A popular question that has arisen from the release of the four new low cost Kabini processors has been their effectiveness in powering a Steam Machine. Phoronix have just finished testing the new Athlon and Sempron chips, paired with several laptop IGPs using Catalyst Linux driver fglrx 13.35.5/OpenGL 4.3.12798 on Ubuntu 14.04. They tested Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, and Portal at a variety of resolutions to see just how much performance these chips offer. None of the chips could offer acceptable performance at 1080p and only Portal was delivered at 60fps assuming you used 1024×768. They will be following this review with another that will pair discreet GPUs with Kabini which should increase gaming capabilities greatly.
"Earlier today the latest installment of our extensive Linux testing of AMD's new Athlon AM1 APUs were shared in the form of RadeonSI vs. Gallium3D benchmarks of the Radeon R3 Graphics found with these new entry-level APUs. Not included with that open-source vs. closed-source driver testing was any Source Engine / Steam Linux game testing due to an XCB DRI3 issue, but this article is devoted to looking at the Catalyst performance for the Sempron 2650, Sempron 3850, Athlon 5150, and Athlon 5350 to see whether any of these APUs can make the cut for a budget Steam Machine."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Lacie confesses to year-long data breach as hackers harvest customers' details @ The Inquirer
- Intel sees 'signs of improvement in the PC business' but earnings remain 'Meh…' @ The Register
- A scanner, darkly: Master data-miner Google tweaks terms of service @ The Register
- Nvidia's new CUDA 6 has the 'most significant new functionality in the history of CUDA' @ The Register
more sempron love
more sempron love
S/A’s got some limited AM1
S/A’s got some limited AM1 benchies with a descrete GPU, for around a $200 price point! PcPer is going to do this also, hopefully ASAP. I would love to see an article on making a cluster computing/gaming system built around 4 or 5 AM1 based quadcore systems, all LANed up nicely and running Linux(Steam OS). I know that the colleges have a HPC computing cluster competition, but I wish they would get a college gaming computing cluster competition going!
these articles need also to
these articles need also to compare Kabini to Intel’s sub $50 Haswell, the Celeron G1820, which is almost as fast as the G3220 PCPer bought and is way faster than kabini for gaming (check the PClab review), a little faster with IGP, way faster with discrete graphics.
Unimpressed by the Haswell
Unimpressed by the Haswell moniker in this case, as the Intel processor is not as HSA aware(and I do not mean just AMD’s version of HSA). The potential Of HSA, including Samsung’s, Arm Holdings’, and Qualcomm’s versions of HSA, and others, is what intrests me more, AMD’s unified memory between the CPU and GPU, and other HSA aware hardware, has not been fully tapped yet, so as the software ecosystem begins to catch up to the hardware, expect any companies HSA aware SOC products to show more improvment. These companies, Intel excluded, are all members of the HSA foundation, and in spite of AMDs marketing monkeys trying to hijack the HSA term for marketing, the principles behind HSA are valid across the entire computing field and industry. The Ability to seamlessly utilize the CPU and GPU for all computing tasks is going the give any HSA aware SOC a leg up on the competition, including the ability of having a unified memory address space between CPU and GPU, and not having to waste time and enegry moving vast amounts of data between non-unified memory! Expect the AMD SOCs to come down in price much quicker than Intel’s SKUs, and when AMD releases an inproved SKU, it will be just a matter of swapping the APU out for the newer part, get your desoldering kit out for the Intel SKUs.