Processors Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 423 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for processors. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

The ODROID-XU is the latest exciting ARM development board. Rather than aiming for low-cost like the Raspberry Pi, the ODROID-XU currently offers maximum performance when it comes to open ARM development boards. The ODROID-XU is based on ARM's big.LITTLE design and incorporates a quad-core Cortex-A15 for maximum performance or in its low-power state there's a quad-core Cortex-A7. The ODROID-XU also has with its Samsung Exynos 5 Octa also has a PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU, 2GB of LPDDR3 memory, and USB 3.0 connectivity.

The Intel Core i3 4130 is a Haswell processor with HD Graphics 4400 and a dual-core part with Hyper Threading that retails for about $130 USD. While we have been amazed by the performance of high-end Core i7 Haswell CPUs, how's this budget-friendly processor? Here's a review of the Core i3 4130 CPU running Ubuntu Linux and compared to a variety of other processors.

At the beginning of September Intel launched the Intel Core i7 4960X processor as the long-awaited upgrade for their LGA-2011 platform. The Core i7 4960X is not Haswell-based but an Ivy Bridge Extreme Edition processor for maintaining socket compatibility and being derived from the Ivy Bridge Xeon. Over the Sandy Bridge Extreme processors, the Ivy Bridge upgrade brings 22nm processors to the socket and the top-end i7 4970X EE model is running at 3.6GHz with 4.0GHz Turbo, 15MB L3 cache, and has a 130 Watt TDP. There's been plenty of Windows benchmarks out there already for the Core i7 4960X EE while coming out today is our full Linux review with plenty of Ivy Bridge Extreme benchmarks on Ubuntu.

Earlier this month AMD unveiled their Richland desktop APUs as an upgraded version of Trinity. While still based upon Piledriver CPU cores, the AMD A10-6800K APU under Linux is a modest upgrade until the arrival of the Jaguar-based APUs. For starting off our Linux testing of the A10-6800K are Ubuntu Linux benchmarks of this high-end Richland APU compared against the A10-5800K Trinity APU.

Utilizing the core-avx2 CPU optimizations offered by the GCC 4.8 compiler can provide real benefits for the Intel Core i7 4770K processor and other new "Haswell" CPUs. For some computational workloads, the new Haswell instruction set extensions can offer tremendous speed-ups compared to what's offered by the previous-generation Ivy Bridge CPUs.

This past weekend I shared the first experiences of running Intel's new Haswell CPU on Linux. While Intel Haswell is a beast and brings many new features and innovations to the new Core CPUs succeeding Ivy Bridge, there were a few shortcomings with the initial Linux support. It still appears that the Core i7 4770K is still being finicky at times for both the processor and graphics, but in this article are the first benchmarks. Up today are benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 4770K when running Ubuntu 13.04 with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

Haswell is here, Haswell is here, Haswell is here!!! After talking for months about the Linux kernel and driver development for Intel's Ivy Bridge successor, the heatsink can be lifted today on talking about Intel's Haswell processor. For the past few weeks I have been running and benchmarking an Intel Core i7 4770K "Haswell" processor on Linux to mixed success. While the Haswell improvements are terrific, the Linux experience now is awaiting improvements.

Last week I shared some early benchmarks of the Samsung Chromebook while running Ubuntu Linux. The Samsung Chromebook is very interesting since it's one of the few readily available computers on the market employing an ARM Cortex-A15 processor rather than Cortex-A9 or other models. The Cortex-A15 found in the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC proved to be very powerful and this Chromebook was quite a good deal with it being trivial to load Ubuntu Linux (and other distributions) while costing only $250 USD for this ARM-based laptop. In the past week I have carried out additional ARM Cortex-A15 benchmarks, including a comparison of its performance the the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core ARM "Cardhu" tablet and several Intel Atom/Core x86 systems.

For some additional benchmarks to share this weekend, here are some multi-core scaling numbers from the AMD FX-8350 Vishera that launched a few days ago.

The latest Phoronix benchmarks to share of the AMD FX-8350 "Vishera" processor are performance-per-Watt results for the Piledriver eight-core processor compared to the previous-generation Bulldozer FX-8150. Tests were conducted when running at stock speeds as well as overclocked settings.

Last week I began delivering benchmarks of the low-power yet massively scalable Calxeda EnergyCore ECX-1000 ARM Server and followed the initial tests with some ARM compiler benchmarks and other benchmarks from this 5-Watt Linux Server. In this article is what many Phoronix readers have been waiting for: comparing Calxeda's quad-core Cortex-A9 ARMv7 performance against a dual-core Texas Instruments OMAP4460 PandaBoard ES and then an Intel Atom processor.

AMD today is lifting the lid on their Piledriver-based 2012 FX "Vishera" processors. Just weeks after the "Bulldozer 2" Trinity APUs were launched, the new high-end AMD FX CPUs are being rolled out. Being benchmarked at Phoronix today under Linux is the new AMD FX-8350 processor.

Continuing on from last week's initial benchmarks of the AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU on Linux, the Trinity memory performance testing, and then more benchmarks of the Radeon HD 7660D integrated graphics, here is the large Ubuntu Linux comparison of the AMD A10-5800K compared to the previous-generation AMD A8 Llano APU, an AMD FX-Series Bulldozer, and several Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPUs from the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge families.

While some information with Windows-based results for AMD's latest-generation "Trinity" desktop APUs have surfaced in the past few days, this morning the full embargo concerning the latest AMD Trinity hardware expires so full details and results can now be shared. In this article are the initial Linux test results of the AMD A10-5800K Trinity APU using Ubuntu at Phoronix.

For the past month I have been testing out the Intel Core i5 3470 under Linux. Like Intel's other processors of recent years (well, ignoring the initial Sandy Bridge struggles), and just like the more expensive Ivy Bridge CPUs of this year, this mid-range quad-core processor is working very smoothly "out of the box" on modern Linux distributions.

Here's some interesting test results recently uploaded to OpenBenchmarking.org that compares the performance of ARM Cortex A8 and Cortex A9 cores running at 1.0GHz against an Intel Atom N450. All three systems running at 1.0GHz were also running Gentoo Linux. Clock-for-clock, can the latest-generation ARM Cortex-A9 take out the Intel Atom? For the most part, yes.

It has been 66 days since Intel formally introduced their Ivy Bridge processors as the 2012 successor to Sandy Bridge. My views on Intel Ivy Bridge (specifically the Core i7 3770K model) back on launch-day were very positive in terms of the Linux compatibility, CPU performance, and the HD 4000 graphics capabilities. Since then I've conducted dozens of additional tests looking at the Core i7 Ivy Bridge on Linux in different areas from comparative benchmarks to Microsoft Windows, trying to run BSD operating systems on the latest hardware, looking at the virtualization performance, compiler tuning, etc. Here is a recap of this additional Ivy Bridge testing that has happened over the past two months of near constant benchmarking.

Last week I shared my plans to build a low-cost, 12-core, 30-watt ARMv7 cluster running Ubuntu Linux. The ARM cluster that is built around the PandaBoard ES development boards is now online and producing results... Quite surprising results actually for a low-power Cortex-A9 compute cluster. Results include performance-per-Watt comparisons to Intel Atom and Ivy Bridge processors along with AMD's Fusion APU.

The Linux OpenCL support for Intel CPUs is not in as good shape as the Intel Windows OpenCL support at this time, but here are some benchmarks that explore the Intel Ivy Bridge OpenCL performance under Linux.

Intel is finally announcing the first Ivy Bridge processors this morning. I have been extensively testing out the Intel Core i7 3770K, the current high-end Ivy Bridge processor, for the past few weeks under Ubuntu Linux. I have been extremely pleased with the Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor under Linux with its phenomenal performance, power efficiency, and new features. This article is the first of many looking at the Linux performance of the new Intel Ivy Bridge processors.

With the upcoming availability of Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release that will be quickly making its way into many enterprise environments, here's a look at the virtualization performance of this popular Linux distribution. In particular, being looked at is the Linux virtualization performance of KVM, Xen, and Oracle VirtualBox compared to bare metal when using Intel Sandy Bridge Extreme and AMD Bulldozer hardware.

Following the interest yesterday from the AMD A8-3870K graphics testing even though this new Llano APU has the same Radeon HD 6550D integrated graphics as the original A8-3850 APU, here's some more information and numbers from the week-old AMD A8-3870K when running the desktop AMD APU under Ubuntu Linux and attempting to overclock this week-old Llano APU.

Using the new Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge processor, Scientific Linux 6.1, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Solaris 11 11/11 were benchmarked when having a different number of CPU cores enabled to see how well each operating system scales up to six cores plus Hyper Threading.

By now you have likely heard of the Core i7 3960X processor, which is one of the Sandy Bridge Extreme CPUs that was launched in November by Intel to much excitement and talked about quite a bit on Phoronix in the past few days. In this article is a comprehensive look at the Intel Core i7 3960X performance under Ubuntu Linux.

While in the weeks since the launch of the AMD FX "Bulldozer" processors we have looked at many areas of computing performance for the FX-8150 CPU, from the compiler tuning to multi-core scaling, one area that hasn't yet been covered under Linux is the AMD FX-8150 overclocking. But this article changes that.

For those wondering about the impact that AMD's Cool 'n' Quiet and Turbo Core technologies have under Linux for the latest-generation Bulldozer processors, here are some tests illustrating the changes in performance, power consumption, and operating temperature.

With the renewed interest in the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver now that this software-based acceleration method is working with GNOME Shell, here are some benchmarks of this LLVM-based software driver when running some OpenGL tests on Intel Sandy Bridge and AMD Bulldozer hardware.

Now having looked at the AMD Bulldozer FX-8150 performance on Linux, as well as how it's scaling across multiple cores/modules, in this article are results when building a variety of benchmarks under the popular compilers. The tested compilers were GCC, LLVM/Clang, and AMD Open64, including different revisions of these open-source compilers.

There has been a lot of discussion in the past two weeks concerning AMD's new FX-Series processors and the Bulldozer architecture. In particular, with the Bulldozer architecture consisting of "modules" in which each has two x86 engines, but share much of the rest of the processing pipeline with their sibling engine; as such, the AMD FX-8150 eight-core CPU only has four modules. In this article is a look at how well the Bulldozer multi-core performance scales when toggling these different modules. The multi-core scaling performance is compared to AMD's Shanghai, Intel's Gulftown and Sandy Bridge processors.

Two weeks ago AMD introduced the Bulldozer FX-Series CPUs to much excitement, although many were letdown by the initial results, and it was months after showing the first Linux benchmarks of an AMD Dual-Interlagos pre-production system. In the days that followed I delivered some initial AMD FX-4100 Linux benchmarks when securing remote access to a low-end Bulldozer system running Ubuntu 11.04 (and there were also some Linux benchmarks from independent Phoronix readers), but then last week a Bulldozer kit arrived from AMD. The centerpiece of this kit is an eight-core AMD FX-8150 CPU, which is now being used to conduct a plethora of AMD Bulldozer benchmarks on Linux.