Massive Linux GPU Tests, Russia, Devil's Canyon Dominated June In Linux News

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 1 July 2014 at 10:20 AM EDT. 1 Comment
PHORONIX
There was a lot of interesting Linux and open-source news along with our hardware reviews on Phoronix during the month of June.

In June we celebrated Phoronix turning 10 years old and the Phoronix Test Suite turning six years old. Over the month of June in celebration of Phoronix being around for a decade, we ran a lot of interesting high-profile articles. Published on Phoronix in June were 253 original news stories and 35 featured-length articles, which were all written single-handedly by your's truly.

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The most popular articles on Phoronix in June included:

Testing 60+ Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPUs On Linux With Open-Source Drivers
With Thursday marking the ten year anniversary of launching Phoronix.com and also the six-year anniversary since the public 1.0 debut of the Phoronix Test Suite, there's a lot of interesting articles that I've been working on to celebrate these two milestones. For your viewing pleasure today is easily the largest graphics processor comparison that's ever happened at Phoronix... I've tested over 60 GPUs from the Intel HD Graphics, AMD Radeon, AMD FirePro, and NVIDIA GeForce series to see how their performance is when using the very latest open-source Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

Is Antergos Arch Linux Really Faster Than Ubuntu, Fedora?
Frequently within the Phoronix Forums it is requested to do benchmarks with Arch Linux since its users tend to be adamant that it's the fastest Linux distribution. In the past I've run benchmarks of the Arch-based Manjaro to look for speed differences as an easy and quick to deploy variant. Today the latest Arch Linux variant I am benchmarking is Antegros Linux.

35-Way NVIDIA/AMD Proprietary Linux Graphics Driver Comparison
Last week with Phoronix turning ten years old I celebrated by testing 65 different GPUs with the open-source Linux graphics drivers from Intel, AMD, and Nouveau. I also followed-up with power efficiency and thermal benchmarks from all of the graphics cards that played nicely on the latest open-source drivers. Today I'm following up with the next round of testing by checking out the proprietary NVIDIA and AMD Catalyst graphics drivers under Linux with 35 different graphics cards.

Nouveau Re-Clocking Is Way Faster, Shows Much Progress For Open-Source NVIDIA
Earlier this week on Phoronix we covered the steps to trying out Nouveau re-clocking with Linux 3.16, assuming you're running a supported NVIDIA GPU that can currently be statically re-clocked using this reverse-engineered graphics driver. While the support is still experimental and isn't intended for end-users, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Nouveau driver DRM code for Linux 3.16 when re-clocked.

Intel Core i7 4790K: Devil's Canyon Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux
Last week at Computex Intel formally announced the Core i7 4790K "Devil's Canyon" processor as a new, high-end, refreshed Haswell part. The Intel Core i7 4790K tops out at 4.4GHz and is quite interesting for PC enthusiasts and performance junkies. Today we're delivering the first public tests of the i7-4790K Devil's Canyon run under Linux.

NVIDIA Slaughters AMD Catalyst On Linux In OpenGL 4.x Micro-Benchmarks
With the APITest OpenGL 4.x tests developed by John McDonald at NVIDIA who is now working for Valve on their Linux-related endeavors, the AMD Catalyst driver gets absolutely annihilated for these GL4 micro-benchmarks.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 740: I'd Rather Have Maxwell
NVIDIA recently began shipping their TITAN Z graphics card that sports two unlocked GK110 GPU cores and 12GB of video memory, but for those that can't afford this $2,999 USD graphics card, on the opposite end they also began shipping a new budget graphics card: the GeForce GT 740. At Phoronix today we are seeing how well the EVGA GeForce GT 740 Super Clocked graphics card compares to many other NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux. There's also a number of AMD/NVIDIA Linux performance-per-Watt metrics, GPU thermal data, etc, in this latest Linux graphics card review.

Crucial MX100 128GB: A Cheap But Good SSD For Linux Systems
Crucial is out with a new solid-state drive line-up that's generating a lot of interest due to its lower price-per-Gigabyte than competing drives or even their former drives. The Crucial MX100 is the new SSD series and today we're testing out the Crucial MX100 128GB SSD, which costs just $80 USD (or about $0.62 per GB while the higher-capacity MX100 SSDs are comparatively even cheaper with the 512GB version costing less than $0.50 per GB).

The most popular news meanwhile included:

Russia To Replace AMD/Intel CPUs With 64-bit ARM Hardware
I heard a few days ago when getting into Russia from a contact that the Kremlin was looking to get rid of AMD and Intel CPUs on the basis that they're manufactured in the United States. That information has now been publicly announced and it appears they want to replace the AMD/Intel hardware with 64-bit ARM designs.

Civilization V Is Now Available For Linux, SteamOS
The latest AAA game shipping for Linux is... Civilization V!

id Software's Softdisk Open-Sources Some Really Old Games
Softdisk was the company where John Carmack, John Romero, and Adrian Carmack met and developed games originally before founding id Software. Those original Softdisk game titles are now being open-sourced under the GPL.

The New Features To The Linux 3.16 Kernel
Linus Torvalds will most likely be releasing the Linux 3.16-rc1 kernel today, now that the merge window has been open for two weeks and the feature pull requests are coming to an end. Here's a concise look at the new features and improvements to be found with the Linux 3.16 kernel.

The Linux 3.16 Kernel Already Has A Ton Of New Features
The Linux 3.15 kernel isn't even expected for release until later today, but thanks to the Linux 3.16 merge window opening a week early to adjust to Linus Torvalds' upcoming schedule, we already have a good idea for a portion of the changes for the next kernel cycle.

The Top Features Of The Linux 3.15 Kernel
With the Linux 3.15 kernel expected for release within the next few days, here is a rundown of the top features that are introduced as part of this big kernel release.

Apple Announces A New 3D API, OpenGL Competitor: Metal
At Apple's WWDC conference today they have just unveiled Metal, a new 3D graphics API to compete with OpenGL.

Sadly, Two X.Org GSoC Projects Already Failed
Two Google Summer of Code projects for the X.Org Foundation have already failed.

There's Now 500 Games On Steam For Linux
It just so happens on the tenth birthday of Phoronix that 500 games are now available for Linux via SteamOS.

XFS & Btrfs For Linux 3.16 Bring New Features
While EXT4 didn't see any exciting changes for the Linux 3.16 merge window, the XFS and Btrfs file-systems are continuing to receive a great deal of upstream improvements.
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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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