AMD A8-3500M Llano Linux Benchmarks

This morning there will be an introduction by Advanced Micro Devices of Llano, their next-generation Fusion APU. In this article are some launch-day Linux benchmarks of this newest 32nm accelerated processing unit using Ubuntu 11.04 with the A8-3500M part. This article is in continuation of our Radeon HD 6620G Linux benchmarks that were published at midnight.

With the A-series Fusion technology, we have launch-day Linux performance numbers, but as said in the earlier article, it is not due to AMD's interest towards Linux results. AMD's Legacy (CPU) side hasn't sent us out hardware in a very long time, even with all of the AMD Linux articles published on Phoronix that are pretty much on a daily basis due to various open and closed-source AMD Linux driver advancements. All of these launch Linux numbers for AMD's A8-3500M Llano were done remotely by obtaining remote access to a system from an independent party. We ran as many Linux tests as we could remotely using the Phoronix Test Suite for the short time we've had SSH access since Sunday evening. However, with the hardware being remote, we could not swap out any of the hardware and so our comparison numbers are limited.

The AMD Llano system used was the standard media kit that was sent over to the (Windows) media outlets. The system appeared to be a Compal PCL10 notebook with the AMD A8-3500M APU, 4GB of system memory, 32GB Intel X-25 Extreme SSDSA2SH032G1GN SSD, and the Radeon HD 6620G integrated APU graphics.

Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64) was the Linux distribution used for testing. A clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" with the stock parameters will work on AMD Llano, at least for the Compal test notebook that was used. The Catalyst 11.4 binary driver that ships in the Natty repositories will work with the Llano APUs (at least the A8-3500M) though the open-source driver stack in Ubuntu 11.04 is not supported.

As this article and early testing was not sanctioned by AMD, we also do not have the press slides or any official briefing by AMD on this next-generation Fusion APUs. Some key Llano facts that we do know include:

- Llano is AMD's first 32nm SOI chips.
- Llano is mostly made up of quad-core APUs but there are some lower-end dual-core chips and possible triple-core too.
- The Llano graphics are much-improved over the earlier Brazos parts.
- The A8-3500M has Radeon HD 6620G graphics, a stock 1.5GHz clock speed, 2.4GHz turbo frequency, 35 Watt TDP, 4MB of L2 cache (1MB per core), 400 Radeon cores, 444MHz GPU clock speed, UVD3 support, and supports DDR3-1333 system memory. Llano also supports the low-power DDR3L-1333MHz memory.
- In general, these Llano APUs have graphics abilities similar to those of discrete "Redwood" graphics cards. These APUs also support hybrid graphics for splitting the rendering workload between the integrated Radeon HD graphics processor and a discrete Radeon HD 6000 series GPU, but it's unknown right now whether this technology is fully supported under Linux.
- Some of the other initial A-Series Llano chips for mobile/notebook devices include the: A8-3530MX, A8-3510MX, A6-3410MX, A6-3400, A4-3310MX, and A4-3300M.
- Of interest to many Linux users is AMD's commitment to Coreboot on Llano (and all future CPUs).

For those interested in what the /proc/cpuinfo is for the AMD A8-3500M LLano:

processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 18
model : 1
model name : AMD A8-3500M APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics
stepping : 0
cpu MHz : 800.000
cache size : 1024 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
apicid : 0
initial apicid : 0
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 6
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc rep_good nopl nonstop_tsc extd_apicid aperfmperf pni monitor cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt cpb npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save pausefilter
bogomips : 2994.01
TLB size : 1536 4K pages
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate [9]

The two comparison systems for reference include:

AMD E-350 APU: AMD A-350 @ 1.60GHz, ASUS E35M1-M PRO, 4GB system memory, OCZ 64GB Vertex SSD, AMD Radeon HD 6300 series integrated graphics.

Intel Atom 330: ASUS Eee PC 1201N, Intel Atom 330 @ 1.60GHz, NVICIA MCP79 / GeForce 9400M integrated graphics, 2GB system memory, 250GB Hitachi HTS54502 SATA HDD.

These two systems plus the Llano setup were running Ubuntu 11.04 (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, X.Org Server 1.10.1, EXT4 file-system, GCC 4.5.2, and the respective binary driver (Catalyst 11.4 - fglrx 8.84.60 / NVIDIA 270.41.06).

So let us jump onto the Phoronix Test Suite results for the AMD A8-3500M.