Valve Continues Dominating & Kaveri Excited Linux Users
It was a very busy month at Phoronix with having single-handedly written 39 featured articles (more than one Linux hardware review / driver analysis / prominent multi-page article per day) and 318 news items written (an average of more than 10 per day!). This is due to my continued devotion of enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the major sole source on the Internet for enthusiast-focused Linux hardware information.
If you appreciate all of this content that comes out on Phoronix seven days per week, 365 days per year, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium, make a PayPal tip, use our Amazon.com shopping link, and/or we now accept Bitcoin tips.
You can also follow Phoronix on social network sites like Steam Community, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. You can also resort to just fetching our RSS feed.
With the PSAs out of the way, our most popular articles on Phoronix this month included:
AMD A10-7850K vs. Intel/AMD CPU/APU Comparison
Two days ago AMD launched their "Kaveri" APUs to mixed reactions. On launch-day we provided a Linux overview of the AMD A10-7850K APU and followed that with an Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows 8.1 performance comparison for this top-end Kaveri APU. Yesterday was then the AMD Kaveri APU compared to discrete AMD/NVIDIA GPUs and now today we've finally had the time to finish the tests most people have been looking forward to: the A10-7850K comparison against various other AMD and Intel CPU/APUs. These Linux tests cover a range of both processor and graphics testing from Ubuntu 14.04 across a wide selection of Intel and AMD hardware.
8-Way Linux 3.13 File-System Benchmarks
After last week delivering SSD file-system tests and HDD file-system tests of the Linux 3.13 development kernel compared to the stable Linux 3.12 kernel. The earlier testing was limited to the popular EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems, but out for your viewing pleasure today is an eight-way Linux 3.13 file-system comparison on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 14.04 vs. Debian 7.3 vs. Debian Jessie Preview
For those curious about performance differences between the current Debian 7.3 "Wheezy" stable release and the upcoming but currently unstable Debian 8.0 "Jessie", here are some performance benchmarks comparing Debian's stable and testing releases on the same hardware. Making things more interesting, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in its current development form was also tossed into the mix.
Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 Benchmarks
To complement the many Ubuntu 13.10 Linux benchmarks I have published on Phoronix since the "Saucy Salamander" premiere in October, I've started several Fedora 20 benchmarks since December. So far I've shared Fedora 19 vs. Fedora 20 benchmarks and Wayland OpenGL benchmarks, besides using Fedora 20 as the base platform for unrelated tests, while today are some Ubuntu 13.10 vs. Fedora 20 performance benchmarks.
AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: The Linux Introduction
This morning AMD is releasing the first APUs in their Kaveri family, their most advanced APU ever with up to 12 compute cores and is a big push forward with their overall HSA architecture. We managed to get our hands on a Kaveri system with A10-7850K APU and in the days/weeks ahead there will be many Linux benchmarks looking at the next-generation AMD APU. Here's what Linux users need to know right now about AMD Kaveri APU Linux support.
AMD A10-7850K Kaveri: Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux
Aside from sharing the Linux overview of AMD's A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU on Linux, for your viewing pleasure today I also have out some early OpenGL graphics benchmarks comparing the performance of the A10-7850K APU under Microsoft Windows 8.1 vs. Ubuntu Linux in its current 14.04 development form. These tests are a precursor to many more interesting AMD Kaveri benchmarks in the coming days.
25-Way Open-Source Linux Graphics Card Comparison
As alluded to in days earlier after finding major open-source Radeon driver improvements -- including the newer RadeonSI Gallium3D driver -- I've been conducting a fresh graphics card comparison spanning many graphics processors and looking at the latest open-source driver performance on the Intel, NVIDIA, and Radeon fronts under Ubuntu Linux. In this article is a 25-way Intel Haswell HD Graphics vs. AMD Radeon vs. NVIDIA GeForce graphics comparison from Ubuntu 13.10 with the upgraded Linux 3.13 kernel and Mesa 10.1 development driver code to provide a very bleeding edge look at what the open-source drivers have to offer the Linux desktop users.
DDR3-2400MHz On AMD's A10 Kaveri With Kingston's HyperX Beast
Earlier in the week I published benchmarks showing AMD Kaveri's DDR3-800MHz through DDR3-2133MHz system memory performance. Those results showed this latest-generation AMD APU craving -- and being able to take advantage of -- high memory frequencies. Many were curious how DDR3-2400MHz would fair with Kaveri so here's some benchmarks as we test out Kingston's HyperX Beast 8GB DDR3-2400MHz memory kit.
The most popular stories were:
Valve Is Making All Their Games Free To Debian Developers
Valve will be making all of their games -- past, present, and future -- available for free to Debian Linux developers.
The Biggest Problem With GTK & What Qt Does Good
Dirk Hohndel of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has talked at length on his experiences in the GTK and Qt tool-kits, including what he views as the biggest problem with GTK.
Cairo Proposed To Become Part Of ISO C++
The C++ standards committee is looking at adopting a Cairo C++ interface as part of a future revision to the ISO C++ standard to provide 2D drawing.
Richard Stallman Calls LLVM A "Terrible Setback"
In the days since Eric S. Raymond had some choice words about GCC vs. Clang, the bickering and fighting over GCC vs. Clang compilers has continued. Richard M. Stallman has come out this morning on the Free Software Foundation's mailing list with his views to reiterate.
AnthraX Linux Kernels Remain Closed Source
AnthraX, a kernel used by some for their mobile Android devices as an alternative to the stock kernels or those from other open-source Android projects for reportedly offering better performance and functionality, is still refusing to release the kernel's source-code even though it's based on the Linux kernel and subject to the terms of the GPL.
A New Open-Source Game Engine Being Released
A very promising game engine that's been in development for several years and has already been ported to multiple platforms plus the popular game consoles is set to be out under as open-source in the coming weeks. This game engine has a feature-set similar to Unity and has been developed from scratch, including the various libraries commonly needed by game engines. Read on more in this Phoronix exclusive.
Open-Source Blu-ray Decryption Library For Linux
Some days ago there was an update released to VideoLAN's libbluray Blu-ray library that began supporting BD-J Java and other new functionality. Making news now is another but separate open-source Blu-ray news.
MPlayer2 Gone Dark, MPV Is Still Happening
The once popular MPlayer2 fork of MPlayer has sadly not seen any new development activity in nearly one year, but another less well-known fork of MPlayer is still showing a future with its most recent activity just being from hours ago.
1 Comment
