The Brazos Review: AMD's E-350 Supplants ION for mini-ITX
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 27, 2011 6:08 PM ESTHeavy Lifting: Performance in Complex Workloads
Brazos is clearly faster than Atom in light workloads, but what about in more complex/heavier applications? Are the Bobcat cores enough to allow E-350 systems to move up in the world or will they still be confined to the web browsing/email usage models of netbooks? I've run the E-350 through our entire Bench suite to find out. If you want the full gamut of results head over to CPU Bench, but I've chosen a few here. I also included performance results from a 2.66GHz Pentium 4 to put things in perspective for users of really old systems.
Photoshop CS4 performance is not half bad on the E-350 compared to other similarly priced platforms. Also impressive is the E-350's performance advantage over the old Pentium 4. Compared to the Athlon II X2 however the E-350 is still noticeably slower.
The standings and performance trends continue in our x264 encode benchmark. I don't expect you to do a lot of video transcoding on the E-350 as it's not much faster than Atom here. VIA's dual-core Nano is a bit quicker but still not enough to make this a viable usage case.
Windows Media Encoder provides a far lighter workload, but the standings don't change. The E-350 is faster than anything Atom based, faster than the old Pentium 4, but slower than VIA's Nano X2.
While I don't expect E-350 users to do any offline 3D rendering work, Cinebench does give us a good characterization of single threaded performance. The problem with Atom is that its single threaded performance isn't nearly as good as its multithreaded performance. In all of the previous benchmarks an Atom D510 is clearly quicker than the old 2.66GHz Pentium 4, but looking at single threaded Cinebench R10 you get a different story entirely. The P4 has nearly twice the single threaded performance of an Atom D510.
The E-350 is still a bit behind the Pentium 4 in single threaded performance, but it's not nearly as bad as Atom. The out-of-order execution engine helps tremendously here. What you get as a result is a system that doesn't really feel slower than a 5 year old PC but has the features of a more modern system.
Overall the E-350 is clearly faster than Atom ever was at running these heavier workloads. The highly threaded workloads aren't much faster on E-350 vs. Atom thanks to the latter's Hyper Threading , but single threaded performance continues to play an important role and is a huge advantage of AMD's. VIA's simple out-of-order architecture is consistently faster than the E-350, however I don't expect to see widespread adoption or support for VIA's platform (at least compared to AMD's). Compared to the larger out-of-order x86 cores the E-350 is still in a lower performance class, the Athlon II X2 is easily twice as fast as the E-350 in these tests.
Ultimately the same rules that applied to Atom based systems apply to Brazos systems:
1) Swapping to disk is painful so you need enough memory (I'd recommend no less than 2GB for Windows 7, ideally 4GB) and you'll want a fast HDD. My preference is still an SSD, even a low end value drive over even a fast hard drive. Even a low end SSD (e.g. Kingston SSDNow V100) will make a Brazos system feel acceptably fast.
2) Outside of media playback and some gaming, you're still limited in the types of applications and workloads you can run on Brazos. The Brazos platform is great for web browsing/email workloads, but don't try to do too much more with it. The advantage over Atom here is that Brazos just does those things noticeably faster.
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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.