The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTPower Consumption: Better than Atom
Power efficiency was a big draw of Atom, but does AMD sacrifice any of that in order to deliver the performance it does with the E-350? To be blunt: no, not at all.
I don’t have any pico PSUs or anything super efficient readily available so don’t expect any of the numbers to be particularly impressive, but what they are is comparable to one another. I hooked up each one of the systems I’d been using to the same PSU and measured power in three conditions: idle, full CPU load (Cinebench 11.5) and while playing a 1080p H.264 video.
Pine Trail and the old ION platform consume just about the same amount of power at idle. The Athlon II system obviously draws more, in this case an increase of 17%. The E-350 uses less than 70% of the power of the Atom D510 system at idle.
Under load the Brazos advantage shrinks a bit but it’s still much lower power than Atom. While playing a H.264 you’re looking at ~83% of the power of an ION system, and 85% under full CPU load.
Say what you will about Intel’s manufacturing process advantage, it’s simply not put to use here with Atom. AMD’s E-350 is higher performing and uses less power than Intel’s 45nm Atom D510. Did I mention it’s built on a smaller die as well?
I wanted to isolate the CP...err APU and look at its power draw exclusively. I ran the same three tests but this time I’m not measuring power at the wall, but rather just power over the ATX12V connector directly to the CPU.
At idle the E-350 APU only requires around 3W of power. That’s actually not as low as I’d expect, especially given that Sandy Bridge is typically down at 4W when fully idle. AMD is apparently not being too aggressive with stopping clocks and gating when fully idle, at least on the desktop Brazos parts.
| Power Consumption Comparison | |||||
| ATX12V Power Draw | Idle | 1080p H.264 Decode | Cinebench 11.5 | ||
| AMD E-350 | 3W | 8W | 9W | ||
| AMD Athlon II X2 255 | 7W | 12W | 47W | ||
Under load, either full CPU or when using the video decode engine, APU power consumption is around 8 - 9W. By comparison, an Athlon II X2 255 will use 12W when decoding video (this doesn’t include the UVD engine in the 890GX doing most of the heavy lifting. The more interesting comparison is what happens when the CPU cores are fully loaded. The E-350 uses 9W running Cinebench 11.5 compared to 47W by the Athlon II X2.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
beginner99 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
nope. had the exact same thought. SB also offers quicksync which could be very useful on a HTPC.Plus if you factor in total system cost especially if you use a ssd and a nice rather expensive HTPC case, the difference is not that big anymore.
Power consumption on desktop is also not a big issue unless you run it as a server 24/7.
duploxxx - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
perhaps before you praise the quicksync that much you might want to check at which cpu it is actually supported, yes yes here is our beloved intel again cutting features for certain lower end parts :Dhttp://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridg...
sure cpu of G620 will be better then e350 but GPU won't and the E350 is fully passive and probably most will be right at the 100$ mark while there is only 1 board with that kind of price and the 70$ is bulk 1000 pieces price......
but sure you can always select the SB in a month or 2 i.s.o. the brazos, just a matter of positioning, my goal is to replace my atom netbook and that will be done very fast.
never ever will this be same power consumption.... a 35W rated cpu against a 18W get real
sebanab - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Llano should take care of our confused friends here.silverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
It might, but we're still talking a memory bandwidth limitation along with four tweaked Stars cores. For the moment, we don't know how the latter will affect things, but the former certainly presents an issue especially when you think about enabling AA. It'll be a big boost over Brazos, but then again, we expected that. Perhaps it'll have enough grunt to play most modern games with medium and higher details at a good frame rate, but I can't help but feel sceptical.mosu - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
totally wrongsilverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Come on... a two word answer isn't an answer. :)Shadowmaster625 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
If intel charges $70 for budget SB 60 days after launch, I'll eat my socks. That goes against everything they stand for. $100, bare minimum.rs2 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I'm wondering about the suitability of one of these systems for use as a low-volume, low power consumption web server. Obviously performance would not be stellar, but I'm wondering if it would be reasonably acceptable for a low-traffic, non-mission-critical server (for more intense loads I have a quad-core box that I can use, but the power bill associated with running it 24/7 in true server fashion makes me cringe).It seems like the E-350 is about as fast as a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 from way back when. If so then it seems like it would make a passable server (I'm just thinking basic stuff, like Apache httpd, PHP, and MySQL...maybe Tomcat at most), no?
jjcrandall - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
supermicro makes a atom based 1u server, so i imagine that the amd platform does a much better job than that.lordmetroid - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
How hot are are these new processors running? Are they possible to passively cool?