AMD A10-5800K "Trinity" APU On Linux

All of this initial AMD A10 Trinity testing was being done on an MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 motherboard that was provided by AMD. This motherboard was working out just fine under Linux.

Being published on Phoronix today are only the very early AMD A10-5800K Linux results while much more information will follow in the coming days. Unfortunately the AMD launch didn't work out too well with receiving the hardware while at XDC2012 in Franconia, then there was the annual Phoronix Oktoberfest meet-up, other business trips, and now this article was written while benchmarking the new ARM Calxeda Linux servers down in Texas.

The results in this article are mainly looking at the Radeon HD 7660D graphics performance on the A10-5800K compared to several discrete AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards when using the proprietary Linux graphics drivers. There's also some early CPU performance numbers from this quad-core APU also, which can be compared using OpenBenchmarking.org. Due to the aforementioned time constraints, yet to be published are the performance-per-Watt results plus raw performance for the A10-5800K compared to AMD Llano, AMD Bulldozer, and various Intel processors. There are also various other Linux areas to look at with this latest-generation of APUs. Expect the full Phoronix A10 Trinity Linux results to be out later this week and more to come in the following weeks as other areas are looked at of the Piledriver core performance, compiler tuning, OpenCL, open-source vs. closed-source graphics drivers, etc.

For these very early Linux graphics numbers from the A10-5800K / Radeon HD 7660D APU with the Catalyst driver the comparison discrete graphics cards came down to the Radeon HD 5450, HD 6570, and HD 6770 on the AMD side. On the NVIDIA side, there were the GeForce GT 220, GT 240, and GTX 550 Ti for reference. Testing was from Ubuntu 12.10 with the latest drivers found in the Quantal repository. All testing was done from the AMD A85X system and the Linux OpenGL benchmarks were facilitated in a fully-automated and standardized manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite automated testing software framework.