AMD "Kaveri" APU Linux Review, Benchmarks Next Week

News on AMD's "Kaveri" APU is trickling out this week from CES, besides the facts that have long been known about this "Richland" APU successor. The launch date is officially next week and there will be Linux/open-source performance testing and results to follow.

The AMD Kaveri APU is the first product with HSA functionality and "Steamroller" CPU cores. The graphics on this APU are also upgraded and are of the Radeon R7 tier with up to 50% more performance. While the GPU performance is said to be up to 50% better, on the CPU side the IPC performance is reportedly only 20% better.

The AMD Kaveri APUs launching next week are the A10-7700K and A10-7850K with the latter offering a 3.7GHz base frequency with 4GHz Turbo, 512 GPU cores, and 720MHz graphics core clock frequency for its GCN GPU. The TDP on this APU is 95 Watts.

AMD Kaveri should be fairly interesting and will be particularly interesting under Linux where there's the open and closed-source graphics drivers. Benchmarks of the AMD A10 Kaveri APU are planned for next week on Phoronix. Sadly, as with other recent AMD product launches, they haven't looped Phoronix in with the usual NDA'ed information and review samples as they do the many Windows-based sites, etc. Thus I have no review samples of Kaveri but I will be buying the necessary hardware on launch-day for carrying out the Linux benchmarks at Phoronix.

While AMD has sent out many APU/CPUs and GPUs in the past to Phoronix, for whatever reason they have lost interest in supplying new samples or even communicating with Phoronix over new product launches... Even though we've never broken an AMD NDA in our ten year history, the Linux gaming market is only growing, AMD relies upon the Phoronix Test Suite internally, Phoronix is the only source for Linux hardware news, the AMD Catalyst team relies upon Phorogit for the distribution packaging script handling, AMD Linux developers participate in our forums, etc. AMD's PR/marketing department just seems to not be in it for Linux.

As Kaveri is interesting and many Phoronix readers will likely be interested in seeing how it performs on the processor side and with its graphics -- on both drivers and in varying configurations, I'm caving and just buying the hardware retail on launch day due to my commitment to Linux hardware coverage and benchmarks. I hope to have the results starting to flow shortly thereafter. I'll also be comparing the Kaveri performance to many other AMD and Intel processors.

I'm mentioning this now just in case any Phoronix readers have any special test requests they'd like to see with the AMD Kaveri Linux testing. The processor and graphics tests will come first and with time I'll run some AMD Steamroller GCC/Clang compiler optimization testing and other areas covered in more technical detail on Phoronix. Ubuntu Linux will be the first distribution tested with the AMD Kaveri followed by others. If you're interested in AMD's Kaveri, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, making a PayPal tip, or at the very least disabling AdBlock, for helping to defray the hardware costs due to AMD's recent unwillingness to provide new hardware samples even though Phoronix is the only real source for Linux hardware reviews and performance benchmarks. Feedback is welcome via the forums and @MichaelLarabel on Twitter.