watt top model of Carrizo, the FX-8800P. See our Bristol Ridge article for more information on the architecture and improvements compared to Carrizo.

Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6

The Intel Xeon E3-1505M v6 is a fast quad-core processor notebooks based on the Kaby Lake architecture and was announced in January 2017. It is the second fastest mobile Xeon model and the performance is slightly better tha the 100 MHz slower clocked consumer Core i7-7820HQ. Compared to the Core processors, the chip also supports ECC-RAM (error correction). Besides four cores including Hyper-Threading support running at 3 - 4 GHz (4 cores up to 3.6 GHz, 2 cores up to 3.8 GHz), the processor is also equipped with the professional HD Graphics P630 GPU as well as a dual-channel memory controller (DDR3L-1600/DDR4-2400). It is manufactured in a 14nm process with FinFET transistors.

Architecture

Intel basically uses the same micro architecture compared to Skylake, so the per-MHz performance does not differ. The manufacturer only reworked the Speed Shift technology for faster dynamic adjustments of voltages and clocks, and the improved 14nm process allows much higher frequencies combined with better efficiency than before.

Performance

Thanks to the higher clocks, even the smaller model of the mobile Xeons is ahead of the fastest Skylake models (Xeon E3-1575M v6) and is therefore als powerful enough for very demanding applications.

Graphics

The integrated professional Intel HD Graphics P630 has 24 Execution Units (similar to previous HD Graphics 530) running at 350 - 1100 MHz. The performance depends a lot on the memory configuration; it should be comparable to a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 920M in combination with fast DDR4-2133 dual-channel memory. It offers certified drivers for 15 professional and CAD applications.

Contrary to Skylake, Kaby Lake now supports hardware decoding for H.265/HEVC Main 10 with a 10-bit color depth as well as Google's VP9 codec. The dual-core Kaby Lake processors, which were announced in January, should also support HDCP 2.2.

Power Consumption

The chip is manufactured in an improved 14nm process with FinFET transistors, which improves the efficiency even further. Intel still specifies the TDP with 45 Watts, but it can also be reduced to 35 Watts by the notebook manufacturers (cTDP down). This will obviously affect the performance, because the Turbo Boost cannot be maintained for longer periods.