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Benchmark Results: Productivity

Our threaded Photoshop CS5 test definitely favors the low-power Athlon II. Intel’s Celeron SU2300 also fares well, followed by AMD’s E-350. The Atom/Ion combination brings up the rear.

If ASRock’s E350M1 is part of a productivity-oriented machine, then it’s feasible that it’ll need to interact with a scanner and OCR software. Naturally, AMD’s desktop architecture reigns supreme here. But the Celeron, E-350, and Atom all fall within four minutes of each other (a veritable lifetime in the world of high-end CPUs, but relatively less in the power-optimized market).

Converting a WAV file to MP3 is another fairly realistic usage case for a low-power system. And what we see here is interesting. Lame is not threaded, so it’s certainly not surprising to see the 2.8 GHz processor tearing things up. More surprising is that Intel’s efficient Celeron SU2300 takes second place, with its 1.2 GHz clock. The E-350 is right behind, running at 1.6 GHz. And the Atom, with its in-order execution pipeline gets far less done at the same 1.6 GHz clock rate.

This is a result you’ll see again—so keep in mind that Atom really needs the parallelism enabled by a second core and Hyper-Threading to fully maximize its performance.

The same issues trouble Atom here in WinZip, which also isn’t threaded. The 1.6 GHz processor struggles to get the workload completed compared to AMD’s E-350, which runs at the same clock rate, but employs a more performance-oriented architecture. In fact, the Zacate APU is only a minute and a half slower than the 1.2 GHz Celeron SU2300, based on Intel’s Core 2 microarchitecture.

WinRAR is able to take advantage of processors with multiple cores, and the Atom’s loss isn’t as pronounced. Again, AMD’s desktop architecture takes the top spot, following by Intel’s 10 W Celeron, the E-350, and Intel’s Atom 330.

Benchmark Results: Productivity

Benchmark Results: Media Encoding

Not surprisingly, the desktop-class Athlon II, running at 2.8 GHz, finishes this test the fastest. It’s followed by Intel’s 10 W Celeron SU2300. The E-350 takes a third-place spot not far behind, and Intel’s Atom brings up the rear way back there.

Of course, iTunes is single-threaded, so we can see just how badly AMD’s Bobcat core beats Atom on a clock-for-clock basis (we’re talking one 1.6 GHz core per processor here).

It’s probable that most folks aren’t going to push a lightweight system based on E-350, Celeron SU2300, or Atom 330 any harder than an iTunes encode. But we wanted a closer look at threading performance, and MainConcept is able to provide that.

The performance story is indeed much different here, since Atom includes two cores and Hyper-Threading support. Instead of the blowout seen in iTunes, ASRock’s E350M1 is just barely able to scrape by the IONITX-L-E. Then again, remember the Atom board still costs $190 compared to the Brazos platform’s $110 or so. Even if you factor in the benefit of onboard Wi-Fi from Zotac, you’re still getting a lot more performance for your money via Brazos.

Here, Intel’s Atom processor actually manages to sneak past AMD’s E-350. With that said, if you’re doing heavy lifting in HandBrake, it’s likely worth spending money on a separate motherboard and desktop processor, rather than trying to get mobile architectures to do that job. Even the low-power Athlon II is 285% faster than AMD’s E-350.

This really goes without saying, but if you’re expecting to run desktop-class workloads, you shouldn’t show up with a mobile-oriented processor. The Athlon II X2 240e simply mops the floor with the three other contenders here.

Power Consumption And Pricing

Power is where our performance numbers get put into context. Remember, I threw a pretty wide net here, looking for the best way to quantify what AMD’s Brazos platform could do.

· I used a low-power desktop processor with integrated Radeon HD 4250 graphics for the folks wondering just how much better one of AMD’s current 45 W parts perform. There’s also the comparison between Radeon HD 4250 and Radeon HD 6310.

· I used a Celeron SU2300-based Mini-ITX board with Ion graphics for the folks who’re already using Intel’s ultra-low voltage mobile processors on the desktop. There’s also the comparison between Radeon HD 6310 and Ion.

· I used an Atom 330-based Mini-ITX board with Ion graphics because Atom is E-350’s natural competition. Remember that the dual-core 1.6 GHz Atom 330 isn’t much slower than the newer Atom D510 at 1.66 GHz, and the pounding Atom takes here isn’t going to be mitigated by an incrementally faster clock and more efficient platform architecture.

The Athlon II-based config is unquestionably the fastest, but its idle and the E-350’s load figures barely overlap. They’re in completely different leagues.

AMD’s E-350 is actually more power-hungry than Intel’s 10 W Celeron SU2300 and 8 W Atom 330. No surprise there. But the average power numbers separate all three platforms by less than 4 W. Now, yes, the two Intel-equipped boards have Wi-Fi cards. But you also have to remember that they’re armed with Nvidia’s Ion chipset, while the E350M1 uses AMD’s A50M “Hudson” FCH. Zacate’s 18 W TDP includes graphics. This isn’t the case for Celeron or Atom.

Interestingly Celeron uses more power under load and less power at idle than Atom. So, both Intel-based platforms average about 28 W across the PCMark Vantage run. The Zacate-based setup averages 32 W.

Pricing

Now, when you look at the power chart and the PCMark Vantage benchmarks, the Celeron/Ion combo would seem to have a modest advantage over AMD’s latest and greatest. But then you have to take pricing into consideration.

Zotac’s IONITX-P-E currently sells for about $200. Its Mini PCI Express card can be found for roughly $20, so we’ll call that $180 for the motherboard and processor. ASRock is planning to sell the E350M1 for $110. That’s 61% of the Celeron board’s price, even if you factor out the wireless module. The E350M1 offers better gaming performance too, thanks to its Radeon HD 6310 graphics. Ion simply can’t keep up.

Comparing AMD’s Zacate APU to Atom is even easier. You’ll pay $190-ish for the IONITX-L-E, and it too includes wireless networking. In every discipline, the Brazos platform destroys it, including (and especially) price. The only compromise is a <4 W average power consumption disadvantage across a PCMark Vantage run.

The desktop platform I built was more anecdotal than anything. We already knew its performance would far exceed E-350, as would its power use. The price is up there, too, though. The 880GITX-A-E sells for $115 on its own, while the Athlon II X2 240e sells for $75 or so.

At the same time, with those numbers in mind, an 880G-based Mini-ITX setup is actually your best bet for performance/$, so long as your enclosure is capable of handling the higher power numbers. The Zotac board doesn’t offer PCI Express expansion, so its options are limited in a gaming context, but Blu-ray movies play back smoothly thanks to the integrated GPU’s UVD2 logic.

Conclusion

So, there’s a lot of talk about what Fusion is and how APUs are going to change the face of computing. AMD’s own Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s products group, went out on a fairly long limb at this year’s CES by saying:

“We believe that AMD Fusion processors are, quite simply, the greatest advancement in processing since the introduction of the x86 architecture more than forty years ago. In one major step, we enable users to experience HD everywhere as well as personal supercomputing capabilities in notebooks that can deliver all-day battery life. It's a new category, a new approach, and opens up exciting new experiences for consumers.”

The greatest advancement in processing since x86 was introduced? While we undoubtedly haven't seen as many top-secret projects as Rick, the Zacate APU we have on hand definitely doesn't deserve that sort of pat on the back. Now, according to AMD’s numbers, its “all-day” result is actually 11 hours of runtime on an E-350-based notebook with a 62 Wh battery sitting idle. Active, running 3DMark06, the platform purportedly achieves four and a half hours.

Those certainly aren’t bad figures if they carry over to shipping products later this quarter. But in the context of nettops based on ASRock’s E350M1 and boards like it, we’re still dealing with a fairly basic concept here: Zacate is the combination of processor cores and graphics elements sharing a memory controller, similar to Intel’s Atom-based Pine Trail platform, and indeed the Sandy Bridge processors that just launched a couple of weeks ago. Dress the technology up with new acronyms and sweeping initiatives, but the basic tenets distill down to this: integration is the key to higher performance, lower power consumption, and lower bill of materials in the mobile and mainstream desktop spaces. This is less about an earth-shattering vision and more about smart business.

We’re already seeing companies like CyberLink make focused optimizations based on the fact that graphics and execution cores now live on the same die, but we have to imagine AMD is hoping to see much more impactful development efforts in its Fusion-based products that pack more in the way of GPU muscle. We can only assume that’s still in the works. For now, the ramifications of Fusion-as-an-initiative are limited.

What we do have are the benefits of integration and a new processor architecture from AMD. The company clearly looks to be going after Intel’s Atom processor. It’s an easy target, given its “good-enough” approach to computing. And indeed, the Brazos platform decimates Atom in single-threaded apps, still manages to beat it decisively in more parallelized programs, and embarrasses it in anything having to do with graphics. Once we start getting our hands on netbooks featuring Zacate and Ontario APUs, we’ll get a better picture of how they’ll compare in price and longevity.

On the desktop, Brazos goes up against more formidable competition (albeit pricier competition, too). The experience of using a Brazos-based machine is night-and-day better than a desktop with Intel’s Atom. The Celeron SU2300 is an impressive little CPU, matched to Nvidia’s Ion chipset, and we’d have to call it comparable. AMD’s Athlon II X2 is significantly faster, but you also incur completely dissimilar power consumption, too.

Unfortunately, this slide, which AMD presented back when it previewed Brazos, is entirely too optimistic. Zacate can go head-to-head against Intel's lowest-wattage Core 2-based Celeron processor, but I can't imagine it faring well against the Arrandale-based U3600, which runs at the same 1.2 GHz and costs the same $134. Even less likely is an even match-up against a Pentium-branded chip. In reality, I think AMD needs to shift the Intel column of the above slide up a notch to more accurately reflect its performance.

Where Brazos cannot be beaten is price. ASRock anticipates selling its E350M1 for $110, and we hear that competing boards will go for $100. Buy a case, power supply, 4 GB memory module, and a mobile hard drive if you’re on a budget. Factor in a Blu-ray drive if you want it in the living room. That’s a platform I’d like to have as an HTPC or commons-area kiosk in the house.

Had AMD been given a choice, I don’t think it would have decided to use Zacate and Ontario as the springboards for heralding the arrival of Fusion. As fate would have it, though, we’ll have to wait for the Sabine platform’s 32 nm Llano APU (expected in Q2’11) for a better look inside AMD’s plans for the future.

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