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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flyck - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
i withhold my comment on that until we see the ontario product competing with a single core atom... which will be a 9W single core 1.2Ghz and not zacate.ltcommanderdata - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
So based on these results, despite a bit of excitement of AMD showing Apple computers on their recent press slides, it doesn't seem like Fusion is Apple's ideal CPU/GPU solution. Brazos has neither the CPU or GPU power to replace the current CULV Core 2 Duo + 320M solution in the 11.6" MacBook Air. For 13.3" MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro, Llano looks to have the GPU power, but not the CPU power to go against Sandy Bridge, but the bigger problem is timing since it looks like volume shipments won't be until H2 2011 which will be close to Ivy Bridge. As such, Apple's best solution for their 11.6" and 13.3" models seems to be to stick with Intel processors for best CPU performance and figure out how to fit a discrete GPU, which could be an AMD one if they can get an acceptable hybrid switching implementation.For the rest of Apple's lineup, they'd probably stick with Sandy Bridge over Bulldozer since Sandy Bridge looks to have the stronger AVX implementation which should be useful for their multimedia and content development applications.
flyck - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Didn't you look at the power consumption at all?Brazos system consumer 9watt idle, the SU 20W and atom single core 15W
the SU is always 10W higher than Brazos. Only the Atom can be lower with some loads (altough in gaming the atom is not fast enough)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Idle power consumption on CULV 11.6" is down around 9W for the entire platform, and for 10" Atom it's about 6W. Then along comes Apple's MacBook Air and their idle power consumption is apparently in the realm of 5W. Yes, that's FIVE watts for CULV, based on the Air 11 review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3991/apples-2010-mac... That's a 35Wh battery lasting basically seven hours for light web browsing. Damn!I hope Microsoft can do something with Windows 8 to finally get C-state use to improve. Right now, it's like Windows 7 (which is better than Vista and XP in my testing) still goes around waking up devices and applications. "Hey hey hey! Excel! Yes, I'm talking to you! I haven't seen you request any resources for a while and you look idle, but I'm just making sure. Do you need the CPU? I just woke him up to help out. No? Are you sure? Okay... go back to sleep CPU and Excel. I'll be back in a few milliseconds to see if you've changed your mind! Oh, hey! Word... how ya doin'!? ...."
softdrinkviking - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Is this level of performance even relevant in the notebook form factor?It doesn't do anything I wont be able to do on the next years smart phones.
Sure, bobcat will do it all faster, but I'll have to lug around a notebook!
haukionkannel - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Well, actually this is guite good. It seems not eat too much power. It can be used to read web pages like, atom. You can even use word prosessor on it. And when you play, it seems to beat atom.It is not mean to be gaming prosessor. It is very low end mainstream CPUGPU that has reasonable graphic power, and it can delivere just that.
If you want gaming laptop, you have to go to i3 or i5 and from 350 (5650) to 460 (5870). They are in very different league.
I would be nice to see for example a "gaming" tablet made around this product!
beginner99 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I really don't get the benefit of this gpu. Does anyone really play starcraft 2 or an FPS on a netbook? No, at least not with these results. IMHO this gpu thing is overrated for netbooks. It should play media files including 1080p (for attaching the netbook to the TV) and also be able to play flash video flawlessly and render flash-heavy web-pages. All of it not really needing a gpu but mainly the video decode engine. Browsing mainly needs (single-threaded) cpu power.And then think it's funny you say the platform felt snappy when it has a crucial ssd and most atom systems ship with a crappy 5400 rpm drive at best. probably 99.9% of the good experience was due to the ssd. I must say pretty smart move from AMDs side.
So an ideal netbook has a semi-decent ssd (even JMicron based ones will be good enough), good single-threaded performance ( I mean video encoding on netbooks is very important,,..NOT) and a video decode engine for the common stuff including software (driver, apps) supporting it.
Calabros - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Steve should buy this company.. its the only solution :-)ET - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I do like that different sites use different benchmarks, and it's a good way to get a better overall picture, so even though some other sites have benchmarks that I find more interesting I have no problem with that.Even looking at other reviews, the Brazos looks disappointing from a consumer point of view. It loses in performance to Intel CULV CPU's and isn't much better than available Atoms. It even lost to an Atom D525 + Ion2 in some cases. Extrapolating to the 9W variants suggests that performance will be pretty low.
That said, from an OEM point of view it should be a good replacement for some Intel platforms, because while it doesn't break new ground it should replace the Atom+Ion combination with something smaller and cheaper, and the lower power versions will likely still compete with the Atom while providing better graphics.
Still from my POV I'm pretty disappointed. I had really hoped for something that's game changing.
duploxxx - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
perhaps read that review again...http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Zacate-E350-Pro...
in some cases it loses and most it wins to a 525 yes which has 2 cores 4 threads and a 1,8ghz, and yes some gpu are better because of the ion2 but it also requires 60% idle power and 30% less load power, say again where it fails? for only being released few months after on first revision...
it makes the competition harder so better for us.