AMD Kabini HD 8210: RadeonSI Gallium3D Can Outperform Catalyst

With the AMD E1-2100 "Kabini" APU on the ECS KBN-I motherboard sporting Radeon HD 8210 integrated graphics, I decided to benchmark this APU from an Ubuntu 14.04 development release in a few driver configurations with both the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver and the proprietary Catalyst stack.

The test configurations for this AMD E1-2100 "Kabini" dual-core 1.0GHz system with Radeon HD 8210 512MB graphics included:

- Mesa 10.0 + Linux 3.13. This is the current Ubuntu 14.04 stack but will be moving to Mesa 10.1 for the final release.

- The same stack but with upgrading to Mesa 10.2.0-devel and xf86-video-ati 7.3.99 from the xorg-edgers PPA.

- The upgraded user-space with Mesa 10.2.0-devel and then moving to the Linux 3.14 Git kernel.

- Lastly were Linux 3.13 benchmarks while using the packaged AMD Catalyst driver (fglrx 13.35.5).

All benchmarking was handled via the Phoronix Test Suite and a wide range of OpenGL benchmarks were carried out on this low-end Kabini Linux system. There will also be benchmarks next week looking at the Kabini's graphics performance compared to several low-end discrete GPUs.