AMD Kaveri vs. Intel Skylake With The Latest Linux/Mesa Open-Source Drivers

I'm in the process of testing a lot of my different CPUs/APUs in preparation for some Kaby Lake Linux benchmarks next week with the Core i5 7600K and Core i7 7700K. Along the way with the different CPU benchmarks I've also been running some fresh integrated Linux graphics tests on the newer and interesting hardware.

The integrated graphics tests are still early on and will have much more data when the weekend is through. But so far with numbers from an AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU compared to Skylake-based Core i5 6500 and Core i5 6600K, those numbers alone were interested so I figured I'd share those early numbers this morning.

All three systems were using Ubuntu 16.10 with the Linux 4.10 kernel and Mesa 13.1-dev as of this week.

In another article today I'll have some more AMD Kaveri APU numbers with the latest kernel/Mesa and comparing it to older results, including with the defunct Catalyst/fglrx driver stack.


But I was sort of surprised to see with these numbers that Intel Skylake graphics were now much faster than Kaveri with the latest open-source drivers. At least in the more CPU bound tests with Skylake CPUs being much stronger than the aging Kaveri APUs. Zen APUs should be much more interesting. But even with the heavier Linux games, the Skylake HD Graphics were giving the Radeon APU graphics a run for the money.



You can find many more OpenGL results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. I'll have more Intel/AMD systems to this comparison in the days ahead followed by some large Linux CPU comparisons in working towards next week's Kaby Lake Linux tests.