http://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazos-review-amds-e350-supplants-ion-for-miniitx
Final Words
With the settlement done and no DMI license in place, it's clear that
there won't be another ION from NVIDIA (at least not based on x86). What
Brazos is however is the ION successor that NVIDIA never built. For just
over $100 you'll be able to buy a mini-ITX board with an E-350 that's
faster than Atom, faster than ION and more feature rich than both. While I
don't believe Brazos has enough CPU power under the hood to be a truly
high end HTPC, it's easily good enough for a low cost, value HTPC. Popular
codecs are well accelerated and with full DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD
bitstreaming support Brazos is solid. Flash acceleration is also present
although it looks like there are still some kinks that need to be worked
out there.
Overall performance is much better than Atom, particularly in single
threaded applications. Brazos and the E-350 can make for a very affordable
email/web browsing machine, and run those applications much faster than
Atom could. As our more complex workloads showed however, the E-350 is
limited to the same type of general usage models as Atom (with a bunch of
new media and gaming options). You can run heavier apps on the E-350,
you'll just be far better off with an Athlon II instead.
The Radeon HD 6310 proves to be a good match for the Bobcat cores in the
E-350. There's not much value in adding a faster GPU via the on-board PCIe
x4 slot as most games will be at least somewhat CPU bound. The resulting
CPU/GPU combination is something that's typically as good as, if not
better than Intel's Core i5 661 in games. In some cases the Radeon HD
6310/E-350 combination nips at the heels of Intel's Core i3 2100.
Unfortunately in modern titles that's not always enough to have a playable
experience, but with older games you should be able to do more with Brazos
than you ever could with Atom or even ION for that matter. The CPU/GPU
balance in the E-350 is good enough that I feel like Llano could make for
a pretty decent value gaming machine.
Just as was the case with Atom, Brazos isn't going make for a very
powerful primary PC. Load up the thread count or throw heavier workloads
at it and the E-350 doesn't look all that much better than an Atom D510.
What it will give you however is better single-threaded performance than
Atom and a much better feature set. Brazos makes those secondary or
tertiary computers you build much better than they would have been
otherwise with Atom. I would like to see more CPU performance out of the
platform and I'm not too keen on meeting the single core versions, but
viewed through ION glasses Brazos looks good.
For AMD, Brazos has to be exciting. The company finally has a value
offering that it doesn't have to discount heavily to sell. Brazos does
very well against Atom on absolute performance, die size and price. The
E-350 isn't the most powerful Fusion APU we'll meet, but it's a great way
to introduce the family.
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