The Desktop Kabini Review Part 1: AMD Athlon 5350 (AM1) Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 9, 2014 8:00 AM ESTThe Competition
It is no secret that AMD is attempting to fire a shot across Intel’s Bay Trail. The low power x86 desktop space is almost all AMD vs. Intel (VIA still produces x86 parts), and the socketed direction for AMD’s Kabini is a new approach in this area. The claim of low power, quad core and low cost is something that entry-level desktop integrators might find hard to ignore – in fact AMD have stated that the feedback from their Latin America integrators for an upgradeable Kabini solution is very good.
While we have not necessarily looked at Bay Trail from a desktop perspective, there are products on the market today. In the UK for example, it is easy enough to purchase an Intel Celeron J1800-based motherboard and have it shipped next-day delivery.
AMD considers the Athlon 5350/5150 parts (quad core, 2.05 GHz and 1.6 GHz) in line with Intel's Pentium J2850/J2900, and the Sempron 3850 with the J1850/J1900 - all Silvermont based SoCs. In fact, I think the 5350 vs the J1900 is a better fit:
| AMD Athlon 5350 vs. Intel Celeron J1900 | ||||
| Athlon 5350 | Celeron J1900 | |||
| CPU Architecture | Jaguar | Silvermont | ||
| CPU Cores | 4 | 4 | ||
| CPU Frequency | 2.05 GHz |
2.0 GHz 2.4 GHz Turbo |
||
| GPU Cores | 128 SPs | 4 EUs | ||
| GPU Frequency | 600 MHz | 688 MHz | ||
| Memory Interface | 1 x 64-bit | 2 x 64-bit | ||
| Memory Frequency | 1600 MHz | 1333 MHz | ||
| L2 Cache | 2 MB | 2 MB | ||
| TDP | 25 W | 10 W | ||
| Price | $55 | $82 | ||
The big issue that AMD will point out is the price of the J1900. One of AMD’s big selling points will be the price of an APU and a motherboard, which as we discussed earlier should stretch from $56 to $90 depending on the APU/motherboard. On ark.intel.com, Intel does list the tray price of the J1900 as $82, however you can find a motherboard with integrated J1900 at Newegg for $92. Now either the motherboard manufacturer is getting a good deal on the CPU below tray price (most likely), or Intel is subsiding the cost, or the tray price is incorrect. We can only speculate, but it does mean that the Athlon 5350 and J1900 square off in terms of cost.
For CPU core counts and frequency, the 5350 and J1900 are closely matched with both being quad core parts at ~2.0 GHz, although the J1900 can boost up to 2.4GHz. AMD likely holds the GPU advantage with its R3 graphics/Radeon HD 8400 compared to Intel's 4 EU HD Graphics. With the Athlon there is a higher supported memory frequency, but only a 64-bit wide memory interface. That might hamper the IGP in our testing, and provide memory limited benchmarks an easy ride on the J1900. There's a pretty substantial TDP difference between the two as well, with Intel holding the theoretical power advantage. Intel does make a 20W Silvermont based SKU, the Atom C2750, although that is an 8 core module aimed at servers and costs $171.
The Test
Our AM1 Kabini coverage will be in two parts due to time constraints. This first part of the review is to explain the ecosystem with some Athlon 5350 numbers to compare against other platforms including a couple of Bay Trail and older Intel parts. We aim to publish a second review next week with more numbers, specifically a wider range of Kabini APUs and the key battle of the 5350 against the J1900. We were unfortunate to not be able to source a J1900 in time for this launch.
Our main Kabini Test Setup is as follows:
| Test Setup | |
| CPU |
AMD Athlon 5350 Quad Core, 2.05 GHz |
| Motherboard | GIGABYTE AM1M-S2H |
| Memory | 2x4GB DDR3-1600 9-10-10 |
| SSD | SF-2281 |
| Power Supply | Antec High Current Pro 1200 |
| Graphics | Integrated |
| Graphics Drivers | 14.3 Beta |
For other platforms:
| Test Setup | |||||
| CPU | Motherboard | Platform |
Cores / Threads |
Frequency | IGP |
|
AMD A6-5200 |
ASRock IMB-A180-H |
Kabini | 4 | 2.0 GHz | HD 8400 |
|
Intel Celeron J1800 |
GIGABYTE J1800N-D2H |
Bay Trail | 2 | 2.4 GHz | HD (Ivy) |
|
Intel Atom C2750 |
ASRock C2750D4I |
Avoton | 8 | 2.4 GHz | None |
|
Intel Celeron G1101 |
MSI Big Bang Fuzion |
Nehalem | 2 | 2.3 GHz |
Not Tested no IGP outputs |
|
Intel Celeron G465 |
ASUS Maximus V Gene |
Sandy Bridge | 1 / 2 | 1.9 GHz | HD (Sandy) |
|
Intel Celeron G2030 |
ASUS Maximus V Gene |
Ivy Bridge | 2 | 3.0 GHz | HD (Ivy) |
Other results in this review were taken from our AMD Kaveri launch review.
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azazel1024 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Dear gods yes. Taking DC-DC from a laptop power brick would be awesome. Heck, especially the Intel systems are probably looking at 40-50w absolute max, even with a drive or two in there.Considering there are many 90w power bricks...seems like it could take 12v in no problems.
For the commenter who posted the Tom's review on power numbers who seems to be indicating little difference in power consumption...that 3.5w figure, looking at TOTAL PACKAGE power consumption, is greater than a 10% difference at idle and the figures under load are more like a 30-40% difference in power consumption.
Since I assume the board and other bits add a fair amount here, the CPU difference is looking like probably double the CPU idle power consumption and triple the CPU load power consumption for the Kabini versus Bay Trail.
Also, the power consumption figures on both systems are crap. My full up mATX G1610 uses less power at idle and under load than the Kabini system uses and mine even uses less power than the Bay Trail based one at idle. So either the boards and devices attached are total crap, or else they are using one huge and power inefficient PSU to test with. Heck, mine isn't even all that great, a 380w Antec Earth watts bronze rated. Something like a 360w Seasonic gold would probably drop my idle power under 20w from the 21w it is now and load to under 45w.
So my guess is a big, power inefficient PSU, at the least and maybe just crappy component selection too.
No matter what though, Kabini doesn't look good there, in comparison to Bay Trail or in comparison to an Intel "55w TDP" processor either...which has oodles more CPU performance.
mikato - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
I agree, the PSU is really important here. A big PSU will be inefficient for a low power system even if it's a 80 PLUS Gold or something.ruthan - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Simply slug, this HW is already dead.25W is too much for netbook or tablet, and for NAS or HTPC are Corei3 much better choice. GPU performance is also worse that IntelHD4000.
azazel1024 - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
I am tossing around the idea of a core i3 for my next server depending on exactly what Cherry/Willow Trail and Broadwell/Skylake might hold.The extra cost might be worth it for, what might be, significantly better performance at not significantly higher power consumption during "normal work" which is idle or streaming.
Otherwise, back to a Broadwell/Skylake based entry level celeron probably. The price and performance are hard to beat for the kind of basic server that I need.
Samus - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Wow that's actually really fast for a 25w CPU. I mean A6-5200 isn't no slouch and its right on par with it.beesbees - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
My good ole AMD Athlon dual core at 3GHZ and 7790 oc 2GB with 4GB DDR2 plays all games maxed. I spent like $60 on that CPU on Newegg back in 2009! Who needs 4 cores? lolHangFire - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Moshi Monsters is great stuff, isn't it?abufrejoval - Thursday, April 10, 2014 - link
Here in Germany the J1900 became available before the J1800 at my favorite retailer: I got aGIGABYTE GA-J1900N-D3V (quad core) some weeks ago, put it into a mini-ITX case with a 90Watt PicoPSU (needed the 12V 4pin connector) and a 60Watt 12V notebook power supply.
Added a Crucial C300 for storage and went ahead testing with Window 8.1 (the only thing that worked with the initial BIOS) and then with Win7, CentOS 6.5, Fedora 20, Android x86 after the new BIOS made that possible.
Did the same with a GIGABYTE GA-J1800N-D2H (dual core) two weeks later and benched them side by side.
Main attraction was of course the fully passive cooling design and the main question was whether they would qualify as a credible desktop for office work or low power server.
First off, both CPUs *always* work at their top speeds unless idle. So that's 2.41GHz for the J1900 and 2.58GHz for the J1800. The nominal speeds aren't ever used, and I guess their main reason for existance is because it make them look nicer in the Intel charts. And perhaps their predecessors were actually fixed clocked at that value and I guess you'd still get those if you disable turbo in the BIOS.
Again, even running a Prime95/Furmark combo for hours, won't get any of these CPUs to drop their speeds to nominal: Turbo speeds aren't just for single threaded loads.
That mainly means that the normal clock difference between the J1900 and the J1800 isn't all that big, just 170MHz on the CPU, while the GPU on the J1900 is a notch above the J1800.
That again means, that the main difference between the two is the number of cores (2 vs. 4) and the amount electricity they consume and turn into heat.
It doesn't matter in terms of normal office applications or browsing: The J1800 typically came 170MHz out ahead on things like Kraken or Octane and both are fast enough at 1080p for most users. Yes, side by side with a top-notch 100Watt desktop CPU they are a tad slower, but nothing to loose hair about: Again not-an-Atom any more!
I managed to get the J1800 to 6.3Watts at the power outlet (behind the 60Watt AC/DC and the 12V PicoPSU) with 8GB of LV DRAM, the Crucial SSD, video off on a 64-Bit Windows 8.1 idle desktop. The J1900 will take 3 Watts more (9.3) for the same setup, which seems to indicate that one half of the J1900 can't go to C7 if the other one is still more or less awake.
There is of course also another Ethernet port, more USB 3.0 but none of them were used during the low-power tests.
On the other end, a combined Prime95 and FurMark will result in 28Watts on the J1900 and in 22Watts on the J1800. Core power consumption measured via CPUIDs HWMonitor showed 2.29Watts for the J1900 cores and 2.4Watts for the J1800 cores, while the package consumption was put at 6.85Watts for the J1900 vs. 6.54Watts for the J1900.
This oddity was consistent and I can only explain it by HWMonitor only measuring one of the two CPU blocks on the J1900, but the full GPU block (and remainder of the SoC), which is clocked a little higher on the J1900 under load.
The passive cooling solution on the Gigabyte J1900 board was not capable to dissipate all the generated heat on the Prime95/Furmark combination which generated 28Watts at the socket. About 30 minutes into the test at the threshold temp set in the BIOS (I used 90°C) the CPU started to throttle to 1.3GHz and went back to 2.41GHz once the temperature sank sufficiently.
The J1800 never reached or exceeded 50°C under the same load.
That all points at the 10W TDP as bolloks or only valid for nominal CPU clocks, but I'm not going to complain, because under any normal or reasonable load, even the J1900 never throttles.
I was most interested to compare the relative performance of Silverton against the normal Intel architectures and used a QX9100, a Core2 mobile quad core at 2.26GHz, which the J1900 is basically replacing.
For all ordinary CPU loads the Silverton quad core reached around 80% of the performance of the 45nm QX9100 after adjusting for the clock speed difference (2.41 vs. 2.26 GHz).
That isn't too bad at all for an "Atom" and clearly shows that the Silverton architecture isn't that bad at all and an incredible value jump if you consider that the QX9100 alone was a 4 digit dollar CPU when it came out.
And it vastly exceed the GPU performance and functionality of the GM45 chipset, even if it still doesn't qualify for gaming, except under Android-x86, where it kick-ass pretty well, even compared to my Nexus 10 or Galaxy Note 3.
All-in-all an incredible value which puts a little dent into the A10 Kaveri I just built two weeks before that one.
My *biggest gripe* about the Silvertons so far is, that Intel hasn't enabled QuickSync yet: It's a documented feature in ARK and one of the reasons I bought the J1900: I am assuming the VPU on Silverton is just as capable as the one found on Haswells and you can't get that speed an functionality cheaper anywhere (which may precisely be why Intel isn't enabling it).
I could just stop myself from also ordering this Kabini, which has also become available over the last couple of days.
imeez - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Interesting. I wonder is there any change to create something similar to Raspberry Pi based on AM1 platform? AM1 is not really for desktop usage. Dont know why they started to name it as Athlon parts even. One biggest problem with whatever x86 "for the masses" is the BIOS. Although coreboot does have initial support for AMD F16 family the AMD guys are not yet ready to provide VGA bios for free. But there is a bigger chance that AMD is gonna open the flood gates rather than Intel. Last time I had a x86-like fully open platform was a ZX Spectrum clone :)Krautmaster - Friday, April 11, 2014 - link
Well, 120 Bucks for a Intel system for comparison?What abt:
biostar-nm70i-1037u
-> IB Celeron @ 2x1,8 Ghz and 17W TDP. Should be at least as fast as the 1,9 Ghz SB Celeron in the review, at a cheaper pricepoint.
or here
http://www.amazon.com/ECS-Elitegroup-NM70-I-Proces...
2x1,8 Ghz Celeron with Board and 3x sata for
$72.18 & FREE Shipping.