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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djfourmoney - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
You can build a sub-$350 HTPC with this! If you can recycle some parts from any of your other builds you might be able to get it under $300. I built a ASRock based HTPC based on the price expected for that board ($110) and it comes in at $319 before taxes and shipping. Careful shopping might avoid that.Run Mediabrowser with TV and GameTime! Plug-ins.
You can now throw away your Cable Box SD or HD. If you have standard cable, turning in your box and building a HTPC around one of these boards will pay for itself in about a year.
If you get HD and Premium Channels, hopefully SiliconDust's 3 Tuner CableCard adapter will be out before NFL Training Camp.
For Direct TV/Dish Network/AT&T U-verse, you'll be able to use Hauppauge Colossus with Component Input, eliminate issues with the HD-DVR USB version. As long as they don't cripple the component output, there's no PQ difference.
Khato - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I've been somewhat disappointed with the lack of actual investigation into how changes in memory bandwidth affect this new generation of integrated GPUs - both on Brazos here as well as Sandybridge earlier. The direct comparison to a 5450 here is interesting, but since it wasn't stated I'm guessing those were stock 5450 numbers, not a 5450 underclocked to be the same frequency core/memory?The primary reason for it being a point of interest is that the current rumor has Llano at anywhere from 4x to 6x the shader resources, but only 2.4x the potential memory bandwidth. More likely 2x in any actual systems though given that anything above DDR3 1333 carries a decent premium. So if Brazos is already seeing hints of memory bandwidth limitations...
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Those were stock 5450 numbers, and you are correct - memory bandwidth is an issue (one of Sandy Bridge's "tricks" is the shared L3 cache, it helps mask memory bandwidth limitations quite well as it is currently used for Z operations among other things). I expect that Llano will be much quicker than the E-350, remember that in many cases we're not necessarily GPU bound but rather CPU bound in these game tests.I will continue to play with performance on Brazos but I expect that once I've got Llano in house I'll be able to get a better idea of how bad the memory bandwidth limitations actually are.
Take care,
Anand
Khato - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Thanks for the reply. The CPU vs GPU bound comment actually sparked another point of curiosity - how does the performance picture change as resolution increases?There are quite a few games where the performance increase going from integrated to either the 5450 or 5570 is basically the same, implying that it's CPU limited and something about the integrated graphics decreases the performance. The unknown being whether that something is a constant, a slight latency hit due to whatever arbitration scheme is used between CPU and graphics for example, or if it will scale with the load placed upon the GPU, as would be the case for memory bandwidth.
This certainly has me looking forward to at last getting to see how Llano graphics performance is in a few months. I'd find it all too amusing if the better integration in Sandybridge resulted in graphics performance on par with a memory constrained Llano.
bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I was thoroughly surprised the e350 coped as well as the dedicated cards using shared RAM.Was not expecting that.
Speed3mon - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
this comment... kinda gay.. sry but trueAloonatic - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I don't think that even the staunchest homophobe would even go as far as to associate being gay with the nonsense that the OP wrote.It'[ a shame that there isn't a store that fanboys have to shop in, where their beloved companies can rip them off royally, as that seems to be their want.
His comment wasn't gay, it was just sad, and ill-conceived, which might be how their parents probably view them too, in hindsight :o)
etudiant - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
The Zacate die size is comparatively minute at 75mm2, about a quarter the size of the Thuban.That translates to perhaps one twentieth of the manufacturing cost, given yields are much better for smaller die. Should be very helpful for AMD if they can deliver in quantity.
GeorgeH - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I'm very impressed. Does anyone have an idea when Intel and VIA might respond with updated products?Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Intel's 32nm Atom refresh will appear in Q4 2011.Take care,
Anand