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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Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
All of us know some Anandtech posters are AMD PR people, so no surprise here.silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
Yep, and I, for example, wouldn't be running a low-end Phenom II X3 setup if I was getting fees from AMD for hyping their products (which I clearly am not, anyway).Do yourself a favour and stop spouting rubbish about conspiracies where none exist.
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
OK, so Anand said that no worries about CULV Sandy Bridge series because they are more expensive, power-hungrier and bigger chips which is not a good deal for OEM manufacturers. What about the new Atom CPUs then? Intel is going to upgrade them to 32nm, which is twice as faster as today's 45nm Atoms, or half the power consumption at the same performance. Though bobcat has more efficient OoO architecture, Intel can easily improve the performance of Atom by adding more cores or tune up the frequency given the superiority of 32nm.AMD will definitely win this wave of competition, but its successor won't come until 2012. How will Fusion APUs compete with the future Atoms which will be defnitely faster then current models?
silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Yes but isn't Brazos 32nm at the very least? There's really no sense in throwing out a 3GHz dual core APU of this class because it would simply use too much power. Also, there's not much justification for any sort of Turbo clocking.What MIGHT significantly improve performance would be a dual channel memory controller (especially in the case of the GPU) but I don't know what that would mean for the die size nor the power consumption.
Let's remind ourselves of a couple of things - AMD's two thread out-of-order architecture is still beating Intel's four thread in-order architecture at the same clock speed. Brazos also has Atom completely beaten in lesser threaded workloads. Considering the primary target of these platforms isn't supposed to be massive workloads, the AMD solution will still be more capable than Intel's... for now.
silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Apparently Brazos is 40nm. When they put it onto 32nm, I imagine that anything Intel does with Atom in terms of a die shrink won't be enough to put it back in front of Brazos. We'll see.mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
No 32nm SOI Bobcat APU will see the light of the day.There will be a Zacate/Ontario successor in H1 2012 at 28nm bulk(GloFo).
2-4 Bobcat+ cores, ~120 SP's (mostly likely 2*64 SP's of a newer design)
silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
So that's where 28nm came in. You must forgive me, I lost track on that one.So yes, imagine the power drop from 40 to 28 even with a more powerful CPU. This one might even please Dark_Archonis. Might.
mino - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
More like making him furious :Dmino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
"Worried about whether it can survive the next wave of attack by Intel"The funny part is that AMD's 2011 product portfolio is as strong as it has not been for the past 15yrs.
It is AMD attacking this time around gals. Just think about it for a minute ... 1999 ... 2003 ... 2011 ...
Lolimaster - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Q4 2011/Q1 2012 TSMC will deliver the next low power Fusion at 28nm.Krishna & Wichita with 2 and 4 cores flavors (real ones).
Anandtech an Inteltech site? We all know that, just leave with it.