AMD Athlon 2650e & X2 3250e - Better than Atom for SFF Desktops
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Memory Bandwidth & Latency - Much Improved
Intel’s latest Atom processor (codename: Pineview) finally integrated the memory controller. It just wasn’t that impressive.
Overall performance improved a bit, but memory latency was still unusually high for some reason. It’s either due to a horribly unoptimized IMC, or an unusually potent memory controller in the previous Atom platform.
Either way, the Athlon 2560e’s is better:
| Processor | Memory Latency | Memory Read Bandwidth |
| Intel Atom D510 (1.66GHz) | 95.3 ns | 2997 MB/s |
| AMD Athlon 2650e (1.6GHz) | 75.0 ns | 4768 MB/s |
You get lower memory latency and more memory bandwidth. Two ingredients for much better performance. Which brings us to the next section...
Performance: As Expected
Both the 2650e and the X2 3250e are in our Bench database, but I’ve pulled out a few relevant numbers to help characterize their performance here.
In single threaded applications, the 2650e is roughly twice as fast as Intel’s Atom D510. This is important because the majority of desktop applications are still bound by the performance of a single thread.
I ran a couple of lighter benchmarks to put it all in perspective. Futuremark’s Peacekeeper benchmark is a browser performance test. The scores vary depending on OS and browser version, but I kept both variables static for this comparison (Windows 7 x64 + Chrome):
Simply browsing the web should be roughly two times faster on the single core Athlon 2650e compared to even Intel’s latest Atom.
The situation gets complicated the moment you add a second CPU intensive thread. The Atom D510 and 330 are both dual-core processors with Hyper Threading. They can work on four threads of instructions at the same time. Look at any of the multithreaded workloads and the Athlon 2650e loses out:
Fortunately for AMD (and Dell), the majority of those workloads are things like video encoding or 3D rendering. Two tasks you simply shouldn’t be doing in any serious fashion on something this underpowered. The exception would be video encoding for publishing on the web (e.g. YouTube); a reasonable usage case for even the most entry level machine.
That’s where the Athlon X2 3250e comes into play. You get the single threaded performance of the 2650e, but better multithreaded performance than an Atom D510.
Mix single and multithreaded workloads and the Athlon 2650e is still a bit faster than the Atom D510.
There are some workloads where the Atom D510 is able to persevere, but they are limited.
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signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Sorry if I sounded impolite or nitpicking, it wasn't meant so. I just wanted to point out that it isn't a big deal that the Zino hasn't a mic jack on the front.But you actually can get an adapter for your analog headset for a few bucks.
bse8128 - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
When comparing power consumption, isn't really fair to compare with the old Atom boards with a i945GC chipset. I'd much prefer to see a comparison with for example the Intel D945GSEJT, using a i945GSE chipset like the EEE Box.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
I agree, but I needed something that allowed me to use a standard ATX power supply in order to do an apples-to-apples comparison. I included DC based platforms as a reference point though.Take care,
Anand
ganeshts - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Anand, I believe AMD has made it very clear in its driver release that support for Adobe Flash acceleration will be restricted to the HD4000 series and later. Users of the 3xxx series (and as a result the chipsets with Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics like the ZinoHD) will probably never be able to benefit from GPU Flash acceleration.Not wanting to sound like a Nvidia fanboy here (actually my HTPC uses a 3450 from ATI), but ATI really has a lot of catching up to do in terms of software support for its great hardware.
johnsonx - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
This AMD engineer here: http://blogs.amd.com/home/2009/11/30/it-came-it-sa...">http://blogs.amd.com/home/2009/11/30/it...n-update...claims he was able to get flash acceleration working on the ZinoHD.
AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
We'll just have to wait for Flash 10.xxx to get out of beta and actually work properly, before we draw any of these conclusions.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
AMD told us that the 3200/780G would be accelerated and that the release notes were just pointing out their focus for acceleration.Hmm..
Take care,
Anand
Wirmish - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
"Hmm, that's unexpected. ION + Atom is actually a bit faster than the 2650e and AMD's integrated Radeon HD 3200."Intel use is CPU to boost his GPU performance:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-028231...">http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-028231...
World of Warcraft is in the list.
shabby - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Its new years eve, take the rest of the day off :)Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
I'm going to go do just that :)Take care,
anand