AMD Athlon 5150 & Sempron 2650/3850 APUs On Linux

This week AMD announced Athlon and Sempron APUs for their new AM1 platform that's comprised of socketed Kabinis with Radeon R3 (GCN-era) graphics. I delivered a launch-day Linux review of the AMD Athlon 5350 that is the highest-end AM1 APU currently offered while arriving today were the three other AM1 APUs: the Athlon 5150 and the Sempron 3850 and Sempron 2650 APUs.

The AM1 APUs are ultra-low cost and aimed at entry-level desktops The Athlon 5350 that I've been testing the past few days is interesting with four Jaguar cores clocked at 2.05GHz, 128 Radeon GCN cores at 600MHz, 2MB cache, and a 25 Watt TDP while costing less than $60 USD. Yesterday I published new Athlon 5350 Radeon R3 Graphics benchmarks with big performance improvements when upgrading the Linux kernel and Mesa. More tests are still on the way of this high-end AM1 APU.

Given the very low cost to these APUs, I ended up buying the other currently available AM1 products for some extra benchmarks aside from the Athlon 5350 sample provided by AMD. The Athlon 5150 is a quad-core 1.6GHz APU with 128 GCN Radeon cores and a 600MHz GPU frequency, just like the Athlon 5350. There's also still DDR3-1600MHz support, 2MB cache, and a 25 Watt TDP. The Sempron 3850 is a quad-core 1.3GHz APU with 128 Radeon GCN cores but the graphics frequency is down to 450MHz. WIth the AMD Sempron 2650 is just two Jaguar cores running at 1.45GHz with 128 Radeon GCN cores running at 400MHz and only support for DDR3-1333MHz memory. The Sempron 2650 also has only a 1MB cache while it still has a 25 Watt TDP. Along with these three extra APUs I bought the Gigabyte AM1M-S2H micro-ATX motherboard that will be the focus of further testing on Phoronix.

Next week should be the initial benchmarks of all four of these APUs together under Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Linux. Also planned are GCC 4.9 compiler benchmarks for these APUs with Jaguar cores, power consumption / performance-per-Watt recordings, other compiler tuning, benchmarks on different kernels and distributions, and the Catalyst OpenGL performance results compared to RadeonSI Gallium3D. There's also surely many other AM1 Linux articles to come on Phoronix over time. However, with this article I'm also soliciting a call for feedback for other AMD APU benchmarks you would like to see with this new, low-end hardware. If you have any interesting and worthwhile test requests, let me know via our forums (use the comment link below) or via @MichaelLarabel on Twitter. If you appreciate this testing please be sure to subscribe to Phoronix Premium or consider a tip and to use our Amazon.com shopping link when making your hardware purchases.