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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StardogChampion - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
A low-powered mini-ITX board with 4-5 SATA III ports, maybe a eSATA (Hudson FCH supports 6 x SATA) port and PCI-e slot for adding a SATA controller card (even if it's x4 it's still better than PCI) for $100 has me thinking home server. I don't see a board out there that comes close to these features at this price. If you want a D510 board with 6 x SATA II you have to shell out $200. Take one of these E-350 mini-itx boards, put it in a Lian-Li Q08 case with a bunch of 2TB drives, Amahi/WHS/etc. and you've really got something. It's a waste of GPU but how do you beat it?And, for building friends/family/neighbors desktops to replace the big outdated tower sitting on the floor that they just use for surfing, email, MS Office: once this comes out I'll never build another big tower again.
fr500 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Using mainstream games for this reviews make little sense. It would be better to show it with some good indie games at 720p, say super meat boy (won't run well on an i3 530's IGP or an 9300-ITX IGP for instance it needs good steady FPS to be playable).Maybe Braid, Trine, Torchlight.
I don't see many people using this for MW2.
ProDigit - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I would have preferred to see the E-350 compared to an Atom N550,especially with power consumption.I believe the N550 beats the crap out of the E-350 (power-wise). After all, I guess AMD wants to put this apu in netbooks, no?
LeftSide - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Does anybody know if bobcat is going to support ecc ram? I want to build a low power server with ecc ram.msroadkill612 - Friday, February 4, 2011 - link
I have read it doesntAmdInside - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Will it run Angry Birds?kenyee - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Wish you touched more on that...that's listed as a weakness, but nothing about whether anything this year will be able to decode 3D bluray movies...bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
what are people using OpenCL at this point these days for anyways?spiked_mistborn - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I agree with you geekfool. Where are the OpenCL or DirectCompute benchmarks (especially OpenCL since that is cross-platform and seems to be building steam)? This article does not feel complete without some type of GPU acceleration test since that is one idea that AMD has been pushing since we first started hearing about fusion. The idea was that the low performance of the cpu core on compute intensive workloads could be compensated for by shifting highly parallel workloads to the SPs. If I remember correctly Intel recently released OpenCL support for their CPUs, and there are also upcoming ARM based SOCs that will have OpenCL support.While OpenCL may not matter to everybody today, I think that in a couple of years any devices that are released that don't support it will be skydiving without a parachute.
Klimax - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
Just few things:What board with D510 was used and was it with latest BIOS?
I have noticed that after new BIOS is loaded on intel boards I get about ~20% increase in write and ~10% in read performance on SSD. Along with few percent on graphics benches. (Tested between October and January)
Could somebody here test it? (I used BLKD510MO as cheapest D510 board with 1GB DDR2 and Win7 x64 and cheap Kingston SSD)
This is somewhat missing IMHO.
Thanks.