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.
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7Enigma - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Last line of the second page:"ASUS is working on a passively cooled E-350 motherboard which I should have within the next week."
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Aha! I KNEW it!I knew somebody would replace the fan in no time at all... :) And losing that fan's power is even better for a system that doesn't drink too much in the first place.
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
A fanless HTPC with decent performance...that's what people are expecting for years :)However I doubt if it is entirely silent as you still have to use case fans and noisy HDDs :)
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
If it's no louder than my Dreamcast, I can certainly live with that. :Pcybersax2 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Nice review!I'm a bit surprised that the E350 isn't compared to an Atom D525 + ION2 combo (like the ZOTAC ZBOX ID41 uses).
silverblue - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
He trolls every AMD launch article on here and Toms. Don't worry; unless he decides to actually contribute, he won't be at either place for long.ash9 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Would be interesting to run a few optimized programs (OpenCL) and benchmark the differences. Hidden value - can it get any better?asH
haplo602 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Hi AnandSeems nobody does answer the following questions:
1. Is the iGPU disabled automaticaly when a discreete one is plugged in ?
2. If not, does the system support Hybrid CF (or will it ) ?
3. Can the iGPU be used as a GPGPU device when a discreet GPU is plugged in and/or the iGPU is not driving a display ?
thanks ...
sebanab - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
In my opinion the hole discrete GPU side of Zacate should be ignored completely.At the moment it does not bing any considerable advantages to add a discrete GPU, and if it will very few people would consider doing it.
But these questions will nonetheless be very interesting in the Llano review!
silverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
You definitely have a point. In most tests, it really doesn't look as if adding a discrete card would make any real difference, be it a 5570 or a 5870. The Bobcat cores don't look to be capable of handling enough data so perhaps the 6310 was the sweet spot for performance without the whole thing being too CPU-limited.Now if they added two more cores, perhaps we'd see a better GPU on-die, but the situation could still be the same. Then there's the matter of the 4x port.
I suspect the same will go for Llano; AMD knows that Phenom and Athlon II are CPU limited until the highest resolutions for most modern titles so there's little point giving them an overpowered GPU that is underfed. Putting a GPU on Bulldozer could be too expensive for the moment, but it's unlikely that Bulldozer would have issues feeding a relatively powerful graphics card.