More Linux Benchmarks Of The AMD A8-3500M Fusion APU

Earlier this week we delivered launch-day Linux benchmarks of the AMD A8-3500M "Llano" Fusion APU. The results for this next-generation, quad-core Fusion chip were impressive with the graphics and compute power being several times faster than the common AMD E-350 Fusion APU. In that article we just had two other systems the A8-3500M performance was being compared to, but here are some more Linux benchmarks comparing Llano to other systems running Ubuntu 11.04.

As mentioned in the original A8-3500M Linux article, AMD had not formally briefed us on Llano in advance of its launch (we still haven't had any communication regarding Llano even now being days after launch) nor had they sent over any press/review samples. All of these initial Llano Linux benchmarks were obtained remotely from securing SSH access to an AMD Llano notebook with one of our third-party contacts. It's not known when we'll physically have access to any AMD Llano hardware to deliver a more in-depth review along with looking at other areas of the system's performance, e.g. power consumption / battery life. We also only obtained the temporary remote access on Sunday night, which is why our performance benchmarks on Tuesday were limited in the number of comparisons available.

Besides having the original E-350 APU and Intel Atom 330 hardware for comparison, added to these results today are numbers from Intel Core i3 330M and Intel Core i3 370M nettops (previous review samples from ASRock) and an Intel Core i5 2520M "Sandy Bridge" notebook (sent over by Intel for the upcoming per-commit driver benchmarking to catch Intel Linux graphics regressions). Here is the key data for each of the systems highlighted in this article:

AMD A8-3500M APU: AMD A8-3500M APU, Compal PCL10, AMD Radeon HD 6620G, 4GB RAM, 32GB Intel X-25 Extreme SSD.

AMD E-350 APU: AMD E-350, ASUS E35M1-M PRO, 4GB RAM, 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD.

Intel Atom 330: Intel Atom 330, ASUS Eee PC 1201N, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hitachi SATA HDD, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M.

Intel Core i3 330M: Intel Core i3 330M, ASRock HM55-HT, 4GB RAM, 500GB Seagate SATA HDD, Intel Core IGP.

Intel Core i3 370M: Intel Core i3 370M, ASRock HM55-MXM, 4GB RAM, 500GB Western Digital SATA HDD, NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M.

Intel Core i5 2520M: Intel Core i5 2520M (Sandy Bridge), HP EliteBook, Intel HD 3000 Graphics, 160GB Intel SSD.

All of these systems were running the Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit operating system with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, X.Org Server 1.10.1, GCC 4.5.2, and an EXT4 file-system. With the systems having NVIDIA and ATI/AMD graphics, the Catalyst 11.4 driver was used for the Radeon graphics and the NVIDIA 270.41.06 binary driver was used on the GeForce system. Intel, obviously, is limited to their lone (open-source) driver, which with Ubuntu 11.04 has the xf86-video-intel 2.14 DDX and Mesa 7.10.2.

As always, all benchmarks were facilitated using the Phoronix Test Suite (3.2-Grimstad) with the results being hosted at OpenBenchmarking.org.