AMD Fusion A8-3850 APU "Llano" On Linux

[mirv]

Out of curiosity - have you tried and had any problems with Ubuntu 11.10 (alpha3) on these?
11.04 looks to install out of the box, but 11.10 gives black screens immediately (i.e during installation).
Thankyou for the comparison command line too.

[kbios]

Phoronix Test Suite already supports doing the DIMM modules, including frequencies. However, under Linux, this only works when PTS is run as root since it needs DMI access.... So either the Phoronix Test Suite needs to always be run as root or there needs to be a new way to export RAM information in Linux.

If I remember correctly, starting with Linux 2.6.39 DMI information can be exposed via sysfs and can thus be made accessible by non root users.

[Tgui]

Depends on which i5 you're talking about. I believe all the desktop i5s are quad-core, but my laptop's i5 is a dual core with hyperthreading (basically an i3 with Turbo enabled).

Yup, and my Macbook Pro is an i7 but dual core. Call it an i3 + Hyperthreading + 4 megs cache and more turbo... or something....

The initial complainer should have done his research about desktop i5s, which I believe are all quad cores, before setting Michael straight.

[Luke_Wolf]

Yup, and my Macbook Pro is an i7 but dual core. Call it an i3 + Hyperthreading + 4 megs cache and more turbo... or something....

The initial complainer should have done his research about desktop i5s, which I believe are all quad cores, before setting Michael straight.

Yes particularly since both CPU companies go to all the trouble of setting up sites just for this purpose

Here's the relevant one for the i5 2500k
http://ark.intel.com/products/52210

[scjet]

I think 2012 will be the year Laptops will finally catch up to the performance of PC/Desktops at near equal prices,
Thanks of course, to AMD's Fusion apu/gpu's.
Intel of course has nuthin' to really answer amd's gpu.

[scjet]

Now, if only AMD/ATI Graphics drivers will match the quality of Nvidia(Linux) driver's, then we're all set.
But, from the Linux games here, it looks like things are workin' pretty good so far (for august accrding to this review).
Yep, a nice cheap and powerful all-in-one desktop, with the thickness of a closed Laptop. PC Tower cases are out, flat desktop's are back IN.
Also, being that Arch's Linux kernels are always light-years ahead of Ubuntu's, this all looks very promising indeed.
HTPC lovers' rejoice !

btw, thx for the review/article.

Am I an AMD fanboy or what ?!
Lol.

[ChrisXY]

Now, if only AMD/ATI Graphics drivers will match the quality of Nvidia(Linux) driver's, then we're all set.
But, from the Linux games here, it looks like things are workin' pretty good so far (for august accrding to this review).

Soon...

I have read that Unigine Heaven would nearly run with Open Source drivers. So I started it and to my surprise it worked on my mobile HD 6550 (= HD 5650) with mesa git and xorg 7.11. It is not fast and it had some rendering problems. The good thing is that it run at all (= all OpenGL extensions it needs finally implemented) and it didn't crash X.

Then I tried Half Life 2 episode 1 in wine. The rendering is perfectly fine, but with HDR it is very slow. Without HDR it's still not 100% fluent but is actually quite playable with no rendering glitches I saw. This has always crashed my X in the past.

It won't be long now until the Open Source radeon driver it is a good alternative to the nvidia closed source driver.

[crispy]

Nice device!

I'd really like this in a tiny mini-itx cabinet, just worried about cooling. Got the feeling that these 100w on one die might require some good ventilation...

[Ex-Cyber]

I saw the same HTPC potential as others and put together a box with an A8 a few days ago. The stock cooler looks like it could barely handle 65W, and the fan sounds like it's working quite hard; definitely not HTPC-friendly. I'll see how Gentoo plays with it over the next few days, since I expect that's the straightest path to new enough bits and doubles as a burn-in.

[crispy]

Please do report

What im actually looking for is a box that will be able to play a few games. Not the newest title, 2008 titles are fine on low settings. But I really want a small case, but so far all cases that could sport a pcie card have been too big in my opinion. I want something where the ITX board just fits in with no extra room except for a 2.5" drive. This Llano business seems to fit that demand, however just a wee bit too high tpd it seems :/

I know I know, demanding the impossible