Desktop 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.

Desktop IGP Comparison - Modern Warfare 2 - 1024 x 768 - Low Quality

Desktop IGP Comparison - BioShock 2 - 1024 x 768 - Low Quality

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.

Desktop IGP Comparison - Dragon Age: Origins - 1024 x 768 - Low Quality

CPU Performance: Better than Atom, 90% of K8 but Slower than Pentium DC Mobile IGP Comparison
Comments Locked

207 Comments

View All Comments

  • duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    When you mention this:

    In most of our benchmarks the performance advantage over Atom isn't huge, yet using Brazos is much better than using an Atom based machine. It all boils down to one thing: single threaded performance. Atom can make up for its deficiencies by executing a lot of threads in parallel, but when you're bound by the performance of a single thread the E-350 shines. The E-350 is 65% faster than the Atom D510 in the single threaded Cinebench R10 test. It's this performance advantage that makes the E-350 feel so much quicker than Atom.

    and you only post mainly multithreaded apps which are fooled by the HT people off course get a different idea about the final product..... Atom is slow for booting and loading apps, perhaps a real world timing once the final silicon is there and compare the actual timing will give the brazos credit what it needs, afterall its 40nm vs 32nm and first silicon vs 2e revision.

    so in the end not that bad, but AMd needs at least a 1.8-2.0GHZ brazos to compete in the 400-500$ range, that should be easy to get, they don't need more gpu power.

    btw where is the stated 25W brazos amd has up its sleeves for the ultra low end desktop platform. THey can easily use it for notebooks.
  • duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    sorry anandtech, really big fan of your site, always the first site i will read, but this round other sites have done a much better job then your review. Again even your conclusion is totally off then others who are comparing the right platforms against each other....

    pcperspective really shows platforms, power consumption and guess what the results are :)

    http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1039&type...
  • Khato - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Eh, I wouldn't say other sites have done a better job, rather they just present different information. Given the fact that I was primarily interested in GPU performance aspects, the Anandtech review is far more useful far as I'm concerned.

    That said, the direct comparison against a celeron SU2300 ION platform is indeed interesting. A core 2 duo based celeron at 1.2GHz bests the 1.6GHz 'brazos' in CPU performance on all but the MP3 encode benchmark, which could just as easily be due to differences in the SSD used as the CPU. Sure the power numbers are impressive, but that's quite to be expected on a demo system - it'll be interesting to see how much that goes up on actual retail systems. aka, how stripped down and tweaked was the demo system in order to get idle power that low. It's basically equal to the SU2300 + ION on dynamic power according to those numbers.
  • duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    they all had the same amount of ram and all had ssd in that review, so it is really comaprable, where this review showed lots of different setups.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    My goal was to compare to the type of CPUs you'd find in other $400 - $500 notebooks, mainly ~2.2GHz 1MB L2 Conroe/Merom based CPUs and 2.26GHz Arrandale based chips - both of which you'll see in the review.

    I agree we needed to include some ULV results, so this morning I added data from a simulated i3-330UM (1.2GHz) across the board :)

    Take care,
    Anand
  • khimera2000 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    intresting... I have to say that I got more out of this review then i did with anand since it uses the profile i would consider buying. I would not consider getting one of these chips for a notebook so the comparison against notebook chips are kinda lost to me.

    I was intrestead to see how much performance VS how much batterylife this new platform has since i already have a powerful desktop, a comprable notebook I dont need to know how fast a notebook is if its not hitting close to the 8 hour battary mark.

    If i where to get one of these it would be for long flights and train rides, it would be for the children in my family, and it would be for the older people who are not as tech enabled. as it stands the questoins i had in mind where not easily answerd by anantech's review.
  • piroroadkill - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    You've created Atom like performance with a slightly better GPU, way, way too late in the game.

    I thought the Dual core 1GHz and single core 1.2GHz would be more competitive with Atom 1.6, but looking at these results, those are in with no hope at all.

    This is poor.
  • flyck - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    read the reviews..... performance is better in multithreaded applications than Atom525 with HT and single threaded is 60% faster....

    gpu is better than ion which atom needs.

    powerdraw on idle is LOWER than single core Atom and equal for cpu intensive tasks but higher in games.
  • mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Games which Atom cannot play in the first place.
    Not without Ion which makes the battery life goes boom anyway ...

    Those GPU's are eating electrons like crazy when doing its job. Sneaky beasts, aren't they ? :D
  • Khato - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link

    Really? It's power draw on idle is under the 7 watts measured on Anandtech for the single-core atom N450 Asus 1005PE? Maybe it's power consumption under load is lower than the 9.5 watts for that system?

    Yeah, power consumption figures vary wildly from system to system, especially when comparing netbook/notebook type designs to nettop/desktop. It's rather clear that the brazos test platform is a netbook/notebook type design and hence has no business being compared to nettop/desktop designs on power consumption.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now