AMD Fusion E-350 Linux Performance
The ASUS E35M1-M PRO has five internal Serial ATA 3.0 connectors and one external SATA connectors that is 3.0 / 6.0 Gbps ready. The Gigabit networking is provided by a Realtek 8111E ASIC and the HD audio codec is an ALC887-VD2. There is also a VIA VT6308P IEEE-1394 Firewire controller. The Zacate APU and Hudson M1 chipset are covered by a very large heatsink that can be cooled passively. With the -PRO motherboard, there is also an included fan for those that may prefer better cooling, especially if you tend to overclock the E-350 (the ASUS EFI BIOS does have support for overclocking this Fusion unit).
Installing Ubuntu 10.10 on this Fusion system with the E-350 APU and ASUS E35M1-M PRO motherboard went fine. Fortunately, the network controller was supposed with the Linux 2.6.35 kernel and later, which on Fusion systems with some of the motherboards and notebooks/netbooks using newer network controllers are not yet supported, but should be with Linux 2.6.38.x/2.6.39. As said already, for the Linux graphics support you will need to use the very latest bits (Mesa, xf86-video-ati DDX, Linux kernel) for the open-source Gallium3D / classic Mesa support and even then it may be a buggy experience with Linux 2.6.38. For the Catalyst driver you need Catalyst 11.2 or later for the best experience.
In this article we are focusing upon the computing performance of the E-350 under Linux while in another article we will focus upon the graphics performance once the open-source driver issues are sorted out. The AMD E-350 performance was compared to an Intel Atom 330 nettop with NVIDIA ION graphics, an Intel Core i3 330M nettop, an Intel Core i3 370M nettop, an AMD Phenom II X3 710 Desktop, and Sempron 3400+ Desktop.
The AMD E-350 was tested with the ASUS E35M1-PRO motherboard, 4GB of system memory, 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD, and integrated Radeon HD 6310 graphics. The E-350 was also tested when it was overclocked from 1.6GHz to 1.8GHz. The system specifications for the other tested configurations are listed on the OpenBenchmarking.org results page. Ubuntu 10.10 was the operating system in use, but all system installations were updated against the Linux 2.6.38 kernel.
Via Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 on OpenBenchmarking.org we benchmarked x264, FFmpeg, LAME MP3 encoding, 7-Zip compression, Parallel BZIP2 compression, Himeno, Bullet Physics, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Smallpt, HMMer, Minion, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, TTSIOD Renderer, Apache compilation, and Linux kernel compilation.