Memory bandwidth and light-load testing
Phenom II CPU technology means that memory bandwidth won't be as sharp as Intel's. Still, the A8-3850's competitive against other AMD chips.
This number-crunching test is single-threaded and relies on frequency and IPC. 2.9GHz of Phenom II power, which is what the A8-3850 is composed of, is relatively slow, easily beaten by the Core i3-2100.
Put simply, on a clock-for-clock basis and evaluated on benchmarks that take advantage of a single thread, Core i3 is better than A8.
