AMD Athlon 5150 & Sempron 2650/3850 APUs On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Athlon 5150 & Sempron 2650/3850 APUs On Linux

This week AMD announced Athlon and Sempron APUs for their new AM1 platform that's comprised of socketed Kabinis with Radeon R3 (GCN-era) graphics. I delivered a launch-day Linux review of the AMD Athlon 5350 that is the highest-end AM1 APU currently offered while arriving today were the three other AM1 APUs: the Athlon 5150 and the Sempron 3850 and Sempron 2650 APUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTY2MTQ

[DanL]

Couldn't one just underclock the 5350 to simulate the 5150 by dropping the max multiplier (or is that level of control not possible)?

[dungeon]

Great . I posting this from Lubuntu 14.04 beta2 live this is first i tried with my new Athlon 5350 and Asus AM1M-A . And what i spotted in Xorg.0.log both colortillings are disabled, i just enable both and performance is there .

So to me Michael it seems like your first test are runned without colortiling at all . Not quite sure why is this disabled in lubuntu 14.04 beta2

[schmidtbag]

Couldn't one just underclock the 5350 to simulate the 5150 by dropping the max multiplier (or is that level of control not possible)?

I think it'd make more sense to do the reverse of that. You should be able to easily overclock the 3850 to the 5350, or beyond.

[gururise]

Michael,

When you run your benchmarks, please make sure to compare against the cheap $35 AMD E1-2100 Kabini system. A lot of us have purchased this system based upon your articles & recommendations and it would be interesting to see how the older E1-2100 compare to the newer socketed variants.

[DanL]

I think it'd make more sense to do the reverse of that. You should be able to easily overclock the 3850 to the 5350, or beyond.

The Semprons use what I assume is a 4.5 multiplier for the GPU, so even if you could get that large of an overclock to match the CPU speed, it would still leave its GPU at a slower clock speed than the equivalent Athlons. Also, I'm not sure if clock speed is the only difference between the RadeonHD 8400 graphics on the Athlons and The 8280 on the Sempron.

[Grayswan]

Where does one get a reasonably sized PSU for one of these. The smallest one I see on newegg with 24-pin connector is 180 watts. With a load of <50 watts, that won't be very effecient.

[Spittie]

Michael,

When you run your benchmarks, please make sure to compare against the cheap $35 AMD E1-2100 Kabini system. A lot of us have purchased this system based upon your articles & recommendations and it would be interesting to see how the older E1-2100 compare to the newer socketed variants.

I agree, those would be interesting.
Anyway, since those are based on the same architecture, the Sempron 2650 should be about ~45% faster in cpu performance (1450mhz vs 1000mhz) and ~20% faster in gpu performance (400mhz vs 300mhz). Obviously it's not this easy, but I wouldn't expect any surprise.

The other big difference is TDP, 25W vs 9W, which should give another edge to the Sempron.

[DanL]

Where does one get a reasonably sized PSU for one of these. The smallest one I see on newegg with 24-pin connector is 180 watts. With a load of <50 watts, that won't be very effecient.

Get a mobo with a DC power input...:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157491

[zanny]

Where does one get a reasonably sized PSU for one of these. The smallest one I see on newegg with 24-pin connector is 180 watts. With a load of <50 watts, that won't be very effecient.

I'm thinking of building a 5350 based pc for my mom, since all she does is read email and doesn't need her 500w guzzler.

I found this case, which I would definitely strongly consider. Throw a 32 - 64GB SSD in there, get a board with a wifi chip, and you are in business. The only downside is that I've heard the 20 pin power cable is too short to reach most boards with the pin input not on the top of the board. Or take DanLs route, and get a DC in board and forgo power supply altogether, but then you are hard pressed to power more than two hard drives.