AMD Athlon 5350 / 5150 & Sempron 3850 / 2650

In case you missed it, the power consumption and thermal data for these four APUs were on the previous page. Here's some more benchmark results from our main Linux performance tests of the Athlon 5150 and 5350 / Sempron 2650 and Sempron 3850.

As a reminder, if you wish to see how your own Linux system compares against all of these benchmarks, it's as simple as installing the Phoronix Test Suite on your distribution of choice followed by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1404132-KH-ATHLONSEM89 for the full onslaught of many GPU and GPU benchmarks. Alternatively, a smaller selection of tests used during the thermal/power monitoring can be tested against by running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1404130-KH-AMDAM1SEN46. This will automatically download all of the tests, configure/install the tests in the same manner as we used, and proceed to benchmark the system in a fully-automated manner followed by merging the results side-by-side so you can analyze how your own hardware compares.

Overall, the AM1 APU results were quite interesting but given the differences between the four APUs were in line with expectations. For anyone caring at all about the Radeon R3 Graphics performance, the Sempron APUs really aren't worthwhile for tasks outside of basic web/desktop work. The Athlon APUs with their 600MHz Radeon R3 Graphics (also advertised as Radeon HD 8400), the performance is only worthwhile for very basic games and/or running at very low resolutions to get above a 30 FPS average. In future tests we'll see how well the APU performance is when paired with discrete GPUs along with tuning the open-source RadeonSI driver and seeing how Catalyst for Linux will run on this hardware.

In terms of the other benchmarks, the Sempron 2650 did better than the Sempron 3850 in several CPU tests for those that couldn't fully exploit four CPU cores with the dual-core 2650 being clocked 150MHz higher than the 3850 quad-core. Besides having four CPU cores, the Sempron 3850 also has the advantage of DDR3-1600MHz support, there's twice the amount of L2 cache, and its 128 GPU cores are clocked 50MHz higher. The cost difference between these two Semprons is only about $5.

The Sempron APUs might be nice for some Phoronix readers with running a low-end NAS device / SOHO file server, or other embedded situations, but beyond that the performance might be less than desirable for any moderate desktop work. While it was fun testing all of these APUs, if you can afford the extra $15~25 USD for the Athlon APUs over the Semprons, it's certainly worthwhile. For both the graphics and processor tests the Ubuntu Linux performance was much better with the Athlon 5150 and 5350. At only $60~65 USD, the Athlon 5350 is a very nice APU for a lightweight, low-power system.

Stay tuned for the rest of our AMD AM1 Platform Linux articles in the days ahead. There's a lot coming! If you appreciate all of this extensive Linux benchmarking and articles that is rather time consuming seven days per week, please consider supporting us with a Phoronix Premium subscription to view the site ad-free, view entire articles (such as this one) on a single-page, etc. PayPal tips and Flattr also go appreciated in being able to buy new hardware, such as three of these AM1 APUs used for this article. There are many other interesting Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks also coming up in the next few weeks.