AMD Athlon 5350 APU On Linux

For this initial testing of the Athlon 5350 it was done from a clean installation of a daily, near-final LiveCD of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Its configuration was with the Linux 3.13 kernel, Mesa 10.1, GCC 4.8.2, an EXT4 file-system, and other defaults of Ubuntu 14.04. With using this stock configuration that most people will see "out of the box", graphics isn't the major focus of this article.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is shipping with the Linux 3.13 kernel and for some GCN hardware -- including the Athlon 5350's Radeon R3 Graphics -- dynamic power management wasn't turned on by default. As a result, the clock speeds are lowered compared to their rated frequencies. Tests will also be done from the Catalyst Linux driver for looking at the maximum performance attainable with AMD's binary driver. Well, that's what it looks like at least -- it could just be that the hardware is very slow, but other GCN hardware does lack DPM by default on Linux 3.13. All those articles will come in the next few days, including tests from Linux 3.15 and Mesa 10.2-devel -- there was only so much time between receiving the Athlon 5350 a few days ago and launch day.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with its open-source graphics drivers doesn't yield much to look at for the Radeon R3 Graphics, but that's how it will be found when Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships next week. The newer kernel/Mesa should do much better along with using the Catalyst Linux driver. I had attempted to use a new beta Catalyst Linux driver supplied by AMD for the AM1 launch in the few minutes after the first draft of this article was finished, but that failed to build cleanly on Ubuntu Trusty.

So take these initial open-source Athlon Radeon R3 results as you wish for the out-of-the-box Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support experience. Much more interesting Radeon R3 graphics results will be published shortly. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS also isn't shipping any OpenCL support (Gallium3D "Clover") by default. Let's go look at some more interesting processor tests.