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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legoman666 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
are missing.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Power consumption was listed at the end of the first page. The systems used throughout the rest of the article were based on desktop hardware, so it didn't make sense to compare to those numbers (the Brazos numbers include the test platform's LCD display). We'll have to wait for final notebook hardware to do real comparisons to competing notebook platforms. But at 25 - 30W for the entire system (including display) under load, Brazos is definitely in the right league.Take care,
Anand
Sc4freak - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Still seems to be missing something from page 3:"When it comes to power consumption however, the E-350 can't be touched. I measured max system power consumption at "
And then it just cuts off.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
er, oops...fixed :)Take care,
Anand
jensend - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Hm. From the third page:"the rest of the desktop platforms here consume much more than that at idle (much less under load)."
Unless the desktop platforms really suck much more than 25W idling and much less than 25 under load, this isn't exactly fixed.
I find it odd that you're even troubling to compare this to systems which suck tons more juice and not even throwing up a power consumption chart. I mean, we could certainly find that Brazos performance is rather limited compared to a Gulftown with 3xSLI GF 580s, but that's not going to tell us a lot about what makes a better laptop. If you did a performance vs. power draw scatter chart or something that'd be a lot more interesting.
Sure, it's a little bit apples-to-oranges since you've chosen to compare it to desktop systems. But maybe that should make you reconsider what you're comparing it to (don't you have a good number of laptops around?) rather than leaving power consumption data out of the picture.
quiksilvr - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Soprano'dsinigami - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
uh, since there were so many missing parts to the article, maybe you are missing some charts on page 4 or something? because i only see three, and against the Clarkdale, the zacate wins only the first one, ties on the second one, and loses on the third. With only one win, that page's headline should NOT say it's faster than Clarkdale!you could say that the Clarkdale IGP wins or ties the zacate on two out of three gaming benchmarks, and declare it faster.
sheesh, is that some biasedness, or just wishful thinking?
wiak - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
is it even suposed to be competive with E4400 anyway?, isnt the whole point of it to be power efficient, faster, use less power and totally own atom in graphics/video department?Danube is amd's mainstream competition to E4400, Core 2, Core i3, i5 etc
Brazos is amd's low power competition to atom
wiak - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
correction: E2200 but E4400 aint that far away :PDark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
... Except it does not use less power than an Atom platform. It uses more power than an Atom platform. Also as the benchmarks show, performance-wise it's barely faster than an Atom D510 in some situations.