The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTSetting Performance Expectations
AMD provided this slide of PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage performance of Brazos compared to its existing mobile platforms (Danube and Nile):
If you look at the PCMark Vantage numbers you'll see that AMD's E-350 provides roughly the same performance as an Athlon V120. That's a single core, 45nm chip running at 2.2GHz with a 512KB L2 cache. Or compared to a dual core processor, it's within striking distance of the Athlon Neo K325 which features two cores running at 1.3GHz and 1MB L2 per core. The GPU performance however tells a very important story. While AMD's previous platforms offered a great deal of CPU performance and an arguably imbalanced amount of GPU performance, Brazos almost does the opposite. You get a slower CPU than most existing mainstream platforms, but a much better GPU.
In the sub-$500 market, you're not going to get much in the way of a discrete GPU. What AMD is hoping for is that you'll be happy enough with Brazos' CPU performance and be sold on its GPU performance and total power consumption. From AMD's standpoint, there's not much expense involved in producing a Zacate/Ontario APU, making Brazos a nice way of capitalizing on mainstream platforms. The 75mm2 die itself is smaller than most discrete GPUs as well as anything Intel is selling into these market segments.
AMD's Zacate APU, 19mm x 19mm package, 413 balls, 75mm^2 die
The Comparison
Brazos, like Atom, will fight a two front war. On the one hand you have the price comparison. The E-350 will be found in notebooks in the $400 - $500 range according to AMD. That puts it up against mainstream notebooks with 2.2GHz Intel Pentium DC and 2.26GHz Core i3-350M processors. Against these platforms, Brazos won't stand a chance as far as CPU performance goes but it should do very well in GPU bound games. I've included results from a 2.2GHz Pentium dual-core part (1MB L2 cache) as well as a simulated Core i3-350M in the mobile IGP comparison.
The other front is, of course, the ultraportable space. Here you'll see the E-350 go head to head with dual-core Atom, Core 2 ULV and Arrandale ULV parts. AMD's CPU performance should be much more competitive here. From this camp we've got the Atom D510 (close enough to the N550) and a simulated Core i3-330UM. The expectations here are better CPU performance than Atom, but lower than Arrandale ULV. GPU performance should easily trump both.
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krumme - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
For the first time in history we have a dirt cheap product to produce, that manages to just handle all the basic task and gaming on the modern windows platform. Its an entry to windows and multimedia for 3B on this earth that can not afford an i3.And then this idiotic review giving all the wrong impressions to the casual reader. How sad.
Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
An entry for the billions that don't have a computer? Give me a break.Most people in the world that currently don't have a computer due to financial reasons wouldn't be able to afford a $300-500 netbook/notebook anyways!
Even a $100 computer would be difficult for a lot of these people to afford.
Kim Leo - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
This comes as a very very small chip, have you ever seen the Ion GPU? It's not exactly small. This will finally make it possible to build better netbooks at either a cheaper price, or the same price. Or just a long lasting work notebook, which is what I'm hoping for.People who says this is not impressive live in a dream world, where every netbook has a high clocked Atom with Ion, which somehow magically consumes less power than this 18W beauty.
This is probably the first product that has gotten me interested in what Apple has planned with it's OS where it uses the GPU for certain tasks, AMD demonstrated that this APU can do a lot more than just being a good netbook CPU, I hope we this getting used to it's full potential.
redisnidma - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Zacate is smaller than Atom, it's out-of-order architecture makes it a better overall performer than Atom and in some cases AMD's own nile platform, it has better GPU that rivals current offerings from both AMD's IGP and intel's and it has a lower TDP. I really don't see any reason not to like this little chip. Better performance than Atom, acceptable performance vs Intel's ULV offerings and superb GPU vs everything else.AMDJunkie - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Bobcat is officially a disappointment. $500 machines that can't run Crysis? AMD is dead. :*(SandmanWN - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
As any enthusiast knows, there isn't any $500 notebook that can run Crysis, so there cannot be disappointment in something that doesn't exist.Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Didn't AMD hype claim that Bobcat would be "good enough" for gaming? Clearly, it isn't.silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Define "gaming". AMD clearly have an idea of what they want these products to run - who says it has to include the latest cutting-edge titles?Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Who says? AMD themselves. Their hype for Bobcat implies you can run modern games on it with ease.silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
Throw me a link. I doubt it says anything about running Crysis in Enthusiast settings, for a start.