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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