Update: Be sure to read our full review of AMD's E-350 here.

Last week I mentioned that I had recently spent some time with AMD down in Austin, TX, benchmarking its upcoming Brazos platform. The Brazos platform is composed of an AMD Zacate or Ontario APU and the Fusion Controller Hub (a South Bridge based on the SB800 series). Brazos systems will run the gamut of mainstream notebook, netbook and nettop segments ranging from $299 to around $500. While AMD let us reveal the fact that we tested Brazos, we weren't allowed to publish numbers last week. Today, we can.

I didn’t have much time with Brazos. The AMD briefing started at 9AM, but AMD wanted to go through some marketing slides and answer questions before letting us at Brazos. Going into this whole thing I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough time to run everything I wanted to run. You see, the system I had access to wasn’t pre-configured. It had Windows 7 x64 loaded on it, drivers installed and PCMark Vantage - but everything else was up to me. Despite having a 128GB Crucial RealSSD C300, installing a dozen applications and games still took hours on the system. I asked AMD if I could at least begin copying/installing some applications before we started the briefing, they gladly entertained my request.

I brought an SSD full of applications, games and benchmarks that I wanted to run on the Brazos platform. I purposefully avoided any large test suites (PCMark Vantage, SYSMark) because they would eat up a lot of time and I had no idea how long the rest of the benchmarking would take.


The Brazos test platform

I also didn’t run any of our media streaming suite. The Zacate/Ontario APUs feature AMD’s UVD3 engine and should, in theory, have similar media playback features to the Radeon HD 6000 series. Of course once we have final systems it’ll be easier to put this to the test. I was mainly interested in characterizing the CPU and GPU performance of Brazos, the two major unknowns.

I didn’t get into the full swing of testing until just before 11AM, and we had a hard stop at 5PM. That didn’t leave a ton of time, but I believe it left enough to get a good idea for what Brazos will perform like in the real world.

As I mentioned in Part 1 of our coverage, the system felt snappy. I had the 11-inch MacBook Air on hand (it served as my Excel-runner while I benchmarked) and interacting with the OS felt no different between the Brazos system and the 1.6GHz MBA. That being said, the MBA is technically much quicker (and more expensive).

AMD Brazos Lineup
APU Model Number of Bobcat Cores CPU Clock Speed GPU Number of GPU Cores GPU Clock Speed TDP
AMD E-350 2 1.6GHz Radeon HD 6310 80 500MHz 18W
AMD E-240 1 1.5GHz Radeon HD 6310 80 500MHz 18W
AMD C-50 2 1.0GHz Radeon HD 6250 80 280MHz 9W
AMD C-30 1 1.2GHz Radeon HD 6250 80 280MHz 9W

The system I tested had AMD’s E-350 processor, the highest end APU you’ll find on a Brazos. This is the chip you’ll find in $400 nettops and notebooks in the $400 - $500 range. This puts its direct competition as really expensive Atom based netbooks, Pentium dual-core notebooks and low end Core i3 notebooks. While the latter two should easily outperform the E-350 in CPU intensive tasks, the GPU comparison is another story entirely. It’s also worth noting that the E-350 carries an 18W TDP (including graphics). During my testing I measured a maximum total system power consumption of around 30W (including the 1366 x 768 LCD panel) while playing games and around 25W while encoding H.264 on the two Bobcat cores. The system idled around 15W however AMD cautioned me that this number was unnaturally high. Final Brazos systems will be far more power optimized and AMD expects numbers to drop down to as low as 5.6W.

AMD is confident we will see Brazos based systems deliver well beyond 6 hours of battery life. AMD's goal is to deliver Atom like battery life and form factors, with a real GPU and hopefully better than Atom performance. We spent our time in Austin trying to find out if its goals were realistic.

Setting Performance Expectations
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  • krumme - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    For the first time in history we have a dirt cheap product to produce, that manages to just handle all the basic task and gaming on the modern windows platform. Its an entry to windows and multimedia for 3B on this earth that can not afford an i3.

    And then this idiotic review giving all the wrong impressions to the casual reader. How sad.
  • Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    An entry for the billions that don't have a computer? Give me a break.

    Most people in the world that currently don't have a computer due to financial reasons wouldn't be able to afford a $300-500 netbook/notebook anyways!

    Even a $100 computer would be difficult for a lot of these people to afford.
  • Kim Leo - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    This comes as a very very small chip, have you ever seen the Ion GPU? It's not exactly small. This will finally make it possible to build better netbooks at either a cheaper price, or the same price. Or just a long lasting work notebook, which is what I'm hoping for.

    People who says this is not impressive live in a dream world, where every netbook has a high clocked Atom with Ion, which somehow magically consumes less power than this 18W beauty.

    This is probably the first product that has gotten me interested in what Apple has planned with it's OS where it uses the GPU for certain tasks, AMD demonstrated that this APU can do a lot more than just being a good netbook CPU, I hope we this getting used to it's full potential.
  • redisnidma - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Zacate is smaller than Atom, it's out-of-order architecture makes it a better overall performer than Atom and in some cases AMD's own nile platform, it has better GPU that rivals current offerings from both AMD's IGP and intel's and it has a lower TDP. I really don't see any reason not to like this little chip. Better performance than Atom, acceptable performance vs Intel's ULV offerings and superb GPU vs everything else.
  • AMDJunkie - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Bobcat is officially a disappointment. $500 machines that can't run Crysis? AMD is dead. :*(
  • SandmanWN - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    As any enthusiast knows, there isn't any $500 notebook that can run Crysis, so there cannot be disappointment in something that doesn't exist.
  • Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Didn't AMD hype claim that Bobcat would be "good enough" for gaming? Clearly, it isn't.
  • silverblue - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Define "gaming". AMD clearly have an idea of what they want these products to run - who says it has to include the latest cutting-edge titles?
  • Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link

    Who says? AMD themselves. Their hype for Bobcat implies you can run modern games on it with ease.
  • silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link

    Throw me a link. I doubt it says anything about running Crysis in Enthusiast settings, for a start.

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