AMD A8-3870K Llano APU Linux Overclocking

Following the interest yesterday from the AMD A8-3870K graphics testing even though this new Llano APU has the same Radeon HD 6550D integrated graphics as the original A8-3850 APU, here's some more information and numbers from the week-old AMD A8-3870K when running the desktop AMD APU under Ubuntu Linux and attempting to overclock this week-old Llano APU.

Testing of the AMD A8-3870K is still going on at Phoronix, but due to the interest level and there not being any other results out on the A8-3870K, this is a second batch of numbers to look at today. Rather than focusing upon the graphics, this is looking at the APU performance in several processor-intensive benchmarks along with overclocking. For those that didn't read the A8-3870K Christmas article yet, the AMD A8-3870K is a quad-core APU that has a base frequency of 3.0GHz, 100W TDP, and the same Radeon HD 6550D graphics as found on the other A8-3800 series APUs. Both the CPU and GPU clocks are unlocked on the A8-3870K while being priced the same as the A8-3850.

The A8-3870K Linux testing that is still taking place is largely in regards to overclocking. The AMD A8-3870K Llano overclocking so far has been somewhat mixed. Overclocking the A8-3850 was limited to increasing the reference clock since the multiplier couldn't be increased, but there's been several published reports of the A8-3850 being pushed to 3.4~3.6GHz, although others have had challenges pushing A8-3850 setups past a ~105MHz reference clock.

With the A8-3870K, it was simple to run her at 3.5~3.6GHz. Frequencies beyond that for the quad-core APU could be achieved, but the system was not always stable. I had hit 4GHz in a variety of configurations for the A8-3870K, but there would be problems -- either issues with the SATA SSD resulting in the GRUB boot-loader rescue mode or when making it a bit further there would be problems booting the Linux kernel.