APU was simply AMD's terminology for the now standard practice of placing the GPU on the CPU die, rather than having separate integrated motherboard graphics. AMD were the first company to make this normal behaviour, and the A6, A8 & A10 were all of this same design.
I've never yet met an AMD CPU that wouldn't "play nice" with Linux. AMD have had a lot of bad press over the years; the A-series APUs come from the 'wilderness years', between the high-riding success of the first commercially successful 64-bit consumer CPU, the K8 (the Athlon/Opteron64s) of the early to mid-2000s, and the current success story of their Ryzen chips, which really began around 5 years ago. During the lengthy in-between period, they made some questionable design decisions, and struggled along barely breaking even a lot of the time.
This was the period when Intel basically had the market to themselves, and design innovation stagnated......because they had no real competition much of that time, and competition is what
drives innovation.
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I always found the biggest lie was the claim that AMD chips ran "hot". What a load of cobblers; both the AMDs I've had over the years ran considerably cooler than their Intel counterparts, and chugged along virtually forever without any issues at all. My last one, an Athlon64 X2 3800+ dual-core, would start up below 20C, and even after prolonged use woud rarely, if ever, break the 50C barrier.....
It lasted me nearly 7 years, having bought it off eBay in 2015 for all of £8 GBP. When the Compaq desktop rig died, it was the caps that eventually dried-out.....nowt to do wi' the CPU. I didn't bother trying to resurrect it, because Socket 949 mobos haven't been available for years.....and pretty powerful, and highly-capable entire rigs can be had for half of what the X2s alone cost at launch in 2004 (4-figures plus..!) In addition to which, technology has moved on a LONG way in the intervening years; the Compaq limited me to 4 GB DDR1, with the current HP Pavilion I have 32 GB DDR4 (and even that's considered just 'average' nowadays). SSDs have been born and developed through many generations.....and my Pentium G5400 'Gold' - dual-core with HT, so effectively a quad-core - sips a fraction of the X2's power, cost something like 5% of what the X2 did at launch, and with its modern instruction sets will run rings around the X2 and show it up for the dinosaur that it truly was. Yet in its hey-day, that Athlon64 was the "bee's knees".
Everybody wanted one.
So; to answer your query, yes.......that AMD will run Linux happily. Shouldn't give you ANY problems.
Mike.
