The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTFinal Words
With the settlement done and no DMI license in place, it's clear that there won't be another ION from NVIDIA (at least not based on x86). What Brazos is however is the ION successor that NVIDIA never built. For just over $100 you'll be able to buy a mini-ITX board with an E-350 that's faster than Atom, faster than ION and more feature rich than both. While I don't believe Brazos has enough CPU power under the hood to be a truly high end HTPC, it's easily good enough for a low cost, value HTPC. Popular codecs are well accelerated and with full DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming support Brazos is solid. Flash acceleration is also present although it looks like there are still some kinks that need to be worked out there.
Overall performance is much better than Atom, particularly in single threaded applications. Brazos and the E-350 can make for a very affordable email/web browsing machine, and run those applications much faster than Atom could. As our more complex workloads showed however, the E-350 is limited to the same type of general usage models as Atom (with a bunch of new media and gaming options). You can run heavier apps on the E-350, you'll just be far better off with an Athlon II instead.
The Radeon HD 6310 proves to be a good match for the Bobcat cores in the E-350. There's not much value in adding a faster GPU via the on-board PCIe x4 slot as most games will be at least somewhat CPU bound. The resulting CPU/GPU combination is something that's typically as good as, if not better than Intel's Core i5 661 in games. In some cases the Radeon HD 6310/E-350 combination nips at the heels of Intel's Core i3 2100. Unfortunately in modern titles that's not always enough to have a playable experience, but with older games you should be able to do more with Brazos than you ever could with Atom or even ION for that matter. The CPU/GPU balance in the E-350 is good enough that I feel like Llano could make for a pretty decent value gaming machine.
Just as was the case with Atom, Brazos isn't going make for a very powerful primary PC. Load up the thread count or throw heavier workloads at it and the E-350 doesn't look all that much better than an Atom D510. What it will give you however is better single-threaded performance than Atom and a much better feature set. Brazos makes those secondary or tertiary computers you build much better than they would have been otherwise with Atom. I would like to see more CPU performance out of the platform and I'm not too keen on meeting the single core versions, but viewed through ION glasses Brazos looks good.
For AMD, Brazos has to be exciting. The company finally has a value offering that it doesn't have to discount heavily to sell. Brazos does very well against Atom on absolute performance, die size and price. The E-350 isn't the most powerful Fusion APU we'll meet, but it's a great way to introduce the family.
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Belard - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
It would fail at bluRay 3D.the 1080i is a bit unimportant since flatscreen TVs don't do interlace.
doctorpink - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
if i remember correctly, nano runs 1.8ghz and is much faster but more power hungry...are there netbooks with nano anyway?
grego3d - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
I'm sold on this Sandy Bridge / Atom killer. Well, maybe not Sandy Bridge killer yet, but i'm sure the second generation fusion processors will be. Now I need help finding a great little mini-itx case. I'd love to build a mini pc the size of my Wii. I have found a few small cases, but where on earth are the slot feed DVD/BD players. I always start my daily reading right here @ Anandtech.com so please save me some time and help us all out by rounding up a case review for this new Fusion platform. Go AMD Fusion - Boo Intel (and your 1$Billion oops!)Belard - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
Sure is such excitement over such a tiny chip.It also reminds me why one of the P4s Dells I use at work is sooooooooooo Slooooooooooooooow.
I'll admit I'm using my very old computer (AMD X2 3800) as an HTPC somewhat, since it wasn't worth selling when I upgraded. But its a 90watt CPU... so saving power is the big thing, eh?
lovansoft - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
I've got an Acer Aspire 5517 with an AMD Athlon tk-42 processor and integrated HD3200 video. It's also 1.6 Ghz so I wanted to showcase a relative clock for clock comparison. It is a 20W chip with 1meg cache built on a 65nm process and no VT. It's not an Athlon II, just an Athlon 64 x2, I believe.On Cinebench R10:
Single Thread: E-350=1174, TK-42=1340 :-: 1174/1340 = 87.6%
2 Threads: E-350=2251, TK-42=2373 :-: 2251/2373 = 94.4%
(1174+2251=3425)/(1340+2373=3713) = 92.2%
Scaling seems better on the new chips than on the older ones.
At idle with the screen off the laptop pulls about 18 watts. In Cinebench on a single thread it pulls about 30 watts, with 2 threads it pulls about 33 wats. Opening the screen to run the LCD at full brightness adds about 9 watts at any time.
I ran these tests with a Kill-A-Watt meter. It's not quite an exact comparison, but is pretty close. But to see that they kept performance close, added graphics, and still managed to shave 10% off TDP it's pretty dang impressive.
lovansoft - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
Actually, I just let my laptop sit idle for a while. Now, idle power usage dips down to 11 watts with the lid closed and generally stays switching between 11-13 watts. Hmmm, the power usage on these new chips aren't quite as I would expect unless it's a platform thing. This article shows that the new chips pull 9W at full load under Cinebench. My testing shows I ramp from about 12W up to 33W which is a 21W increase by taxing the TK-42, right inline with the 20W spec giving my rounding of numbers. All other parts being equal and I only ramp up 9W instead of 21W then my peak should be about 12W less, or about 21W total instead of 33W total. That would be a significant gain. Interesting that this article has the new platform at 32.2W with the same workload. That's about 50% higher than my rough estimations. Is it because it's a desktop board and not a laptop design?sebanab - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - link
Thanks for the performance comparison. I really helps putting the Zacate into perspective.On the power consumption comparison:
Ofcourse the desktop board system will consume more than a laptop with same specs.
Your laptop consumes less because of different PSU , less USBs , less components in general (PCIex) and so on.
So in order to make a correct comparison , wait for a HP DM1z review for example.
lovansoft - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - link
I figured as much, but 50% seems high. But then again, it really is only a few watts... Lower efficiency PSU, a couple more chips to provide some extra ports. A couple of watts here and there do add up I suppose. And to think it provides more than 90% of my current performance into only 2/3 the power. I'd think if they can up it to 2Ghz it'd be about the same as mine without tapping the power too much. From the speculation I've read, it makes it seem that the revision coming in a year should grow the performance by quite a bit without really increasing power, about what you'd expect from a die shrink.You know, with this architecture, it'd be nice if a board could be made that would have multiples of these chips for server use. From my experience in SMB, I rarely find servers being CPU bound. Usually if they are, then there is some runaway process that needs to be tamed. Maybe this current generation isn't quite fast enough, but with a process shrink and some speed adjustments, getting a few of these on a board would make a very low energy server. But it'd only be feasible if there were something they could use that built in graphics portion for. Otherwise it'd be a waste.
Oh, and Cinnebench R10 on an AthlonXP 3000+ (2Ghz) = 1438.
Single Thread: E-350=1174, XP3000=1438 :-: 1174/1438 = 81.6%
1.6/2=80% Seems to be about the same IPC as the AthlonXP line.
I don't have power numbers for it, though.
torkemada - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - link
Is E350IA-E45 board HDMI 1.4? Info on the net is confusing.Hrel - Thursday, February 3, 2011 - link
that VIA chip is pretty impressive.