Sandra Drystone and Whetstone results
Tomshardware benchmarked the mobile A8-3500M with several synthetic test, comparing it to an underclocked quad-core PhenomII @ 1.5 GHz. Two of these tests were Sandra's ALU and FPU test. These two benchmarks are quite heavy and very multicore scalable, so its safe to assume that they actively 100% load all four cores for all the time they run. The results are quite interesting.
Lets first see the ALU test:
The A8-3500M APU has a ~7,5% advantage over the PhenomII.
Now, the FPU test:
This time the advantage shrink to ~6.6%.
So, the question is: these greater scores are due to improved Stars microarchitecture or to Turbo core? It's hard to tell for sure, but I have the impression that the increased performances are more a consequence of the former than of the latter, as the improvements are perfectly in line with the expected microarchitecture improvements. It is also possible that both factors are at play here.