DDR3 Memory Scaling Performance With AMD's Athlon 5350
Our latest benchmarks of AMD's AM1 Platform this weekend is looking at the performance impact of the DDR3 memory frequency on the overall system performance while running Ubuntu Linux. The AMD Athlon 5350 APU was tested with DDR3 at 800MHz, 1066MHz, 1333MHz, and 1600MHz (the maximum for these current socketed Kabini APUs).
AMD APUs tend to crave high performance system RAM as benchmarks clearly indicated earlier this year with our AMD Kaveri memory testing with scaling very well up to DDR3-2400MHz. With the Athlon 5350, the maximum DDR3 memory speed supported is 1600MHz, while the lowest-end Sempron is limited to DDR3-1333MHz. Using the ASUS UEFI interface we adjusted the memory frequency for the 4GB AMD Radeon Memory Entertainment Series on the AM1I-A motherboard.
The system was running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 but with the upgraded Linux kernel and Mesa for yielding a faster experience compared to what's offered by default in this distribution that's officially shipping in a few days time.
The testing was done with full automation and reproducibility using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. With these tests being some very straightforward weekend benchmarks, let's get straight to the data for the quad-core Jaguar with Radeon R3 Graphics. Next week will be our Linux benchmarks of the Athlon 5150 & Sempron 3850/2650.