AMD A10-6800K Richland APU On Linux

The AMD A10-6800K was tested from an MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 motherboard, which works just fine with the Richland APUs when using an updated BIOS and is also where the A10-5800K was tested. With this not being a new motherboard, it works just fine when running it on any recent Linux distribution release. In this article benchmarks were from an Ubuntu 13.10 development snapshot with the Linux 3.9 kernel. With the MSI motherboard, the A10-6800K was easily overclocked to 4.70GHz with ease through manipulating the multiplier and upping the voltage to 1.40V. The A10-6800K could potentially be pushed further, but air-cooling was in use and we're more interested in the Linux aspects of the system rather than an overclocking focus.

On the next pages are the CPU benchmark results comparing the AMD A10-5800K "Trinity" and AMD A10-6800K "Richland" APUs at stock speeds and when the new APU was overclocked to 4.70GHz. Following those results are the power consumption and performance-per-Watt figures during testing. The graphics results and other APU/CPU comparisons will be published during the week.