The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTMemory and Cache Latencies
The Brazos platform was configured with 4GB of DDR3-1066 memory. The IDF system had memory running at DDR3-1333, however AMD had to decrease clocks presumably to meet validation requirements for final silicon. I measured an 86.9ns trip to main memory, a 3 cycle L1 and a ~22 cycle L2 cache. That's a lower latency memory interface than Atom or Core 2 based processors, but a higher latency L2.
CPU Performance: Better than Atom, 90% of K8 but Slower than Pentium DC
AMD's performance target for Bobcat was 90% of the performance of K8 at the same clock speed and our Photoshop CS4 benchmark shows that AMD can definitely say that it has met that goal. At 1.6GHz the E-350 manages to outperform a pair of K8s running at 1.5GHz in the Athlon X2 3250e. Unfortunately for AMD, Intel's Pentium dual-core running at 2.2GHz is much quicker. Most notebooks in the $400+ range have at least a 2.2GHz Pentium. Even the Atom D510 isn't far behind.
AMD tells me that in general purpose integer tasks, the E-350 should do well and it may even exceed AMD's 90% design target. However in higher IPC workloads, for example many floating point workloads, the E-350 is constrained by its dual issue front end. In these situations, the out of order engine is starved for instructions and much of Bobcat's advantage goes away.
Our x264 HD test has the E-350 performing within 86 - 92% of the Athlon X2 3250e, once again meeting AMD's design targets. Unfortunately, this isn't much faster than an Atom - mostly thanks to Atom's Hyper Threading support. Although not an out of order architecture, Atom gets a healthy efficiency boost by being able to execute instructions from two threads per core. Once again, compared to a 2.2GHz Pentium, the E-350 isn't close. Even VIA's dual core Nano is faster. When it comes to power consumption however, the E-350 can't be touched. I measured max system power consumption at 25.2W while running the x264 encode test. With the exception of the Atom D510, the rest of the desktop platforms here consume much more than that at idle (much less under load).
Despite being a offline 3D rendering benchmark, our 3dsmax 9 test does fall in line with expectations. The E-350 delivers 92% of the performance of the Athlon X2 3250e and outperforms the Atom D510 by 26%. Unfortunately for AMD, the Pentium dual-core holds onto a significant performance advantage here. Clock for clock, Bobcat won't be able to do much against anything Core 2 based. The real advantage here will be GPU performance.
Single Threaded Performance
In most of our benchmarks the performance advantage over Atom isn't huge, yet using Brazos is much better than using an Atom based machine. It all boils down to one thing: single threaded performance. Atom can make up for its deficiencies by executing a lot of threads in parallel, but when you're bound by the performance of a single thread the E-350 shines. The E-350 is 65% faster than the Atom D510 in the single threaded Cinebench R10 test. It's this performance advantage that makes the E-350 feel so much quicker than Atom.
The Core i3-330UM manages a 46% performance advantage over the E-350. Even in the ultraportable Arrandale ULV space at lower clocks, AMD still leaves a lot of CPU performance on the table. The advantage here will be cost. A single E-350 is less than 40% of the die area of a Core i3-330UM. You may not get the same CPU performance, but performance per mm^2 is much higher.
In the multithreaded Cinebench test Atom is able to catch up quite a bit, but the E-350 still holds an 11% advantage.
File Compression/Archive Recovery Performance
Our final two CPU tests are both multithreaded and they show the E-350 equaling and falling behind the performance of the 1.5GHz Athlon X2. As we explained earlier, the gap between the E-350 and Atom shrinks as you add more threads to the workload.
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sinigami - Friday, November 19, 2010 - link
sure, they run at different frequencies, and if you could turn up the clock speed of zacate's GPU, then it might be the champ. But as it stands now, in the real world, according to anand, there is NO zacate GPU that can run that fast. Regardless of wishful thinking, the best Zacate only won one test, out of three, against intel's GPU.Can ANYONE (besides AMD's propaganda demo) show ANY more benchmarks where Zacate or Ontario or Brazos can beat Intel's Clarkdale integrated on-chip graphics?
texasti89 - Sunday, November 21, 2010 - link
The CPU performance of this product line is way below what i expected from AMD and the hype around it's architecture. Brad Burgess and his team should go back to the white board and refine their way of tackling the given performance/power constraints without sacrificing this huge CPU performance. Bobcat is OoO arch. even though it can handle 2 threads as opposed to 4 threads in Atom, it should give a marginal advantage. 18 w is still not a tight constraint to justify the poor performance I see in this overview.I'm really disappointed. Many architectural details of this processor will be similar in the Bulldozer design. I hope the latter won't carry the same degree of failure.
I totally agree with some inputs here .. what's the point of having a discrete-class graphics perofmrance in a machine that barely faster than the crappy Atom-based counterparts??
sinigami - Monday, November 22, 2010 - link
>>> "what's the point of having a discrete-class graphics performance in a machine that's barely faster than the crappy Atom-based counterparts??"and of course AMD is hyping the graphics performance too: i keep hearing that it's faster than the integrated graphics on an Intel Core i5 661, yet there is no evidence of that.
do not fall for the propaganda: the GPU part is NOT stronger than the current integrated crap from Intel, or nVidia's ION, or even AMD's Radeon HD 4290 integrated graphics.
texasti89 - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 - link
IMO, AMD has the full capacity to deliver the competitive GPU performance level they want. Their graphics division is doing extraordinary job, and I don't think intel will EVER be able to catch AMD in the graphics part.What i'm really worried about, for the sake of our interests (the customers), is the terrible progress this company has made in the CPU development since 2005 compared to the giant chip. After the uter failure of Intel's Larrabee project, AMD now becomes the only entity in the world that has x86 license and the necessary technology to fuse high class GPUs and x86 processors into heterogeneous cores with overall performance never seen before. It's really sad to see how the outcome of "Fusion" starts out this way. I hope the upcoming products live up to the hype of this very promising project.
From marketing point of view, Brazo platform will take some attention only if it's "dirt cheap" .. I don't like this path AMD been taking last few years in the CPUs.
Mishera - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Anand, I believe you forgot Amd's predecessor in this market in the neo and 750 combination. I think this is where Amd is positioning their Zadcate chips. Could you add this combination in you next benchmarks?phillipguy - Monday, April 25, 2011 - link
I know this is an older post but I was thinking of buying the Sony VAIO VPC-YB13KX/S 11.6-Inch Laptop.From what I read I believe this AMD E-350 has better performance than my Atom 330 on my Asus Eee PC 1201N. (Correct me if I'm wrong)
My question is does the AMD E-350 have AMD-V support?
I ask because I will be running Ubuntu Linux as my operating system but I'll also like to run Mac OSX Server in a Virtual Machine (virtual box) however it requires hardware virtualization.
(Sorry if you mentioned this in your post however it's a really long and I understand about 20% of it all) LOL
THANK YOU!!
zero13th - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - link
yes, it support amd-v