Intel GMA3150 Graphics With Ubuntu 12.10

Most often when benchmarking Intel hardware on Phoronix it's from the latest-generation "Ivy Bridge" or previous-generation "Sandy Bridge" families because, well, that's what is most interesting and exciting right now. Intel has made lots of open-source Linux driver advancements for this latest Intel hardware -- while simultaneously working on next-generation Haswell and Valley View support -- but how is their support standing for much older hardware? In this article are benchmarks from an Intel Atom with GMA3150 integrated graphics.

ALUSA sent over their new nettop, which will be reviewed in a future Phoronix article and a number of new/updated Intel Atom Linux benchmarks will be conducted from the hardware. While a new nettop out of Portugal, it's based upon an Intel Atom D525, a.k.a. an old Pineview Atom from Q2'2010. Although it's an old processor, at least it makes for some interesting Linux tests to see how the support has progressed in the past two years -- such as now looking again at the GMA3150 performance out of the motherboard chipset. The Atom D525 is clocked at 1.83GHz, is dual-core plus offers Hyper Threading (four logical cores), supports SSE3 but not SSE4, and has a 13 Watt TDP.

The Intel GMA3150 graphics are only marginally better than the GMA950, which doesn't say much and a long stretch from where Intel is at today with their in-house HD graphics found on Sandy/Ivy Bridge. A few OpenGL benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite were run on this dated hardware when using Ubuntu 12.10 (a daily image from 2012-09-12), Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, and then Ubuntu 10.10. Ubuntu 10.10 is right around the time where the Atom D525 / GMA3150 support was initially well ironed out on Linux. Attempting to use Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS would hang during the installation process. There will also be other CPU/disk-focused tests from Ubuntu 10.04/12.04.1/12.10 on this Atom D525 system to be published in another article with this testing just looking at how the GMA3150 is performing today with Intel's modern open-source Linux graphics stack.

While the results show the frame-rate as improving over the past two years with the Ubuntu Linux packaged components, there are new and outstanding regressions not found when testing the GMA3150 on Ubuntu 10.10.