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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tno - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4017/vias-dual-core-...Not a full review but darn close.
e36Jeff - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
they did, its here:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4017/vias-dual-core-...
Problem is that what they tested was basically an engineering sample built on the wrong node, they havent gotten anything to market yet, so actual numbers from real products are unknown. having said that, yeah it does look like it might be better, but until someone makes a product based on it, we'll never know.
nitrousoxide - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
The price itself is stopping Nano X2 from dominating APU or Atom in the compete. The Nano platform consists of 3 different chips (aka CPU, NB, SB as the traditional layout) but the latter two managed to do that with only one chip, especially APU with very small die size. While Nano X2 is an impressive part compared to APU and Atom in absolute performance, it's not competitive in other features such as die size, price and power consumption.Tralalak - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
AMD Zacate TDP Configs@18W + Hudson M1 = Fusion Controller Hub = ("South Bridge") TDP Configs@2,7W to 4,7 W for typical configurations === AMD Brazos 20,7W to 22,7W TDP. (2 chip solution)VIA say: VIA Nano X2 have some TDP than VIA Nano Single-Core.
VIA Nano X2 1.4GHz (40nm TSMC) have some TDP than VIA Nano U3200 1.4GHz (65nm Fujitsu) TDP = 6.5W
VIA Nano X2 1.4GHz max. TDP@6.5W + all-in-one chipset VIA VX900 MSP (Media System Processor = North Bridge (IGP) + South Bridge) max. TDP@4,5W === max.TDP@11W (2 chip solution)
I mean that In "minibotebook market" is very competitive.
VIA's 40nm next all-in-one chipset VIA VX MSP with DirectX 11 IGP refresh will appear in Q4 2011.
mczak - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
VX900 has Chrome9 HC3 graphics core at 250Mhz - the same as VX800. Its 3d performance can barely keep up with the atoms anemic IGP (I could not find ANY review of VX900, just VX800), so totally no match for Brazos (though, in contrast to atom, it should support video decode much better). So your TDP comparison basically ignores the 3d part of it (surely the graphics core won't consume that much given its performance).Alright, even if I were to believe the DC Nano has same TDP as the current single core one, traditionally perf/power has never been that good with those VIA chips (not terrible, just not really good). Maybe their TDP definition is different (btw I've never seen a published TDP figure for any of the nano u3xxx series, which you seem to use as reference), also keep in mind runtime of notebooks is barely affected by TDP, much more important if you can get low idle power figures. I have no idea how the VIA platform would compete there (granted the publish idle power of the nano u3xxx cpus is only 100mW), but based on past designs I have to assume not very well (fwiw, this article here doesn't help for that neither, since the atoms don't have all of their mobile siblings power management features enabled).
So, unless VIA delivers, I remain sceptical if they can be competitive. Yes, a 1.4Ghz Nano DC should be quite competitive with 1.6Ghz Zacate performance wise - maybe also power wise, but 3d graphics will be very very sub par. To catch up in that area the new IGP is needed which as you mentioned is q4 (if the graphic core is like VN1000, it should do quite well, though I'll note that VN1000 plus the required southbridge has a 12W TDP).
bjacobson - Saturday, January 29, 2011 - link
I for one will be clicking any links with more info on these nanos! That sorely beat the Brazos out of nowhere hah!I doubt the it'll be much good at games though, and the drivers will be rough.,,
silverblue - Monday, January 31, 2011 - link
I've seen the Nano in comparison with Brazos before so I knew it was capable of being faster, however it'll take a load more power.The last time I saw a proper Nano rundown, we were talking a 65nm chip...
Iketh - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
power consumption is considerably higher on NanoAmdInside - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Just curious if it was a fad or are people still buying Atom systems? I bought an Atom netbook but sold it within 30 days cause I couldn't stand it (Dell Mini 10v). Then I bought an ION Zotac Atom 330 system to use as a video streaming device for my bedroom and while I do like it for what it does, I just can't see myself buying another cheap lower powered Atom/AMD E-350 like device. I bought mine because the price made it seem like a great deal but once I got past that, I just lost interest in netbook/low powered mini-ITX platforms. Tablets on the other hand I am still hooked on. Love my iPad and may pick up a second this year and pass mine onto my wife.nitrousoxide - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
What APU/Atom can do is still far beyond ARM-based tablet's reach. Just look at how much superiority x86 have in absolute performance. E-350 has roughly 5 times the performance of Tegra 2, and even an Atom is significantly faster. So tablet is just an alternative of nettops, not a replacement. If you are fine with you iPad that's cool, but saying that nettop is dead is still far too early.The superiority of x86 is just unmatched by ARM, and that's why Intel claims that ARM is not a big deal for it. Want to be as fast? Then add more instructions sets, design more complicated architectures, and what you get is no longer an ARM.