AMD E-350 APU and Brazos platform performance preview
Having seen some previews and discussion of its architecture last week, today we finally get the chance to sink our teeth into AMD's first "Fusion" derived Zacate-based APU and its Brazos platform from a performance perspective. A number of sites have give it a once over, so check out the coverage below.
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.
AnandtechWith our first test we see some interesting data. The AMD Zacate E-350 processor trails the dual core Atom D525 by about 12% in our productivity tests but shows itself to be slightly faster than the dual core Atom in all other tests, except for the gaming test, where Zacate's integrated GPU offers over 2X the performance, and in the communications test where it shows 40% more throughput. Finally, the Turion II Neo K625's more midrange architecture allows it to stretch its legs a bit more over the Zacate and Atom dual-core low power chips here.
Hot HardwareThe GPU portion of the APU is based on the award winning architectures from AMD's desktop line of graphics cards, though scaled WAY down to meet power requirements. The Radeon HD 6310 graphics core is the labeled used for the 18w APU SKU that combines 80 stream processors / 2 SIMDs running at 500 MHz each while the Radeon HD 6250 takes those some 80 stream processors down to 280 MHz. (Just a note, AMD has started calling these "Vision Engine nanocores for parallel computing capability and graphics". I likely won't.)
PC PerspectiveI kicked off my freestyle gaming tests with DiRT 2, a long-time TR favorite and one of the better racing games out on the PC. At 1366x768 with the "low" preset, the demo's Morocco track unfurled at a solid 20 FPS, give or take two or three. Frame rates dropped into the low teens upon crashes, but the game was surprisingly smooth and playable overall.
Next up was Left 4 Dead 2, which I ran at 1366x768 with trilinear filtering, no antialiasing, high shader detail, and medium effect, model, and texture detail. In the first map of the Dead Center campaign, frame rates ranged from a low of about 13 to a high of 36 FPS. From a seat-of-the-pants perspective, the game was completely playable despite notable choppiness during heavy action. Those massive zombie swarms aren't easy on low-end hardware, but Zacate did a reasonably good job of keeping things smooth.
The Tech ReportNext up was Left 4 Dead 2, which I ran at 1366x768 with trilinear filtering, no antialiasing, high shader detail, and medium effect, model, and texture detail. In the first map of the Dead Center campaign, frame rates ranged from a low of about 13 to a high of 36 FPS. From a seat-of-the-pants perspective, the game was completely playable despite notable choppiness during heavy action. Those massive zombie swarms aren't easy on low-end hardware, but Zacate did a reasonably good job of keeping things smooth.
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