DDR3 Memory Scaling Performance With AMD's Athlon 5350

For CPU-bound tests that don't do a lot of frequent memory reads/writes, the greater memory frequency is obviously of little benefit.

The memory scaling performance isn't quite as linear as with the Radeon R3 graphics results, but still the DDR3-1600MHz memory is worthwhile for those with workloads involving frequent memory accesses.

Those buying AMD AM1 APUs are likely doing so for entry-level systems on a very limited budget, but as these results show you probably don't want to skimp on the DDR3 RAM -- either by recycling some old, slower DIMMs or in buying the cheapest DDR3-800/1066MHz modules. For especially the Radeon R3 Graphics performance but also in other workloads with frequent memory accesses, there's much greater performance potential in going with DDR3-1600, which is the highest-rated system memory frequency supported by the Athlon 5350/5150 and Sempron 3850 while the Sempron 2650 dual-core APU is capped to DDR3-1333MHz.

Stay tuned for many more interesting AM1 Linux tests exclusively at Phoronix.com.