AMD A10-7870K Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 10 June 2015 at 10:30 AM EDT. Page 1 of 5. 30 Comments.

Two weeks ago AMD launched the A10-7870K "Godavari" APU. As there haven't been too many independent benchmarks of the A10-7870K yet, this week I picked up the new high-end APU and have been running a plethora of performance tests under Ubuntu Linux. Here's the first batch of the AMD A10-7870K Linux tests.

It doesn't look like AMD has been sampling the A10-7870K much for reviews given that the A10-7870K "Godavari" is just a minor refresh over Kaveri with the A10-7850K. However, I ended up purchasing an A10-7870K for adding to our LinuxBenchmarking.com test farm in delivering daily, upstream open-source benchmarks across 50+ systems. With continuing to add more systems, I decided to toss in an A10-7870K system to get more open-source Radeon graphics coverage. The A10-7870K just boosts the four CPU cores by 200MHz (3.9GHz total), 100MHz bump in the turbo frequency (4.1GHz tops), and the Radeon R7 GPU by 146MHz compared to the previous high-end Kaveri part, the A10-7850K. Everything else is basically the same between the A10-7870K and the older Kaveri parts. The A10-7870K retails for $140~150 USD while the A10-7850K is now going for around $130.

With the A10-7870K launch, AMD was promoting new features like asymmetric rendering with DirectX 12 and Mantle, Virtual Screen Resolution, and other advantages, but for Linux users, it's not too relevant on the open or closed-source Linux drivers. The A10-7870K just comes down to being a slightly faster version of the 7850K -- the 20% bump in frequency for the Radeon R7 should be most interesting, but the CPU speed bump should offer some advantages for those that otherwise wouldn't be overclocking their processor.

When buying this APU a few days back, I got the retail AD787KXDJCBOX for $149.99 USD. In the few days I've been testing it thus far under Ubuntu Linux, it's been running fine without any new issues. Kaveri has been running great on Linux for months so seeing the A10-7870K run fine on both the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver as well as Catalyst isn't any surprise. Likewise, with the A10-7870K not being based on Excavator or any other design changes, it will already run fine with the latest versions of GCC and LLVM/Clang, etc. There have also been no kernel panics or other issues as occasionally can happen when testing a brand new CPU series. With the A10-7870K using Socket FM2+ and no new chipsets being introduced, there's nothing to worry about with any new motherboard issues under Linux assuming you're on a modern distribution with a recent kernel release. So the compatibility is there, but let's check out the initial performance figures on the pages to follow.


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