The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTFinal Words
The Brazos platform really poses the question of what is fast enough from a CPU standpoint. Netbook makers often argued that Atom was fast enough, and honestly they'd be right if Atom wasn't paired with such a heavyweight OS. Running Windows 7, Atom just wasn't fast enough but many made the sacrifice in order to get the form factor and battery life benefits that went along with the platform. The E-350 offers an alternative. You get faster than Atom CPU performance (particularly in single threaded tasks) and a fairly potent GPU. The only issue is that the E-350 doesn't compete against Atom. Most of the time you'll find it up against Pentium or low end Core i3 notebooks.
From a CPU performance standpoint, the E-350 can't compete with either of those CPUs clock for clock. Where AMD has the advantage is in power consumption and GPU performance. This is effectively AMD's answer to Intel's CULV platform, but with better graphics performance.
This is a huge statement from AMD, echoing what Apple has been saying for the past year: while CPU performance matters, GPU performance must scale at least as quickly, if not more to make up for lost time. The only thing we're really lacking are the killer apps (outside of 3D gaming and HD video) to support this mentality today.
The Radeon HD 6310 in the E-350 does very well, despite the memory bandwidth limitations. Its easily faster than Intel's HD Graphics, although some games (e.g. Starcraft 2) are still held back by the performance of AMD's Bobcat cores. Despite being a significant step forward for integrated graphics at this price point, I would be lying if I said I didn't wish it were faster. Ideally I would like to see > 30 fps performance across the board from the E-350.
There's also the GPU compute argument that AMD makes for Fusion, however the GPU compute tests I tried to run on Brazos didn't exactly work. Cyberlink Media Espresso would not use the GPU for encoding and the Civilization V compute shader test wouldn't run either. Both I suspect will be worked out by the time the platform actually ships.
What matters the most with Brazos is what the OEMs do with it. We'll of course get mini-ITX boards to turn into HTPCs, but on the mobile side Brazos needs to be paired with a sleek/well built chassis, good display, fast storage and a large battery to truly be attractive. I am also concerned about the performance of the Ontario based APUs. In many areas the E-350 isn't that much quicker than a dual-core Atom, which makes me wonder how the C-30 and C-50 would do.
Brazos ultimately has the same problem Atom had at its introduction. Compared to similarly priced notebooks based around 2.2GHz Pentium dual-core CPUs or Core i3s, the CPU just isn’t competitive. Unlike Atom however, in GPU bound scenarios the E-350 is actually faster than those two. The only issue, as I mentioned above, is that currently the majority of mainstream applications that are GPU bound are 3D games. Like Atom however, the Brazos platform is also destined for ultra thin formfactors - places a low end Core i3 can’t go. It’s in that comparison that AMD is most successful.
Compared to a Core i3-330UM, Brazos offers much better GPU performance and it’s even competitive in CPU dependent games like Starcraft 2. The i3-330UM is still faster CPU bound scenarios though, reinforcing the CPU speed for GPU performance tradeoff that you’re faced with when considering these two.
The E-350 delivers 50 - 60% of the multithreaded CPU performance of the Core i3-330UM, and nearly 70% of the single threaded performance. It’s a noticeable gap, but AMD attempts to make up for it by delivering up to twice the GPU performance in games.
Then there’s the issue of die size. For years AMD has had to give sell you a larger die at a lower price than Intel in order to remain competitive. The Brazos platform changes that. At 75mm^2, the Zacate die is smaller than just the CPU portion of a Core i3 and it’s less than 40% of the total die area when you include Intel’s HD Graphics. While more CPU performance would be nice to have, this is a good start.
AMD is committed to revving the Brazos platform yearly. We’ll obviously see updated graphics next year but I’m hoping for updates to the CPU cores as well. The biggest mistake Intel made with Atom was to be too conservative with its roadmap. AMD has a history of not making the same mistakes as Intel, so hopefully the Brazos roadmap looks good. Now we wait for the notebooks.
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duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
When you mention this: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.
and you only post mainly multithreaded apps which are fooled by the HT people off course get a different idea about the final product..... Atom is slow for booting and loading apps, perhaps a real world timing once the final silicon is there and compare the actual timing will give the brazos credit what it needs, afterall its 40nm vs 32nm and first silicon vs 2e revision.
so in the end not that bad, but AMd needs at least a 1.8-2.0GHZ brazos to compete in the 400-500$ range, that should be easy to get, they don't need more gpu power.
btw where is the stated 25W brazos amd has up its sleeves for the ultra low end desktop platform. THey can easily use it for notebooks.
duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
sorry anandtech, really big fan of your site, always the first site i will read, but this round other sites have done a much better job then your review. Again even your conclusion is totally off then others who are comparing the right platforms against each other....pcperspective really shows platforms, power consumption and guess what the results are :)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1039&type...
Khato - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Eh, I wouldn't say other sites have done a better job, rather they just present different information. Given the fact that I was primarily interested in GPU performance aspects, the Anandtech review is far more useful far as I'm concerned.That said, the direct comparison against a celeron SU2300 ION platform is indeed interesting. A core 2 duo based celeron at 1.2GHz bests the 1.6GHz 'brazos' in CPU performance on all but the MP3 encode benchmark, which could just as easily be due to differences in the SSD used as the CPU. Sure the power numbers are impressive, but that's quite to be expected on a demo system - it'll be interesting to see how much that goes up on actual retail systems. aka, how stripped down and tweaked was the demo system in order to get idle power that low. It's basically equal to the SU2300 + ION on dynamic power according to those numbers.
duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
they all had the same amount of ram and all had ssd in that review, so it is really comaprable, where this review showed lots of different setups.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
My goal was to compare to the type of CPUs you'd find in other $400 - $500 notebooks, mainly ~2.2GHz 1MB L2 Conroe/Merom based CPUs and 2.26GHz Arrandale based chips - both of which you'll see in the review.I agree we needed to include some ULV results, so this morning I added data from a simulated i3-330UM (1.2GHz) across the board :)
Take care,
Anand
khimera2000 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
intresting... I have to say that I got more out of this review then i did with anand since it uses the profile i would consider buying. I would not consider getting one of these chips for a notebook so the comparison against notebook chips are kinda lost to me.I was intrestead to see how much performance VS how much batterylife this new platform has since i already have a powerful desktop, a comprable notebook I dont need to know how fast a notebook is if its not hitting close to the 8 hour battary mark.
If i where to get one of these it would be for long flights and train rides, it would be for the children in my family, and it would be for the older people who are not as tech enabled. as it stands the questoins i had in mind where not easily answerd by anantech's review.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
You've created Atom like performance with a slightly better GPU, way, way too late in the game.I thought the Dual core 1GHz and single core 1.2GHz would be more competitive with Atom 1.6, but looking at these results, those are in with no hope at all.
This is poor.
flyck - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
read the reviews..... performance is better in multithreaded applications than Atom525 with HT and single threaded is 60% faster....gpu is better than ion which atom needs.
powerdraw on idle is LOWER than single core Atom and equal for cpu intensive tasks but higher in games.
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Games which Atom cannot play in the first place.Not without Ion which makes the battery life goes boom anyway ...
Those GPU's are eating electrons like crazy when doing its job. Sneaky beasts, aren't they ? :D
Khato - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
Really? It's power draw on idle is under the 7 watts measured on Anandtech for the single-core atom N450 Asus 1005PE? Maybe it's power consumption under load is lower than the 9.5 watts for that system?Yeah, power consumption figures vary wildly from system to system, especially when comparing netbook/notebook type designs to nettop/desktop. It's rather clear that the brazos test platform is a netbook/notebook type design and hence has no business being compared to nettop/desktop designs on power consumption.