Recapping All Of Our Linux Coverage Of AMD's AM1 APUs

Just under one month ago AMD released their AM1 APUs that resurrected the Sempron and Athlon branding for these low-end APUs packing up to four "Jaguar" CPU cores with Radeon R3 Graphics.

The AM1 APUs sell between $40 and $60 while the motherboards supporting this new socket for the 25 Watt TDPs can be found for as little as $30 USD. Overall, the AM1 hardware is very interesting for budget PCs and low-end, low-power systems. These AM1 APUs work well with modern Linux distributions and here's a recap of our findings over the past month:

- We reviewed the Sempron 2650 / 3850 and Athlon 5150 / 5350 APUs, all of the currently available AM1 products. AMD sent over the 5350 while I ended up buying the others out of interest.

- The DDR3 memory scaling performance comes as expected with support for up to DDR3-1600MHz memory while all the APUs are single-channel memory supported.

- Overclocking is modest with the AM1 APUs.

- RadeonSI Gallium3D vs. Catalyst is interesting between these open and closed drivers. If wanting to use the open-source driver, you really will want to be running the very latest code: Linux 3.14~3.15 and Mesa 10.2.

- The AM1 APUs can be used for very basic gaming, we also ran some Steam gaming benchmarks for the hardware.

- OpenCL is good for these Kabini APUs.

- 13 graphics cards have been compared to the Radeon R3 Graphics of the APUs. I've also done video memory testing to see what's the ideal amount.

- For kicks I compared these sub-$50 APUs to AMD's original Phenom hardware.

- The Clang compiler performance is good against GCC on this hardware.

- Most recently I ran some tests of the AM1 APUs against the NVIDIA Tegra K1.

- When it comes to motherboards, I have reviewed the ASUS AM1I-A mini-ITX board, Gigabyte AMIM-S2H micro-ATX motherboard, and the ASRock AMIH-ITX mini-ITX motherboard.