The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTFinal Words
With the settlement done and no DMI license in place, it's clear that there won't be another ION from NVIDIA (at least not based on x86). What Brazos is however is the ION successor that NVIDIA never built. For just over $100 you'll be able to buy a mini-ITX board with an E-350 that's faster than Atom, faster than ION and more feature rich than both. While I don't believe Brazos has enough CPU power under the hood to be a truly high end HTPC, it's easily good enough for a low cost, value HTPC. Popular codecs are well accelerated and with full DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD bitstreaming support Brazos is solid. Flash acceleration is also present although it looks like there are still some kinks that need to be worked out there.
Overall performance is much better than Atom, particularly in single threaded applications. Brazos and the E-350 can make for a very affordable email/web browsing machine, and run those applications much faster than Atom could. As our more complex workloads showed however, the E-350 is limited to the same type of general usage models as Atom (with a bunch of new media and gaming options). You can run heavier apps on the E-350, you'll just be far better off with an Athlon II instead.
The Radeon HD 6310 proves to be a good match for the Bobcat cores in the E-350. There's not much value in adding a faster GPU via the on-board PCIe x4 slot as most games will be at least somewhat CPU bound. The resulting CPU/GPU combination is something that's typically as good as, if not better than Intel's Core i5 661 in games. In some cases the Radeon HD 6310/E-350 combination nips at the heels of Intel's Core i3 2100. Unfortunately in modern titles that's not always enough to have a playable experience, but with older games you should be able to do more with Brazos than you ever could with Atom or even ION for that matter. The CPU/GPU balance in the E-350 is good enough that I feel like Llano could make for a pretty decent value gaming machine.
Just as was the case with Atom, Brazos isn't going make for a very powerful primary PC. Load up the thread count or throw heavier workloads at it and the E-350 doesn't look all that much better than an Atom D510. What it will give you however is better single-threaded performance than Atom and a much better feature set. Brazos makes those secondary or tertiary computers you build much better than they would have been otherwise with Atom. I would like to see more CPU performance out of the platform and I'm not too keen on meeting the single core versions, but viewed through ION glasses Brazos looks good.
For AMD, Brazos has to be exciting. The company finally has a value offering that it doesn't have to discount heavily to sell. Brazos does very well against Atom on absolute performance, die size and price. The E-350 isn't the most powerful Fusion APU we'll meet, but it's a great way to introduce the family.
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DanaG - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
One thing I'm wondering: how does Brazos compare to Atom and ARM (such as QNAP TS-219P+) on power usage and network performance? From reviews of ARM devices, it looks like they hit a speed limit that may be caused by the SoC devices themselves.I do know that Realtek Gigabit Ethernet sucks, so it'd be worthwhile to benchmark with an Intel NIC and a Broadcom NIC, as well.
Aone - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I reckon Anand Lal Shimpi should know that neither Atom D510 nor Atom 330 supports EIST or Idle Power State. If he does compare the power consumtion he, at least, must mention it.And i'm not sure that Atom platform supports DDR3-1333 as Brazos. Usually Atom sticks with DDR2-667.
Unfortunately, mem config is absent from description of test configs.
DanNeely - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
DDR3-800 based atoms launched a few months back; the performance difference vs their DDR2 siblings was negligible.krish123 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Hi Anand,You are comparing the gaming performance of Core I5 2500K / higher clocked graphics with E350, but u should also show the power consumption/price difference on those parts. .. I feel ., kind of biased review, when you are trying to compare only the positive side of intel parts and not the negative side
I will wait for your review on Llano and bulldozer
Regards,
Kicha
7Enigma - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Did you even read the text or just look at the pretty graphs?The i5 is in there as a bracketing agent so that those of us with desktop systems can get a feel for the performance difference to these Atom/APU products. There was never a direct comparison drawn unless you ignore all the text and just stare at the pictures.
OneArmedScissorB - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Did you even read the pretty graphs? They were very nearly neck and neck in those comparisons. Why omit the most significant differentiation between the two?Sandy Bridge and Bobcat as HTPC platforms are more comparable than anything else. They are both at least "good enough" for general use, have similar IGP and video acceleration capabilities, and are both readily available in mini-ITX.
And yet, there's a 3.1 GHz Athlon II X2 with an 890GX board in the power results, likely full size ATX, in place of every single last one of the numerous mini-ITX platforms they could have just copied and pasted into the chart from past articles. Wtfbbq?!?
That was not just an oversight, but a very significant mistake that detracts from the usefulness of the entire article.
bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
hm, that seems a bit of an overstatement. I don't really see how the 2500's are at all in the same market as this.code65536 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I wonder, does Bobcat support hardware-assisted virtualization?silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I read that it does.macs - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Can someone test the power consumption of an i3 2100 on itx mobo? I suppose it will be quite close to brazos, at idle at least