The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTSetting Performance Expectations
AMD provided this slide of PCMark Vantage and 3DMark Vantage performance of Brazos compared to its existing mobile platforms (Danube and Nile):
If you look at the PCMark Vantage numbers you'll see that AMD's E-350 provides roughly the same performance as an Athlon V120. That's a single core, 45nm chip running at 2.2GHz with a 512KB L2 cache. Or compared to a dual core processor, it's within striking distance of the Athlon Neo K325 which features two cores running at 1.3GHz and 1MB L2 per core. The GPU performance however tells a very important story. While AMD's previous platforms offered a great deal of CPU performance and an arguably imbalanced amount of GPU performance, Brazos almost does the opposite. You get a slower CPU than most existing mainstream platforms, but a much better GPU.
In the sub-$500 market, you're not going to get much in the way of a discrete GPU. What AMD is hoping for is that you'll be happy enough with Brazos' CPU performance and be sold on its GPU performance and total power consumption. From AMD's standpoint, there's not much expense involved in producing a Zacate/Ontario APU, making Brazos a nice way of capitalizing on mainstream platforms. The 75mm2 die itself is smaller than most discrete GPUs as well as anything Intel is selling into these market segments.
AMD's Zacate APU, 19mm x 19mm package, 413 balls, 75mm^2 die
The Comparison
Brazos, like Atom, will fight a two front war. On the one hand you have the price comparison. The E-350 will be found in notebooks in the $400 - $500 range according to AMD. That puts it up against mainstream notebooks with 2.2GHz Intel Pentium DC and 2.26GHz Core i3-350M processors. Against these platforms, Brazos won't stand a chance as far as CPU performance goes but it should do very well in GPU bound games. I've included results from a 2.2GHz Pentium dual-core part (1MB L2 cache) as well as a simulated Core i3-350M in the mobile IGP comparison.
The other front is, of course, the ultraportable space. Here you'll see the E-350 go head to head with dual-core Atom, Core 2 ULV and Arrandale ULV parts. AMD's CPU performance should be much more competitive here. From this camp we've got the Atom D510 (close enough to the N550) and a simulated Core i3-330UM. The expectations here are better CPU performance than Atom, but lower than Arrandale ULV. GPU performance should easily trump both.
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Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
All of us know some Anandtech posters are AMD PR people, so no surprise here.silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
Yep, and I, for example, wouldn't be running a low-end Phenom II X3 setup if I was getting fees from AMD for hyping their products (which I clearly am not, anyway).Do yourself a favour and stop spouting rubbish about conspiracies where none exist.
nitrousoxide - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
OK, so Anand said that no worries about CULV Sandy Bridge series because they are more expensive, power-hungrier and bigger chips which is not a good deal for OEM manufacturers. What about the new Atom CPUs then? Intel is going to upgrade them to 32nm, which is twice as faster as today's 45nm Atoms, or half the power consumption at the same performance. Though bobcat has more efficient OoO architecture, Intel can easily improve the performance of Atom by adding more cores or tune up the frequency given the superiority of 32nm.AMD will definitely win this wave of competition, but its successor won't come until 2012. How will Fusion APUs compete with the future Atoms which will be defnitely faster then current models?
silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Yes but isn't Brazos 32nm at the very least? There's really no sense in throwing out a 3GHz dual core APU of this class because it would simply use too much power. Also, there's not much justification for any sort of Turbo clocking.What MIGHT significantly improve performance would be a dual channel memory controller (especially in the case of the GPU) but I don't know what that would mean for the die size nor the power consumption.
Let's remind ourselves of a couple of things - AMD's two thread out-of-order architecture is still beating Intel's four thread in-order architecture at the same clock speed. Brazos also has Atom completely beaten in lesser threaded workloads. Considering the primary target of these platforms isn't supposed to be massive workloads, the AMD solution will still be more capable than Intel's... for now.
silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Apparently Brazos is 40nm. When they put it onto 32nm, I imagine that anything Intel does with Atom in terms of a die shrink won't be enough to put it back in front of Brazos. We'll see.mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
No 32nm SOI Bobcat APU will see the light of the day.There will be a Zacate/Ontario successor in H1 2012 at 28nm bulk(GloFo).
2-4 Bobcat+ cores, ~120 SP's (mostly likely 2*64 SP's of a newer design)
silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
So that's where 28nm came in. You must forgive me, I lost track on that one.So yes, imagine the power drop from 40 to 28 even with a more powerful CPU. This one might even please Dark_Archonis. Might.
mino - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
More like making him furious :Dmino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
"Worried about whether it can survive the next wave of attack by Intel"The funny part is that AMD's 2011 product portfolio is as strong as it has not been for the past 15yrs.
It is AMD attacking this time around gals. Just think about it for a minute ... 1999 ... 2003 ... 2011 ...
Lolimaster - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Q4 2011/Q1 2012 TSMC will deliver the next low power Fusion at 28nm.Krishna & Wichita with 2 and 4 cores flavors (real ones).
Anandtech an Inteltech site? We all know that, just leave with it.