The Brazos Performance Preview: AMD E-350 Benchmarked
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 16, 2010 12:01 AM ESTUpdate: 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.
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mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Troll spoken. Beware.redisnidma - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
After reading this preview, I am starting to believe the rumors floating around in the web about Anand's bias to intel. Shame on him if it's true.Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I don't believe that's true :) Is there anything in the article that you believe incorrectly stated the performance of the E-350 vs. its price (2.2GHz Pentium DC/i3-350) and power competitors (Atom)?Take care,
Anand
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Problem is not the numbers themselves.It is the focus of the article to workstation/gaming market along with an unfortunate selection of benchmarks.
For the uninitiated without a gift of reading between the lines, the whole article comes out saying "Oh, another over-hyped CPU crap from AMD barely matching a 2yrs old Intel Atom. Lets move on to discuss some important SB rumors".
khimera2000 - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I am starting to get that feeling to unfortionately. Ive read this sight for a long time although i only this year started posting it does look like the language used is getting more and more lop sided, Although i still enjoy reading the sight im just not getting what I use to get out of there reviews.Then again I can be byast because of the AMD 6xxx reviews... which did feel vary vary bias, and was blasted not for the reviewing and conclusion but the choice of componants for testing. at least thats how i see it.
Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Are you serious? The gaming market was compared because well, you know, AMD HYPED Bobcat for gaming!This is ridiculous. AMD hyped gaming performance and GPU performance for Brazos, and therefore gaming benchmarks are perfectly applicable in this situation.
If AMD talks the talk, they need to walk the walk. AMD should have never hyped the GPU performance or gaming performance of Brazos in the first place, given that Brazos struggles in a variety of gaming situations.
mino - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
No, AMD did not "HYPE" Bobcat for gaming.It said that Zacate is a game changer that provides discrete-class performance to the APU market.
That market is currently represented by a really mediocre Atom APU's that can not even launch the games, not to mention playing them.
It actually went out of its way NOT to hype Ontario by excluding it from its Fusion branding.
Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
Zacate is not a game-changer, because it does NOT provide "discrete class" GPU performance.Bobcat was hyped through the hyping of Zacate.
silverblue - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - link
But it obviously DOES provide discrete-class GPU performance. Low end, yes, but it still fulfills its purpose. And for far less power than the low-end discrete cards will use.Dark_Archonis - Tuesday, November 16, 2010 - link
I am starting to believe the rumors of more and more AMD PR people infiltrating tech websites are true ...