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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themw6 - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
Hi Anand, as many of us are interested in using zacate in a NAS - could you run a quick truecrypt benchmark? I'm especially interested in AES-256 performance. Additionally, network throughput would be great, too ;)Something else: you measured 24 watts idle power consumption. Could you provide more details on your test platform? Others had engineering samples with as little as 11 watts at idle. I'm guessing you used some 850W-rated PSU? ;) Anyway, thanks for the review!
MrSpadge - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
With such a low clock speed and such low power draw and a desktop platform, which can easily provide power but needs some more performance.. you'd think AMD would have put a proper Turbo mode in there. 1 thread 2.0 GHz, 2 threads 1.6 GHz - easy.MrS
rashire - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
First Thanks to Anand for doing a HTPC review for this chip, I've been waiting on this since your initial comments in Nov.But I'm kind of disappointed after reading the review. While it definitely looks like a better alternative to atom+ion i was just expecting a bit more horse power from it.
I was hoping for a product i was certain would have the power to do downloads, archive extraction and other CPU intensive processes in the background while doing 1080p playback or running an emulator in the foreground. And from the review i just don't see enough power to be sure my media and data-storage processes without potentially maxing out the CPU under certain combinations.
Looking forward to next gen discrete solution to replace my mid-tower HTPC.
GullLars - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
I'd like to see a clock for clock comparison of Bobcat, Athlon II, Phenom II, Atom, Core, Nehalem, and Sandy Bridge.From what i can see in these graphs, Bobcat performs about 60-90% of Athlon II clock for clock.
I look forward to seeing overclocking of bobcat :)
Malih - Sunday, January 30, 2011 - link
Zacate (board) ~$100WiFi ~$25
small Case ~$75
PSU ~$50
4GB RAM ~$50
widescreen LCD ~$125
storage ~$100
around $500 for a good enough complete system, but of course you can always get cheaper case, PSU, storage, LCD and 2GB RAM
THE_DOM!NAT0R - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
The mini-ITX boards based on Brazos are quite good as it seems. They surpass Atom for HTPC's and have more features like more sata ports. I would like to see a comparison with about 5 mini-itx Brazos boards by Anand. Also, if you have a power supply that is rated for max efficiency at about 15-30 W, you can accurately compare the power figures between Brazos boards and Atom. I've seen some reviews and they use power supplies that are rated at about 300W; their lowest reasonable efficiency is 10% load, that isn't designed for 15<P<30.MrMilli - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I would really like to see a comparison against the Athlon II 250u.jamesgor13579 - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
Until it can replace my ION/Linux/XBMC system, I am not interested. AMD has been doing well on the Linux front recently, but I don't know about their video decode.Metaluna - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I'm also interested in how these boards perform in Linux (or even if the new GPU is supported at all in current mainstream distros like Ubuntu 10.10). I'm interested in building a small nettop, mostly for web browsing but possibly HTPC use at some point.Jeffk464 - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 - link
"The good news is 1080i60 works just fine.Brazos’ GPU also fails all of our deinterlacing tests,"
The second sentence follows the first one and seems to directly contradict it. I was planning on buying one of these for a htpc and the ability to play 1080i60 as well as 1080p24 are absolutely critical. 1080i60 is one of the main standards of broadcast(over the air TV) and 1080p24 is the standard for blue ray. So my question then becomes since the author seems to have contradicted himself can brazos handle the interlaced 1080i60 content? This article should have cleared things up not made it more confusing.