AMD's AM1 Platform & Linux 3.15 Dominated April

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 30 April 2014 at 09:00 PM EDT. Add A Comment
PHORONIX
April has finally come to an end and it was an incredibly busy yet interesting month in the Linux enthusiast hardware world.

This month on Phoronix was very exhausting with writing 278 news articles (nearly 10 news postings per day) while having authored 45 featured-length articles covering a multitude of Linux hardware being reviewed, new Linux graphics driver benchmarks, and a ton of other interesting Linux content catered towards the open-source enthusiast.

Before getting to the top content for April 2014, if you appreciate all the work invested into Phoronix.com, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also help out the site by offering a PayPal tip to support our costly hardware operations. You can also become social with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Thanks for your support!

With all of that said, of the 278 news articles written this month on Phoronix, the most visited stories were:

The GNOME Foundation Is Running Short On Money
While GNOME has been riding high lately with driving the development of its Wayland-based compositor and being the first major desktop getting there natively for most of its applications, and the overall work on the recent GNOME 3.12 release being fairly exciting, on the foundation side they are running into a budget shortfall and funds are becoming very tight within the GNOME Foundation.

Linux Kernel Developers Fed Up With Ridiculous Bugs In Systemd
A patch was sent out today to the Linux kernel mailing list that would hide the "debug" string from showing up within the /proc/cmdline output. Why? To workaround a systemd bug. This has set off Linus Torvalds on another epic tirade.

PC-BSD Is Developing Its Own Desktop Environment
The PC-BSD project is developing its own desktop environment from scratch! The ultimate plan is for Lumina to become a full-featured, open-source desktop environment that may ultimately replace KDE as its default desktop environment.

Torvalds Is Unconvinced By LTO'ing A Linux Kernel
Yesterday patches were published via a pull request to enable experimental LTO support for the Linux 3.15 kernel, but Linus Torvalds hasn't yet decided whether he will accept this code in the upstream Linux kernel... Linus doesn't yet see the benefits in link-time optimizations for the kernel and isn't sure whether this code is ready yet to be mainlined.

The Most Amazing OpenGL Tech Demo In 64kb
While we see lots of interesting OpenGL tech demos and graphics benchmarks at Phoronix, a demo we saw this weekend is perhaps the most impressive yet... And the compiled size of the GL4 demo is only 64kb!

The Linux 3.15 Kernel Is Going To Have A Lot Of Great Features
There's likely just a day or two left before the Linux 3.15-rc1 kernel will be released to mark the end of the Linux 3.15 kernel merge window. With all of the major features appearing to have been merged by now, here's an overview of the exciting features to look forward to with the Linux 3.15 release.

Systemd Is Working Towards Its Own Super Fast DHCP Server, Client
Systemd has been working on network support for this leading open-source init system. As part of this, systemd developers have now achieved support for obtaining a network connection in less than one millisecond... With that said, systemd developers are working towards having DHCP client and server capabilities built into the init system for having a super-fast booting OS and quicker network connections when resuming the system.

Old x86 Platforms To Be Removed With Linux 3.15
While the Linux 3.15 kernel is introducing a large number of new features, it's also doing away with some old drivers and older x86 platforms.

Chromium Browser Going Through Growing Pains In Ubuntu 14.04
Google's open-source Chromium browser is in a bit of a bad shape for this week's release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

New Features Coming To Xubuntu 14.04 LTS
Much of our talk about Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on Phoronix is in regards to the default Unity-based desktop given that it takes the largest share of *buntu users, but for the Xubuntu 14.04 LTS release this week there's several interesting changes for this Xfce spin worth noting.

Meanwhile, our most popular featured-length articles were:

AMD Athlon 5350 APU On Linux
Now that we've covered the general information about the new socketed Kabini APUs, here are our first benchmarks from the Athlon-branded Kabini APU we were seeded with by AMD: the Athlon 5350 with Radeon R3 Graphics. Let's see how this 25-Watt APU with four processor cores can perform under Ubuntu 14.04 Linux.

AMD Athlon 5350 / 5150 & Sempron 3850 / 2650
It's been a busy past few days since AMD launched their "AM1" Socketed Kabini APUs. After the initial Athlon 5350 Linux review on launch-day, I did some tests involving a faster kernel and newer Mesa code along with some reference DDR3 memory scaling benchmarks for these APUs with Jaguar processor cores. Since then the Athlon 5150 and Sempron 3850/2650 APUs arrived. After a busy weekend of benchmarking, here's the initial Ubuntu Linux benchmarks of all four AMD AM1 APUs that are available at this time: the Sempron 2650, Sempron 3850, Athlon 5150, and Athlon 5350. With these four new AMD APUs are also a number of thermal and power consumption tests.

Ubuntu 12.04.4 vs. 13.10 vs. 14.04 LTS Desktop Benchmarks
With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS being released today, here's some fresh benchmarks comparing the Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit performance against Ubuntu 13.10 and Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS. In this article are desktop and gaming benchmarks comparing these versions of Ubuntu Linux.

AMD's New Athlon/Semprons Give Old Phenom CPUs A Big Run For The Money
Curious how AMD's new AM1 platform APUs compare to the original AMD Phenom processors? Wondering myself, I ran some tests showing how the Sempron 2650 and 3850 along with the Athlon 5150 and 5350 compare to the original Phenom 9500 and Phenom II X3 710 processors with RS780/RS880 motherboards. Besides the new APUs being competitive against the old hardware while costing much less than the original Phenom CPUs, their power consumption is also at a fraction of AMD's former high-end processors. Here's a brief but nice look at AMD's processing evolution in going from Phenom CPUs to today's AMD budget APUs.

A Quick Look At GCC 4.9 vs. LLVM Clang 3.5
Following my most recent GCC 4.9 benchmarks for the open-source compiler that should be officially released next week, I ran some benchmarks of the GCC compiler results against LLVM's Clang 3.5 compiler in its latest SVN state. Here's the data for those curious how the very latest compiler code is comparing between GCC and LLVM/Clang.

GCC 4.9 Compiler Optimization Benchmarks For Faster Binaries
For those curious about the impact of modern compiler tuning CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when using the GCC 4.9 compiler with an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" processor, here are many benchmarks of many C/C++ code-bases when testing a variety of compiler optimization levels and other flags.

Upgraded Kernel & Mesa Yield A Big Boost For Athlon R3 Graphics
Yesterday I delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the AMD Athlon 5350 with Radeon R3 Graphics. Benchmarks of the socketed Kabini APU are ongoing at Phoronix in a variety of different software and hardware configurations. The tests that have just wrapped up today are checking out the performance when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa compared to what's shipped by default in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS vs. Oracle Linux vs. CentOS vs. openSUSE
Since last week's release of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we have been busy benchmarking Ubuntu 14.04 in a variety of configurations. Already some of the Ubuntu "Trusty Tahr" benchmarks we have done recently include 12.04.4 vs. 13.10 vs. 14.04 benchmarks, a 20-way graphics card comparison, server benchmarks, and results in many other articles. We are in the process of doing a larger, server/enterprise-oriented Linux distribution. More distributions are still being tested, but to get a new week of benchmarking started at Phoronix, here are some results of Ubuntu Linux, Oracle Linux, CentOS, and openSUSE.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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