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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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?