The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTDesktop IGP Comparison: Faster than Clarkdale
I split the graphics comparison into two sections: desktop and mobile. For the desktop section I compared the E-350 to the latest Clarkdale chips, AMD's own 890GX and a discrete Radeon HD 5450 graphics card. While the Radeon HD 5450 has the same number of shader processors as the E-350 (80), they run faster and it has a dedicated 1.6GHz memory bus to feed it. The E-350 has to share memory bandwidth between the two Bobcat cores and the 80 SPs, severely limiting its performance potential.
The E-350 does extremely well compared to its desktop brethren. In our Modern Warfare 2 and BioShock tests its easily faster than the Core i3/i5 and in the case of BioShock 2 it's even faster than AMD's 890GX. Dragon Age Origins is another story however as the benchmark is primarily CPU limited, giving the desktop parts a huge advantage. In GPU bound scenarios, it's clear that our initial Zacate benchmarking was accurate: the E-350's Radeon HD 6310 is quicker than Intel's HD Graphics.
Compared to the Radeon HD 5450 the 6310 offers between 66 - 69% of its performance in our GPU bound tests. The performance reduction is entirely due to the 6310's limited memory bandwidth being shared with the dual Bobcat cores on-die.
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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.