The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTMobile IGP Comparison
I narrowed down the platforms for our mobile IGP comparison. I simulated a Core i3 350M by taking an i3-530, underclocking it (I couldn't do anything about the 4MB vs. 3MB L3 cache) and capping its GPU frequency at 667MHz. This is the best case scenario for the i3-350M, and as you'll see below, it doesn't really matter. I also paired a 2.2GHz Pentium Dual-Core with a G45 motherboard, agian simulating the cheaper mobile Pentium platform. Finally I installed Windows 7 on the 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo based 11-inch MacBook Air with its GeForce 320M to give you an idea of the upper bound for mobile performance with what might as well be a low end discrete GPU.
Updated: I've added performance results from a simulated Core i3-330UM, the E-350's competition in ultra portables.
We'll start with Modern Warfare 2:
The E-350 puts the i3-350M, i3-330UM and Pentium DC to shame, delivering 67% better performance. The frame rate is just shy of being totally smooth however. I found that in most modern games 1024 x 768 would result in frame rates just under 30 fps.
BioShock 2 showed a similar performance advantage. Again we're not able to break 30 fps but the performance advantage is huge compared to the Intel platforms with integrated graphics.
Dragon Age: Origins is mostly CPU bound at low quality settings and thus there's no real advantage to the E-350's Radeon HD 6310 GPU. It's faster than the Pentium/G45 platform, but significantly slower than the i3-350M. I expect most games however to be GPU bound at these settings across the board.
World of Warcraft continued the trend. The E-350 ended up 57% faster than the i3-350M, although still fell short of a discrete GPU.
Of course I wondered how well Brazos would play Starcraft 2:
The GPU handles SC2 just fine, however the game is very CPU dependent and thus you see a pretty big advantage from the mainstream i3 system. The comparison is a lot closer when we look at the i3-330UM. The E-350 won't be able to play SC2 as well as a $500 mainstream notebook, but it'll be comparable to an ultraportable running ULV Arrandale.
We don't have numbers for the G45 platform here because the system wouldn't run our benchmark (our tests use an older version of SC2 which apparently had issues with the G45 drivers).
Our SC2 CPU test gives you an idea of the lower end of performance in large multiplayer battles:
The E-350 offers only 58% of the performance of the i3-350M system. The Bobcat cores do hold the platform back from time to time. Again, compared to the i3-330UM there's no performance difference at all.
Just for kicks I also ran the Civilization V benchmark, which gave us two datapoints: GPU performance and no-render/CPU performance.
The benchmark doesn't score well on either platform, although AMD does hold a 72% performance advantage over the i3 and G45 platforms. The CPU test puts the E-350 at about 55% of the speed of the Pentium dual core platform.
Civ V is one area where the Arrandale CPU advantage wins out over GPU performance.
Overall, the E-350 has no problems outperforming any of the current Intel integrated graphics offerings in 3D games. In CPU bound titles the E-350 loses out to the mainstream i3, but is competitive with ultra low voltage i3s. Just as with Atom, you'll have to sacrifice performance vs. a mainstream notebook, but compared to low voltage Arrandale the E-350 can hold its own.
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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