Sad thing here is even a lowly J1900 can more or less match dual-core A4 performance. Celeron Ivy Bridge or newer? Good luck with the equivalently priced AMD option. Aside from outliers running heavily multi-threaded applications, the typical user is better off with Intel for general performance.
Well I mean J1900 is still Atom. I don't think it'll have near the raw compute performance of a dual-core modern AMD CPU. It does have four cores and has QuickSync and takes nearly no power though, so that's definitely a plus. For specific uses (particularly HTPC/video uses) the J1900 will do the job just fine, at low cost, and low power consumption. An A4 on the other hand...it doesn't have much marketing stance/positioning. It's not powerful enough to do be competitive in "real" modern day computing, and it's not cheap enough or power-efficient enough to do the stuff J1900s do perfectly fine.
To be honest, even for light gaming you get better bang for the buck with a Celeron or Pentium Haswell paired with low end discrete GPU than a similarly priced AMD APU platform. Besides, given power and heat considerations, it's not like you can cram them into ultra-SFF builds anyway.
This is the other thing I was talking about.
Core-based (not Atom-based) Pentium or Celeron + something like R7 260 or GTX 750 is going to be better than higher-end AMD FM2+ processors, for not much more/similar money. AMD APUs just become a "simpler" solution but at the same time you need DDR3-2133 or higher to really get the proper performance out of the GPU side.
All that said, I'm glad there's others here that are living in 2015 and not 2008, lol.
I'm not the kind of person to say, "Hey don't buy AMD CPUs, they are teh suck!" but at the same time the truth is the truth. AMD CPUs just aren't that attractive for
most users. AMD's idea has been, for a while, to "just throw in more cores" instead of doing anything to try to compete with Intel's CPUs. This is only of use in
some specific instances and does nothing for the overall picture. And even in those "specific instances" it's only outdoing Intel CPUs with half as many cores, while taking more electrical power to do so.
8-core 4Ghz Vishera may cost around $200 with 125W TDP, but when a 4-core 3Ghz Haswell with 84W TDP for not much more offers better overall performance...what's the point? Plus with AMD, where you gonna go from there on the same board/platform? With an mid-range i5 you've got higher clocks and i7 ahead, while AMD's already maxed out. And Vishera is years-old now, unsurprisingly. The irony of some AMD codenames too, lol. They're not Bulldozing, Piledriving, or Steamrolling anything. They probably should have used these names in the Manchester and Toledo days!
It's a sad situation really and I'm really not too happy about it ither. That's exactly why i7s are around $400
and up! i5s in the $250-300 range. If AMD were competitive, these CPUs would be half the price! Unfortunately not the case.