AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux

Aside from sharing the Linux overview of AMD's A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU on Linux, for your viewing pleasure today I also have out some early OpenGL graphics benchmarks comparing the performance of the A10-7850K APU under Microsoft Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux in its current 14.04 development form. These tests are a precursor to many more interesting AMD Kaveri benchmarks in the coming days.

While I'm still working on the complete Linux performance roundabout for AMD's Kaveri APU, some early tests I did was comparing the Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro x64 performance against that of a daily development build of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64. The first round of tests solely was comparing the OpenGL performance in a wide variety of games / tech demos known to be reliable across platforms. The graphics drivers used on each platform were AMD's "press drivers" derived from the 13.30 series with their first-cut Kaveri support.

During this testing the hardware components were maintained the same under each operating system: the AMD A10-7850K running at stock speeds with its Radeon R7 Graphics, a 120GB Kingston SSD, ASUS A88X-PRO motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-2133MHz system memory, and XION 700 Watt power supply. Windows 8.1 Pro x64 had all available updates at the time of testing as did the development build of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. See the earlier Phoronix article on AMD Kaveri for all the Linux specific details. In this round of testing the mainline Linux 3.12 kernel was deployed on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for easy fglrx 13.30 RC2 driver compatibility.

All of this open-source, cross-platform benchmarking was facilitated via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software. To compare your own system's performance against these early AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7 Graphics performance numbers, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and from the command line run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1401122-PL-AMDKAVERI23.

On the following pages are these initial AMD Windows vs. Linux performance results while in the coming days will be the rest of the AMD A10-7850K performance figures, including performance-per-Watt measurements, CPU thermal data, etc. As mentioned in the introductory article, the full onslaught of Linux results for the A10-7850K isn't available today due to receiving the AMD sample at the last moment.