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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Silver47 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Surely by then Anand AMD would be starting to show off the next gen Bobcat?Are Intel factoring this in and going to try and compete with the next gen, because if not they would look rather silly having a better performing part for a few months and AMD come along and crash the party?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
AMD indicated we should see it follow a ~12 month cadence with Brazos and its successors. Assuming perfect execution that would mean we'd see the followup in Q1 2012.The next-gen Atom part is just going to run at a faster frequency and have better media functionality (e.g. H.264 decode). I believe Intel is one more generation away from a significant performance boost with Atom.
Take care,
Anand
Tralalak - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
VIAl's 40nm Nano X2 (Eden X2) with all-in-one chipset VIA VX900 MSP = VIA EPIA M900 Mini-ITX Q2 2011 (04/2011).VIA's 40nm next all-in-one chipset VIA VX MSP with DirectX 11 IGP refresh will appear in Q4 2011.
SilentSin - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Don't mean to nitpick as I think you meant 5570 due to the market this board is aiming, but on page 5 when you added a discrete GPU did you use a 5770 or a 5570? The paragraph text switches back and forth, graph shows 5570.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Thanks for the correction - it's 5570 :)Take care,
Anand
Silver47 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
"3, 4, 7""5 sir!"
"5!"
strikeback03 - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
I thought the number of the counting shall be three?jnmfox - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
Would this be powerful enough for HDTV playback with Sage TV?"For HDTV Playback: 3Ghz processor or higher or a slower processor in combination with a video card utilizing DXVA support and using a decoder which supports DXVA"
http://www.sagetv.com/requirements.html?sageSub=tv
TiA!
QChronoD - Thursday, January 27, 2011 - link
I realize that this review was for an ITX board, but what would you guys say are the odds of this chip (or something with equal performance) shipping in the next few months in a thin and light laptop?Also could you do a quick test of minecraft? The ION 3D you reviewed the other week was passable and it seems like this is faster, but you never know...
djfourmoney - Friday, January 28, 2011 - link
Several were shown with the announcement of the HD6990 - http://www.hardwarezone.com/features/view/131493