The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTMobile IGP Comparison
I narrowed down the platforms for our mobile IGP comparison. I simulated a Core i3 350M by taking an i3-530, underclocking it (I couldn't do anything about the 4MB vs. 3MB L3 cache) and capping its GPU frequency at 667MHz. This is the best case scenario for the i3-350M, and as you'll see below, it doesn't really matter. I also paired a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual-Core with a G45 motherboard, agian simulating the cheaper mobile Pentium platform. Finally I installed Windows 7 on the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo based 11-inch MacBook Air with its GeForce 320M to give you an idea of the upper bound for mobile performance with what might as well be a low end discrete GPU.
Updated: I've added performance results from a simulated Core i3-330UM, the E-350's competition in ultra portables.
We'll start with Modern Warfare 2:
The E-350 puts the i3-350M, i3-330UM and Pentium DC to shame, delivering 67% better performance. The frame rate is just shy of being totally smooth however. I found that in most modern games 1024 x 768 would result in frame rates just under 30 fps.
BioShock 2 showed a similar performance advantage. Again we're not able to break 30 fps but the performance advantage is huge compared to the Intel platforms with integrated graphics.
Dragon Age: Origins is mostly CPU bound at low quality settings and thus there's no real advantage to the E-350's Radeon HD 6310 GPU. It's faster than the Pentium/G45 platform, but significantly slower than the i3-350M. I expect most games however to be GPU bound at these settings across the board.
World of Warcraft continued the trend. The E-350 ended up 57% faster than the i3-350M, although still fell short of a discrete GPU.
Of course I wondered how well Brazos would play Starcraft 2:
The GPU handles SC2 just fine, however the game is very CPU dependent and thus you see a pretty big advantage from the mainstream i3 system. The comparison is a lot closer when we look at the i3-330UM. The E-350 won't be able to play SC2 as well as a $500 mainstream notebook, but it'll be comparable to an ultraportable running ULV Arrandale.
We don't have numbers for the G45 platform here because the system wouldn't run our benchmark (our tests use an older version of SC2 which apparently had issues with the G45 drivers).
Our SC2 CPU test gives you an idea of the lower end of performance in large multiplayer battles:
The E-350 offers only 58% of the performance of the i3-350M system. The Bobcat cores do hold the platform back from time to time. Again, compared to the i3-330UM there's no performance difference at all.
Just for kicks I also ran the Civilization V benchmark, which gave us two datapoints: GPU performance and no-render/CPU performance.
The benchmark doesn't score well on either platform, although AMD does hold a 72% performance advantage over the i3 and G45 platforms. The CPU test puts the E-350 at about 55% of the speed of the Pentium dual core platform.
Civ V is one area where the Arrandale CPU advantage wins out over GPU performance.
Overall, the E-350 has no problems outperforming any of the current Intel integrated graphics offerings in 3D games. In CPU bound titles the E-350 loses out to the mainstream i3, but is competitive with ultra low voltage i3s. Just as with Atom, you'll have to sacrifice performance vs. a mainstream notebook, but compared to low voltage Arrandale the E-350 can hold its own.
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mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Why else would anyone spend 90% of the space boasting about multithreaded benchmarks that are COMPLETELY meaningless for the target markets?Anand, it is a sad fact that you are not humble enough to do a proper review of the low end stuff anymore.
Leave the space to people who are not so pampered by having the top-end stuff to play with for over a decade.
Stick to the luxury stuff where your mind is. Your time as a "mortal" reviewer is over.
You are far too out-of-touch to not get manipulated by PR lads without realizing it. As far as low-end and mainstream parts go, that is.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
These days it's actually very difficult to find workloads that don't at least stress 2 cores, even installing Modern Warfare 2 on the Brazos system ate up 61% of the 2 cores. That's why the Cinebench test is so handy because it does give us an idea of single threaded performance as well.Single threaded performance does matter quite a bit to how fast the system feels. Application launch time and how quickly windows pop up is greatly based on this, which is why I pointed it out in our single threaded performance results.
I tried to show single threaded performance, multithreaded performance in both high and low IPC workloads as well as a lot of gaming performance data to present as complete of a picture of Brazos' performance as possible.
If I've failed in doing so by your standards I do apologize. I wanted to run a lot more but with time constraints on how long I had access to the platform I had to limit what I could run.
Take care,
Anand
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I am pretty sure you have a very good understanding of Zacate's performance.Where I see the problem that your articles have, over the years, come to be written from an upper class POW.
As if subconsciously disregarding the pricing part.
Then when a part comes out that is _designed_ to be cheap first and anything else second you make an article sound as the part was a piece of crap by definition.
While i certainly hope it was not the idea, it is how it came out ...
People are subjective by definition and our lives DO affect our expressions however much we would like it to stay otherwise.
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
One just needs to contrast the tone of this article with the Atom one. While Atom was being heavily praised for delivering acceptable performance for a low price an power.link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2537
Nevermind that Silverthorne, while itself good, represented very much a crappy and imbalanced platform. (Outside the non-existent MID market.)
Compared to that Brazos, while almost shouting out "Atom done right" gets a stamp of "undewhelming" ...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I appreciate the feedback. It's not my intention to discredit value as a piece of the equation, in fact pricing is always a major component of anything we discuss here.I believe we need to look at Atom in context. Two years ago Atom's level of performance might've been a decent balance of perf/power, especially given the price of good systems at the time. Today that is no longer true. Outside of smartphones, the overwhelming response tends to be that Atom based netbooks running Windows 7 aren't exactly fast enough.
The E-350 is clearly faster than Atom. My worry is that the E-350 won't be the chip aimed at Atom. In a $299 netbook the E-350 would easily trump anything else out there. But if we're talking about $500, then you start getting into Pentium DC and Core i3 territory.
While video encoding, 3D rendering and file compression/archive recovery aren't the only things you'd do with such a system, these are good tests of CPU performance which is the unknown we were looking to answer in this article. The tests told us three things:
1) The E-350 is faster than a dual-core Atom by varying amounts depending on the type of workload (the tests also highlighted the limits of Bobcat's front end in high IPC workloads).
2) The E-350 does achieve AMD's design target of 90% of the performance of a K8, and
3) The E-350 does suffer the same fate as Atom does when it comes to CPU performance. You can get a faster CPU in a similarly priced system, although you will likely give up form factor and/or battery life.
The E-350 is easily better than Atom, but when it comes to the Pentium/i3 comparison you have to make the tradeoff between CPU performance or GPU performance. I simply tried to present enough data to allow users to understand that tradeoff.
Take care,
Anand
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Just try more care when publicly judging stuff by your personal expectations.Very few people will get the subtle praise in the background which a mere recognition of Zacate competing with mainstream platforms represents.
Thanks for the reply and keep up the good work,
Cheers!
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
It now came to me that what was really called for is a three-progned look at Brazos:1) as a netbook/ultra-thin solution
2) as a HTPC solution
3) as an ultra cheap alternative to mainstream parts
IMO it shines in all those roles but for a VERY different reasons:
1) solves GPU bottleneck that plagues this market since inception
2) provides Atom-class power with CULV-class connectivity and performance
3) is the cheapest kid on the block while providing _acceptable_ performance across the board (outside workstation tasks)
Maybe a topic for a follow-up analytic article ? :)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I would LOVE to have a netbook/ultraportable laptop to test right now using Brazos, but that's not what AMD is ready to show just yet. They're showing early hardware that needs the big OEMs to put it all into a compelling package. Unfortunately, I think they're going to fall short as well. Do you want an alternative to ION netbooks? This will definitely work, and even come out ahead. But ION, frankly, isn't good. Yes, it can play multimedia content a lot better than just Atom (or Atom with CrystalHD), but then so can ULV stuff.And the big problem is that you can get ION netbooks for $500, and ULV starting at $600. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... So if AMD were to say that Brazos is going to target the $300 to $350 netbook world, I'd be ecstatic. When they say it's going after the $500 laptop world, I'm a lot less impressed. Intel already has CULV laptops that cost under $500; add in a G 310M (which is still too slow for most recent games) and you'd have something faster than Brazos in pretty much every way. It's just nothing special.
Is it a bad design? No. Is it an awesome design? Equally, no. It's an okay design that will fill a niche--a niche that already has plenty of options, unfortunately.
mino - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
Well, Jared, I was hoping there is a chance for AT to recover.After this reply of yours, I am pretty sure you have lost the ability to see the forest behind the trees.
I will still not call you paid, but you are REALLY pushing for that.
Never mind, just no more hope left.
silverblue - Thursday, November 18, 2010 - link
Jarred didn't write the preview. He's entitled to his own opinion.