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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
176 Comments
View All Comments
Scootiep7 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
The major problem is that Intel's drivers are flat out junk for anything Gaming/HTPC related. With ULV Sandy Bridge, you'll be paying three times as much for a complete system that performs less than half as well on most of the stuff you want to do with it in this market segment.redraider89 - Thursday, May 4, 2017 - link
Yes, yes it is.redraider89 - Thursday, May 4, 2017 - link
An unreleased processor can't beat an existing processor. So, yes, yes it is. It's absurd when people think just because they repeat their no's that gives what they are saying more legitimacy.Marlin1975 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Talk about good for a first try.Think about it; AMDs first shot into this area is as good or way better than the much updated Atom from intel.
Anand can you ask when amd thinks they will be able to move this to 32nm? Seems the design is good just needs updated shrinkage to increase the Mhz.
Also since this will not be in a netbook/laptop can you overlclock???
nitrousoxide - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
No 32nm Brazos parts, they will come directly with 28nm next year. Yes, 4 bobcat cores, VLIW 4D architecture GPUs, 2x performance at minimum or even higher if AMD gives it Turbo Boost feature.Overclocking doesn't make any sense on this chip, because no matter how you overclock it, the chip cannot do the things it can't do at default clock. it simply brings you more power consumption.
Marlin1975 - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Overclock for the desktop not the netbook.Could make some items go from unusable to usable as a low power desktop replacement.
I like to see what would happen and what would help the most or not.
nitrousoxide - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Try AMD Overdriveknedle - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
You can overclock everything (even a notebook), but since the board didn't support it, it's much harder. ;)I'm sure someone will release overclockable boards, it's just the matter of time.
Gigantopithecus - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
...ETA for Brazos mini-ITX availability in retail channels?I can't think of a reason to buy anything, be it a netbook or nettop or htpc, with an Atom in it given Brazos's performance and power consumption. Can't wait to start building Brazos systems!
codedivine - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I am a little confused. If I put a graphics card in the x16 slot, will it run at x4 PCIe 2.0 speeds or x16 PCIe 2,0 speeds?