News AMD's Brazos and Zacate Benchmarked

Thanks Gareth. This piece was a nice short accurate thought provoking piece on the new AMD offering.

I too agree that while it is a good single low powered CPU/GPU solution, it still has a fair bit of catching up to do with the market satuarion of Atom or Atom/ION combination.

The real question here for the low end netbook, low powered notebook is whether AMD have come too late to the market. Maybe not since they are so cheap to replace and I've had two myself over the last 2 years for one accident to another.

 

Not too late for me, who thought that Atom powered anything was a complete waste of space.

Personally, i have no interest in tablet computing and it has probably already reached saturation point with the ipad. Netbooks/ultra-portable laptops haven't even begun to reach their potential. This sector has been dominated by under-powered, low price crap or over-priced, low battery life products.

The main use for a low power netbook or ultra-portable has got to be web browsing, e-mail, with a bit of HD video streaming and maybe some audio/video encoding + casual gaming. GPU accelerated video and GPU accelerated web browsing is available on this platform, making genuine multi-tasking a possibility on a low end machine.

From Tom's Hardware review:

 

i think this is important to bring up, because tom's hardware is (or at least at one point was) a very biased site and they were saying how zacate is performing very well (altho i'm a little confused how the celeron did so well considering what it was). i think an atom with ion could possibly beat zacate in cpu+gpu tests.

if anyone wants REAL facts, don't rely on 1 website. i check guru3d for benchmarks, i check bittech for tech news and backup benchmarks, and i use phoronix for linux news and untested benchmarks.

 

Power consumption figures:

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/AMD-Zacate-E350-Processor-Performance-Preview/?page=8


Quick summary:

Zacate owns.

 

Why is it when Bit-tech speak the truth about product reviews the fanboys come out trying to quote from other sites, as if they can be trusted any more than Bit-Tech.

Face facts gents, maybe it just isn't that good in the first place.

 

Do you even bother to read anything before trolling every AMD related thread?

bit-tech haven't reviewed anything, the only info available IS from other sites, including the info which is the source of the article.

 

sites like tomshardware IS a site that some people find more trustworthy than bit-tech (personally i don't but some do). and like i said in my previous post, its better to check multiple sites, especially non-biased ones, and just get a mental average of what the product performs best against. also, you can't base how good a product is on 1 test that is currently about 5 years old.
i've seen test results where a triple core phenom II has outperformed one of the lower-end quad core i7s with HT on. that does not at all mean its faster just because a couple tests said so.

honestly, you MUST be an intel fanboy considering the fact that you did not realize what i and frontline have mentioned.

 

Great article....
I just love all the pie charts, benchmarks, and the two tons of information in this article that compared all the different cpu's and configurations together so I could see for myself how the chips performed. Great job with all that DATA. Must of been a pain to do all those test. I'm glad you took the time to do them and post the results, Thanks.

Oh wait I'm sorry wrong Thread cause this article offered NOTHING!!

 

i not looked at tomware site for long time (2 years+) norm junk reviews or mistakes that should not be there (went down hill when that media company taken hold of them)

bit-tech/cpc, hardocp, anandtech

 

Toms Hardware and Hardware Heaven are the only two major sites which have reviewed AMD Zacate ATM. The Toms Hardware review is the only one which compares Zacate to a CULV Ion and an Atom Ion motherboards.

 

Here is a review of a notebook with a E350:

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/laptops/hp-pavilion-dm1.aspx?page=2

From the review:
"The dual-core 1.6-GHz AMD E-350 CPU and 3GB of RAM powered the dm1z to a PCMark Vantage score of 2,198. That's well above the netbook average (1,351), and beats out the 1215N (1,921) which has a 1.8-GHz Intel Atom D525, and the Toshiba Satellite T215D (1,938), which has a 1.7-GHz AMD Athlon II Neo K125 CPU. However, the dm1z is 1,400 points below the ultraportable average, and comes up short compared to the Lenovo Thinkpad X100e (2,382), which has a dual-core AMD Turion processor, and the Dell Inspiron M101z (2,431), which has a 1.3-GHz AMD Athlon CPU. Even the Acer Aspire 1410, which has a 1.2-GHz Intel Celeron SU2300 CPU, fared better (2,475).
However, synthetic benchmarks are one thing, and real-world tests are another. The dm1z took 2 minutes and 45 seconds to transcode a five-minute, 114MB MPEG4 to AVI using Oxelon Media Encoder. That's more than twice as fast as the netbook average (5:56), but still a minute slower than the ultraportable average (1:58). The dm1z's time also falls between Atom-powered netbooks like the 1215N (3:17) and older AMD-powered machines such as the Dell M101z (2:16).

Converting a five-minute 1080p video to an iPod touch format using MediaShow Espresso took 7 minutes and 21 seconds. That's twice as fast as the Dell Inspiron Duo (14:44), and much better than the 1215N (12:08) and the Aspire 1410 (11:31). Despite having a 7,200-rpm, 320GB hard drive, the dm1z was slow to duplicate a 5GB folder of multimedia; it took 4 minutes and 36 seconds, a rate of 18.4 MBps. That's even slower than the netbook average (18.9 MBps)."

 

Anyway,it will probably be better to wait a few more weeks until more reviews are released to get a better view of the pros and cons of the new AMD E350 based motherboards. Pricing is going to be another major factor too.

 

well
how much power use the so called faster Atom D525 was paired with Nvidia's Ion NG compared to zacate?
and you also have to remember that if you buy a amd zacate netbook/nettop you are guaranteed to get a system that can decode hd in hardware, have alot better 3d perf, and fast enught cpu, if you buy a intel atom system you might get a Intel integrated crapstics, integrated crapstics + a broadcom hd decoder or if your lucky you can pay premium for nvidia ion

 

I know, lets blame Intel because it's all their fault....and let's blame Nvidia as well...because they are doing well again.....and they aren't aloud to because if we can't do a decent job of anything THEN NO ONE CAN!

Come on guys! seriously for one minute. Why bad mouth Bit-Tech just because they report that the current AMD product has some small failings in one particular area. It's not huge, just one small area on this particular product line. Why bad mouth this site as if it's somehow their fault? Quoting other sites here, just shows how desperate you all seem to be for AMD to do well. Of course we would all like to see AMD do well but you can't shoot the messenger when it clearly hasnlt gone well on this particular occasion. If you don't like what Bit-Tech has to say, I'm sure they aren't making you stick around. Although, they must have some of your respect since you DO come here and read their excellent, well informed and accurate topics.

Peace!

 

Insulting other forum members is not appreciated

 

Sorry Boss! Can that go for them as well?

 

Removed by Bindi

OnT: Any competition is better than no competition. I am not in the market for these sorts of chips from any vendor but it's good to see AMD advancing their tech in at least one area. I would have thought despite maybe being beaten by the atom+ion combo, the fact that GPU+CPU are all on one chip would make for a much more competitive price?

 

Snips: Appreciate the support but please conduct yourself more appropriately in future. Flaming others is not the way to go about making your point.

I've got the Gigabyte E350-USB3 (iirc) coming next week and I'm trying to source a D525 and NV Ion part to compare it to, but people don't want to lend me stuff if they aren't the focus of reviews usually. I've already got a SU2300 laptop and old D330, and I intend to do a clock to clock comparative against an Athlon II X2 as well rather than use a 240e that Tom's did. For a desktop CPU comparative, if I can disable one of the cores in the BIOS ill set it up as a Sempron 140 (£22 CPU): Zacate mini-ITX boards should retail for around the same cost as Sempron 140+basic 880G. There's a lot I'd like to do, but just don't have the parts yet (plus TW goes on Chinese New Year holiday next week).

I was going to use one to do a guide into a low cost Linux XBMC box, but AMD still don't provide any UVD drivers for Ubuntu either.

 

when will next gen Phenom II's be released? are they to be fusion?

 

Llano. It will have a Phenom II core.