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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
flyck - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
at idle the SB cpu uses 30% more power (or 4W) (2400S), during playback the difference between the cpu will also be around 1W.the chip consumption is however not known.
duploxxx - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Nice review, always a good review from Anandtech, thxFor now brazos could use only another cpu speedbump to totally destroy all atom based solutions and even more get into the ULV regions. A wider APU platform offer (different clockspeeds) would be better though.
To crush next gen Atom I think AMD knows what to do, update like 69xx series on uarch for gpu, add higher speed or more core in the new 28nm package all combined with turbo modes by the end of this year and Intel will never have a chance unless they bring a new uarch.
bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
meh, they can just compete with the ULV Pentiums.To me that's what Brazos is competing with performance wise-- of course it stomps Atom...so what's next? ULV chips...and it has a much harder time with them.
beginner99 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
...as mentioned before I do not see the benefit of playing MW 2 at 20 fps on a 1024x768 resolution. Who will do that? probably no one because it is still unplayable.I mean this thing is nice and better than Atom (assuming same price) but I think the GPU is a waste of die space. Why not beef up the decode engine? I mean this thing will be used mainly for media stuff and not for gaming. I mean not being able to play 1080p youtube perfectly is already fail for a nettop/htpc because that is a very, very likely usage scenario (1080p tv or screen).
More fixed function hardware fro media would be better maybe even something like QuickSync so you could actually trans-code on your htpc. Or said otherwise functionality you get with these broadcom cards, which quite a few atom system have.
I would still 100% choose this over Atom.
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Then it won't be an APU :)And AMD doesn't have smaller GPU...HD5400 Cedar is the smallest available design AMD has lol
While it can't run Modern Wardare 2, I'm quite satisfied with the fact that it can run L4D2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2 and I can even play Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 tuned to "medium".
sebanab - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I also think the 3D functions of the chip might as well not be there at all.But they should come in handy for Aero effects in Win7 and why not , Win8.
Shadowmaster625 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
1080p youtube is just too slow to be practical for anything other than watching trailers for the really big movies that come once a year, like Avatar. Most people's internet connections simply cannot keep up to stream realtime 1080p. And even if you did have the bandwidth, that dont mean that youtube is going to have it.720p is much more reasonable, though even then comcast 20mbps + youtube have trouble keeping that pipe filled most of the time. Most of the time I go with 480p just because less wait is more important than the added quality.
krumme - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I like the review, epecially the new HD bm and the recommandations. Looking at the hd bm themselves one had to wonder if 7200rpm was not enough for the bobcat? but i guess there is room for personal interpretation. I think Anand really likes his ssd more than i do :)I still feel the emphasis on multithreaded and heavy workloads is a little to much, and the same for the emphasis on the gaming side. But ofcourse there must be some readers that will use this for for gaming.
I hope AMD get this bobcat on lower leaking gf 32nm process, so we can have even better battery life.
bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
You know I've found my 160GB 5400RPM drive to be plenty fast for my Atom. I doubt a 7200RPM would be too terribly much of a bottleneck. Might impact battery life though compared with SSD on a laptop.I found the multi-threading very useful-- it showed us that even in perfect-scalable applications (Cinebench), the e350 still stomps a dual core dual threaded Atom. That's the conclusive evidence I was looking for that this is a better chip.
macs - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
My thought:- AMD E-350 itx board: 100-130 $
- Intel Sandy Bridge Pentium G620T (rumored release date 2/27/11, dual core, 35w TDP) 70$ paired with a H67 ITX board like the Foxconn one (75$) TOT:145$
I suspect that we will have similar power cosumption (probably Idle is even better for Intel) but the performance are way better in Sandy Bridge and totally worth the 10/50$ price difference.
Am I wrong? (sorry for my poor English)