Anand, I don't mean to be rude, but I'm curious why you are constantly fixated on bitstreaming support for HTPC's. Why is it any better than 5.1 channel LPCM? The only difference I've managed to find between the two are vague, superstitious assertions that LPCM is harder to sync correctly with the video than bitstreaming. In fact, LPCM actually has one advantage: you can mix in overlaid sounds, such as commentary, which AFAIK is impossible with bitstreaming. Thanks, Confused Seer
The reason is that without a protected audio path, or stripping the DRM, audio quality is reduced when it is decoded and PCM is sent over HDMI.
I'm not sure about PCM when a PAP is available, but when native Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio are bitstreamed to a compatible audio receiver there is no quality loss (outside of what is done by the AVR).
Between the two, blu-ray owners prefer the lossless option. Lossless PCM versus lossless DTHD/DTSMAHD decoding at the AVR level is equal otherwise, but not in this case.
I don't think the PCM route will ever be 'fixed', at least not without jettisoning DRM, which is unlikely.
I am strongly against copyright infringement, but this is such a good example of how content providers are providing an inferior product to the illegal alternative. It is a huge, huge problem in the industry.
I paid for a DVD, why must I sit through FBI warnings and deal with down-converted output when a less legitimate copy does not have this nuisance?
That's what I had to use to play my perfectly legal copy of Inception using my laptop with my fully patched fully legal bluray software. I think I should charge the bluray consortium for my copy of AnyDvD because it's only only way I can play back my legally owned films!
Yes, but so long as you use HDMI you have that PAP. And all of the points in question have been about LPCM over HDMI. So that doesn't really answer the question.
Just because it is a HDMI connection does not ensure a PAP. Especially in older chips.
If the solution can do LPCM over HDMI without reducing the quality one bit (or Hz) then most people wouldn't care. Bitstreaming ensures 100% quality intact.
I directed my post to Anand, not seeing that Jarred wrote the article. However, my point still stands when directed in a larger context to the site as a whole.
For loads of irrelavant multithreaded benchmarks, cpu heavy gaming benchmarks and encoding benchmarks that absolutely none of the target customers is going to use - if they know the names of the situations at all.
Who cares about ordinary surfing, wav-mp3 conversion, zip, l4d type gaming and just plain ordinary office work?
Lets prepare for comparing battery life to Atom, efficiency to culv, power to core2. And let the 75mm2 on 40nm TSMC for 100usd all included stand as a minor issue compared to to abolutely catastrofic lack of bluray 3D
Well that's because "ordinary surfing, audio conversion and plain ordinary office work" can not be benchmarked. A test relies on data to convince everyone because it makes no sense the test says "it works fluently in surfing and office work". Everyone believes that APU is a nice chip, but it cannot do well in benchmark, and therefore, the media has a reasonable motivation to write the test in the way Intel PR told them :)
Sorry, but you're completely wrong. Intel said nothing to me; AMD would have loved for us to be a lot more positive, but that's not how I see things. Atom is definitely "too slow", CULV was fine about a year ago, but even web surfing demands a lot.
Things I'll be happy to try and quantify: Facebook performance. I am on FB a lot, and it can be a bit sluggish even on my desktop. Sure, Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz are casual games and not something everyone needs, but I can say without doubt that they suck on Atom. Will they be better on Zacate or Ontario chips? I doubt it, simply because I don't think Flash games leverage the GPU enough. (Zuma Blitz for instance pegs one of my Core 2 Quad CPU cores at 100% when I play it.)
If "works fluently for surfing and office work" is all you want/need, you can use pretty much any computer built post-2004 and be happy. If you throw in video playback, as stated, that's the killer app for Brazos. If you're after a snappy experience, I don't think even an SSD will pull Atom or Brazos up to the level where I can do everything outside of gaming and never think, "this is taking too long." But hey, I'll be happy to try it. Give me some way to quantify this in a graph, though, because subjectively saying it "works fluently" is marketing speak for "slow but fast enough to run Windows 7". Next year, even ARM will be in that same category.
I'm sorry but you pretty much misunderstood what I said. I mean, that's what's happening in my country, where all the media are downplaying APUs by comparing it to a Core i3 or Athlon or Phenom or something else that is irrelevant. I never doubted the fairness of your test on Anandtech (except the ones for Phenom II X6s) and I'm just saying a common approach taken by many media manipulated by Intel PRs.
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I get accused of being anti-AMD so often that it's almost laughable. (See the comments in the Global Foundries/AMD article from last week.) While many people can easily get by with slower CPUs, I'm sure I'm not one of them, and I have trouble believing most of our readers are.
Facebook is a huge one for example; as a parent, what happens when your kid starts to complain about all his/her favorite Facebook games running like poop on their new laptop? I don't play Farmville (anymore at least... LOL), but virtually every Facebook game that leverages graphics seems like it will kill anything less than Core 2 Duo. I suppose we can take the Apple approach and just blame Flash, but that's a cop-out as well. People are making millions of dollars by creating Facebook games, and because of the ease of creation that Flash affords, we get content from unexpected avenues.
Anyway, if anyone wants to accuse me of Intel fanboyism, read the last paragraph of my intro to an old Buyers' Guide (back in the days when AMD was actually ahead): http://www.anandtech.com/show/1550 Pretty much every BG I did up until Core 2 Duo launched said something to the effect of "AMD is the better choice". Unfortunately, the shoe is on the other foot now.
It's seems Anandtech always gets in to trouble when it forgets the level of quality it's readers expect from it.
If a Core2Duo is the bees knees then what was the purpose of Atom? Atoms purpose is the same as Brazos and that is to fit into small form factors at lower power, and lower price than what CULV processors can fit into. The bone to pick isn't that one time long ago you said something positive about AMD. The problem is that you've done an editorial with two benches and IR and from there you've interjected paragraph upon paragraph which questions the validity of Brazos even though the benches aren't really there for us to see in detail in order to agree with the articles premise or even disagree with it.
Atom wasn't "low-hanging fruit" when it didn't have a competitor, but now it is ? When has AMD ever been able to come close to Intel in power per watt in any market? I can't remember when it's ever happened.
You said this, "This is essentially the killer app of Brazos compared to Atom, and it’s important to keep things in perspective. These chips have a much better IGP than Atom, but at least on the nettop side of things the faster AMD E-350 isn’t miles ahead of Atom D510 in the CPU department. When we drop clock speeds down to 1.0GHz (dual-core C-50) from 1.6GHz (E-350) and compare that to the Atom N550 (1.5GHz)… well, 62.5% of the performance of E-350 compared to 90.4% of the performance of D510 means that in some tests the N550 will probably beat the C-50 for raw CPU potential. Yeah, that’s a concern for me. The GPU is the real difference, so naturally a video decoding test is the best-case scenario. I suspect C-50 will be underpowered for most 3D games, even if the DX11 GPU inside Brazos is fast enough—it will just be the AMD equivalent of Atom + NVIDIA ION, only without as many discrete chips."
What benchmark did you use here? What was power like? We have no idea. I can't agree with the premise because you've provided no numbers other than you downclocked a E-350 processor to 1Ghz and compared it to a DC processor running at 1.5. You shimmy over to talk about CPU prowess using what benchmark we don't know and then parry over to talk about weak GPU performance based on what? Certainly not anything earlier in the article. The logic to make certain statements is weak to say the least because they are written just by themselves with their supporting evidence being nothing more than "feeling" or suspicions, which in the later paragraphs starts talking about how great Brazos is again. Huh? (BTW less discrete chips at this price point matters.)
The problem isn't that there's some disparaging remarks against AMD. The problem is that the article goes too far with opinion without enough benches to back up what it's saying.
"Unfortunately, the shoe is on the other foot now." Based on what?
Way to ignore what I've said about Atom from the beginning, but let's just grab snippets from a few of our Atom review conclusions:
HP 5103 (N550): "Looking just at the performance side of things, then, the current Atom landscape fails to impress. Intel knows this, and so do the manufacturers, which is why the focus with netbooks now is more about providing an inexpensive secondary mobile device where you can access all of your regular programs and data, albeit slowly."
HP 5102 (N450): "Great Build, but Still Atom... Given we’re looking at a netbook that’s now past its prime, we’re still generally impressed with what the Mini 5102 offers. The build quality is far better than anything we’ve seen from a netbook to date, with the best keyboard in a 10” netbook we've ever used. It also comes with a matte screen that’s much easier to use outdoors, though contrast ratio is still poor. However, for $100 more than the competition this is essentially the same old Atom performance."
ASUS 1215N: "A Decent Netbook, but Atom Remains Slow... CULV will eat the dual-core Atom for lunch and not even bother spitting the bones out. You don’t even need to ask about Core i3 or its ULV equivalent."
Samsung N210: "At the end of the day, the insides of the Samsung N210 aren't likely to inspire, and they weren't supposed to. Netbooks just aren't exciting kit where hardware and performance are concerned...."
Or the first Pineview netbook review, the ASUS 1005PE: "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back... Internally, the changes haven't resulted in a system that's significantly faster, but the one change is very noticeable. Our initial tests indicate that Pineview has improved battery life on the 1005 laptops by a whopping 25%. If you want a netbook that can last 10+ hours and you want to spend less than $400, the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE has exactly what you need.... The 1201N is significantly faster than anything you're likely to see from Pine Trail netbooks. Dual-core Atom 330 trumps single-core N450, and ION pummels the GMA 3150, takes its lunch money, and sends it crying home to mama.... The latest release of Atom brings quite a few changes, but the net result isn't quite as impressive as we were hoping. We have an integrated memory controller in the CPU along with a GPU on package. Those are cost saving measures that also provide some benefits in terms of power requirements. What they apparently don't provide is a significant improvement in performance."
The Pine Trail launch was when I wanted something more like Brazos. I wanted a GPU more like ION, and we got GMA 3150. However, that was over a year ago! It's great that Brazos is better than Atom in the GPU department, but look at our nettop preview of Brazos. 1.6GHz E-350 vs. 1.66GHz D510, and the performance difference is anywhere from 10% to 75% faster for AMD. Great. Now cut the clock speed of the E-350 down to 1.0GHz, and chop the GPU clock almost in half, and I'm a lot more concerned.
E-350 is looking like a solid offering, and the Lenovo ThinkPad X120e is probably the most compelling laptop I've seen so far with Brazos. Battery life will probably be six hours instead of 10-12 (just an estimate -- it might hit eight), but performance should be about 60% faster than C-50. 60% is a huge difference; I don't think anyone would disagree with that. At 1.2GHz with the single-core C-30, some CPU tasks should still be faster on AMD than Atom N450, but 1.0GHz on an architecture that appears to be slower clock-for-clock than K8 and CULV makes me concerned.
Sorry if that's not specific enough for you. How about this. One year ago, I wrote a roundup of three CULV laptops. The title: "Intel Core 2 CULV Roundup: Who Needs Atom?" From the conclusion again: "CULV is a great way to balance performance, battery life, and cost while keeping a small size. Given the choice, we'd either go with one of the CULV models or we'd move up to CULV with switchable graphics; Atom remains more of a secondary (or tertiary) computer. Sure they cost more, but we feel the cost is justified."
I don't know how many times I have to say Atom is a lousy solution for most users before it sinks in. So when someone comes along and states that "Atom wasn't "low-hanging fruit" when it didn't have a competitor, but now it is?" you're clearly running around with blinders on. We gave exactly one editors' choice award to an Atom netbook; that was the ASUS 1001P, which happened to deliver a nice matte screen with a high contrast ratio along with all the usual Atom shortcomings. We called it our favorite netbook, and so it was, but even then we ended the review with this:
"The final caveat is that you need to stop and ask yourself: do you want a netbook, or do you want to pay ~$100 more for an 11.6" CULV machine like the Acer Aspire 1410 or Gateway EC14? If your only concerns are price, size and battery life with no regards to performance, a netbook will do the job. With over twice the computing power, a much more livable WXGA screen resolution, 802.11n/Gigabit Ethernet, and not much in the way of a size, weight, or battery life penalty, it's hard not to recommend going the CULV route."
So please don't try to pawn me off as an Intel shill, or someone that changes tune every time AMD comes out with a new part, or whatever other label you happen to have. Brazos isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread; it's merely "better than Atom", which was marginal at best. I've been pointing at CULV as the minimum target I'd recommend to most people for over a year now, so if Brazos chips can't hit CULV performance levels I'll be disappointed. Then I'll end up with, "well, CULV for $100-$150 less" and walk away saying it looks like an okay platform but there's plenty of room for improvement. And the next iteration with up to four Bobcat cores isn't exactly what I'm looking for; how about two cores in a netbook that can clock up to 2.0GHz and still not require more than 12W? That's what I want from Brazos today, because then it would be faster than CULV in every test, it would have a better GPU, and it would actually decimate Atom netbooks.
I don't think you get where I'm coming from. You can provide bad things you've said about Atom until the cows come home. That's not apart of my concern nor does it factor much into my statements. My issue is not that there's some bad things said about AMD. The problem is that this editorial and no other is lacking in benchmarks to support the claims that it is making.
Yet somehow you're able to come up with a thesis on performance and comment with worry and suspicion when you haven't provided much in the way of benchmarks. This isn't about flaming you. This is about wondering on the lack of quality. You have your opinion for sure, but in THIS editorial there's not much to back it. That's the issue. A secondary issue is the lack of logic when making statements when they aren't backed by real benchmarking numbers. Lets take a look at your restatement.
"It's great that Brazos is better than Atom in the GPU department, but look at our nettop preview of Brazos. 1.6GHz E-350 vs. 1.66GHz D510, and the performance difference is anywhere from 10% to 75% faster for AMD. Great. Now cut the clock speed of the E-350 down to 1.0GHz, and chop the GPU clock almost in half, and I'm a lot more concerned."
Houston we have a problem! You haven't provided benches so that we can SEE it for ourselves as to why exactly you are concerned. This isn't PCWorld or Fudzilla it's Anandtech. There's a difference at least in my eyes. What CPU test did you run? Was it Photoshop? Cinebench? Angry Birds? What was is it that gave you that suspicion, worry or concern? We don't know. We will never know until you provide what metric you used.
"So please don't try to pawn me off as an Intel shill, or someone that changes tune every time AMD comes out with a new part, or whatever other label you happen to have. "
Did I say you were? Nope. Don't pass me off as just another person who is critiquing your editorial because there were unfavorable things said about AMD. I could care less. You've said other things in the past, but they were backed up by benches so there's no need to say anything. It was what it was. However you do make it easy for people to say such things when you say...."And the next iteration with up to four Bobcat cores isn't exactly what I'm looking for" BASED ON WHAT BENCHMARK!?? Good grief I'm not looking for AMD praise I'm looking for a benchmark that backs up claims like these.
Seriously? Is that all you've got? You people with your "Anandtech is all about Intel" are delusional. Let me try to help: "look at our nettop preview of Brazos". The article in question actually LINKED the article. Here it is again: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-perf...
PS CS4: Brazos is 9% faster than Atom. x264 1st pass: 7% faster than Atom x264 2nd pass: 5% faster 3dsmax: 26% faster CB singlethreaded: 65% faster CB multithreaded: 11% faster Par2: 4% faster Winrar: 6% faster
But those are all CPU intensive benchmarks! Well, yeah, that's the point of a CPU comparison. You don't benchmark a CPU by running a test that's bottlenecked by the hard drive. Hell, if Brazos is only 65% faster than Atom in the best-case result, I'm even more concerned than what Anandtech is voicing in this editorial piece! E-350 should be the lowest Brazos offering, but the C-30 and C-50 appear to be there to compete with netbooks for battery life, even if they may end up slower in everything outside of video decoding and GPU-intensive tasks.
Thanks for link to the E-350 which has benchmarks. The remarks about performance within this article are about C-50 and C-30 in this article. So seriously that's what I'm talking about. Thanks for helping though.
Hey buddy, I very much appreciated the summaries without benchmarks. The benchmarks will come later. If you don't like it, screw off, because I want to read them. They've done this many times before and have always backed themselves up later with data.
I've rarely if ever seen anandtech's comments get so narrow to the side :P kc77, dude, read the articles, read the benchmarks, read about the architecture... Atom is weak at best. Plus, if you are looking for Atom performance benchmarks then go to an article about that, no need to reiterate the same data several dozen times. Furthermore, I get the feeling Anandtech and its writers expect a level of knowledge from the readership. Apparently there are exceptions to the assumed knowledge levels. But by all means, challenge their posture and you will find that they are not lying or pulling things out of their.... hats.
Bobcat is good, but the power benefits from dropping the clock to 1GHz while also crippling the GPU is negligible, Jarred is talking about that. He is saying that Bobcat can and/or should compete against CULV, not Atom. That is his frustration. He figures a quad-core bobcat will still be crippled by low clockspeeds, and I agree with him on that.
"kc77, dude, read the articles, read the benchmarks, read about the architecture... Atom is weak at best. Plus, if you are looking for Atom performance benchmarks then go to an article about that, no need to reiterate the same data several dozen times."
Did you not read what I was saying. I don't need benchmarks for Atom we know what that is already. As you said they are in other articles.
"Furthermore, I get the feeling Anandtech and its writers expect a level of knowledge from the readership. Apparently there are exceptions to the assumed knowledge levels. But by all means, challenge their posture and you will find that they are not lying or pulling things out of their.... hats."
Um this is about UNRELEASED hardware. Not hardware that can be bought. If it was purchasable then maybe it's readers would know about the hardware, which if that's the case Why come here? To read something I already know?
"Bobcat is good, but the power benefits from dropping the clock to 1GHz while also crippling the GPU is negligible, Jarred is talking about that."
You don't need to repeat what he said. I read that. However he made remarks on performance and didn't tell us anything in regards to what we ran and what score it got. Instead he provided insight that was half-technical without any becnhamrks to say why. ... That's the problem,
"He is saying that Bobcat can and/or should compete against CULV, not Atom. That is his frustration. "
Well maybe he should work for AMD and control their product lines. With all of this rambling it's going to come down to price. $100 regardless of performance matters in where these CPU's are marketed .
And that's why I think choosing the right test suite (though I may not know what is a "right test suite") and counterpart for APU is important for such tests. But I really don't want to see APU being said "Oh, it sucks when you play Call of Pripyat and Farcry 2" or "It's incredibly slow in heavy H264 encoding".
I have no idea what you're rambling on about. But again another article that is negative towards AMD just for the sake of being negative. Why don't you just forget completely abut anything AMD and not write about them?
Come on Anand has always been positive towards AMD's Fusion APUs, just because Intel sucks with its Atoms and have been too conservative on refreshing the Atom product line for years.
huh? He seemed very kinda to AMD. What I saw was: "Atom just can't keep up" "Brazos dips at places but that's probably drivers" Why isn't a drivers issue with Atom? I've had a heck of a time getting the right decoding working on my gma500 but my 1.3ghz Atom with that GMA500 can decode 1080p24 video, or stream over wifi + decode 720p (don't have the bandwidth for the 1080p usually).
GMA 500 was a horribly supported GPU, unfortunately. Not sure if the newer Z series will be better, but let's hope so. GMA 500 managed H.264 offload, but at least the system I tested was totally unstable (crashing several times per day). Last I looked, the drivers were still a year old.
yes it was poorly managed, the crashing multiple times/day was because Acer shipped them with the wrong driver and drivers not installed correctly.
Once I tracked down the correct one straight from Intel's site, and installed manually via "Upgrade Driver" (and specifically not running the intel setup.exe), it ran fine no more crashing.
actually that's not entirely true, transparency still doesn't work without crashing eventually in Windows 7-- but it's much faster without transparency so I leave it turned off.
Perhaps you miss the point of bobcat? It is to offer cheap netbooks with good battery life and good enough performance. Will it be able to do everything? No. But is it cheap? YES! Will it have good battery life? Yes!
Thanks for the good article. Have you considered the trend towards GPU use in browsers while pondering the future of this platform? IE already does this, but as a user of Chrome I know it's currently a lab feature. Google plans to unload more and more to the GPU, whenever possible. That bodes exceedingly well for browser experience with a Fusion chip.
In future benchmarks of Brazos platform-based machines, could you provide some more single-threaded benchmarks? Versus Atom, that's where the Bobcat processor gets interesting, as its OOOE engine should allow it to get higher single-threaded performance than Atom. For heavily multithreaded applications, it's not at all surprising that Atom's and Bobcat's performance are so close together, as Atom's SMT allows it to better keep its in-order pipeline filled.
Single-threaded performance is important in these comparisons because a major criticism of Atom is that it doesn't "feel" very fast, mainly because it doesn't respond quickly enough to OS/UI events, which are usually single-threaded in nature.
Finally, what might help capture Facebook performance is to run something like SunSpider. SunSpider is pretty easy to run anyway, so why not?
I'm not sure what you're getting at... obviously, doing high-end CPU-intensive tasks on Atom (or Brazos or CULV) isn't really the intended use. It's why I include PCMark, and I'm open for suggestions on other tests that truly show the difference. I've used enough laptops and desktops to say that for basic tasks, even Atom still feels very sluggish, but it might be tolerable in a pinch. Brazos looks to be about the same, only now you can get HD video decoding as a benefit. But calling the lack of Blu-ray 3D support "catastrophic"... well, I'll just respectfully disagree.
Despite all the hype and the effort, everyone I hear thinks the 3D experience is marginal at best. A few people really like it, most are ho-hum, and there are a LOT of people that really dislike 3D. Active 3D gives a lot of people headaches, for example. Passive is better in that regard, but it still requires more effort on the part of your eye muscles. Normally I'd say exercising your muscles is good, but I'm not sure that's the case with the eyes. Either way, it's still uncomfortable for enough people that it's a concern.
Ultimately, for netbooks and ultraportables, I really don't care too much about lack of 3D support. It's something probably less than 5% of the market cares about. On HTPCs it's a bigger issue, but I'm not reviewing the HTPC aspect, hence the statement, "If you’re looking for the ultimate HTPC chip, we’ll have to investigate that area in further detail" -- and be "we" I mean "someone else at AnandTech, probably Ganesh. :-)
Really looking forward to your test! Have seen many of the tests posted on other sites but they are not convincing enough as most of them are choosing the wrong test suite and wrong counterparts. Hope Anandtech can come up with a test suite designated for netbooks/ultraportables and, never ever compare APUs to the Mobile Cores (1st or 2nd Gen) or any mighty chips on the desktop, I'm just tired of seeing APUs being stated "incredibly slow compared to a X2 250or Pentium G6950" :)
What do you expect them to compare it to? Obviously Atom will be in the comparison, but what else should they include? Brazos is going to be slow cpu-wise compared to anything except for Atom.
One thing. Atom is strong when two similar threads run on the same core. On a dual core that's 4 threads naturally. Only in this scenario D525 is in the same league as E-350. But please tell me, which are the scenarios when 4 similar threads run under high load on a netbook or TnL notebook? You write that in your Flash scenario only one core is heavily loaded. But when only one heavy thread is running, or even one on each core, then E-350 leads by a big margin. And it likely still runs noticeably faster with three threads.
So what ist the everyday-task on a netbook that runs four similar* threads at full load that justifies to say an atom D525 is practically as fast as an E-350?
Oh, and please try Flash 10.2 when you're testing Flash games, see blogs.amd.com/fusion I don't know anybody playing facebook games in my country btw. Facebook yes, several. But FB games?
*similar means, I've only seen benchmarks for one program at four threads. What happens when four absolutely different tasks (or e.g. two programs with two threads each) are run on a dualcore hyperthreading CPU, I don't know.
Tomshardware has a decent article up on the Brazos platform, a good read. Anandtech dares not do a similar article because AMD really embarrasses Intel's Atom.
You mean like our old Brazos preview, where we show E-350 leading the Atom in virtually every test? Yes, we certainly don't dare to do that! That would be horrible to report the truth, because that's only what we've been doing for years. But then you know that, because you've been accusing us of bias pretty much since Core 2 arrived and took a commanding lead over the AMD chips. The only *ONLY* reason we haven't done a complete writeup of a retail Brazos platform is because we don't have one for testing yet. I'm working to get some Brazos laptops in, and the sooner the better, but we don't have them yet.
Funny thing is that THG's article isn't particularly gung ho on Brazos either: "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."
As I've said, Atom is so slow that just about anything is faster. Intel is afraid to make Atom faster because then it encroaches on their ULV chips and the Pentium class processors (which case about twice as much as Atom). But I won't give AMD a pass for making something 25%-50% faster than Atom, because CULV was already about twice as fast. It looks like the slowest dual-core CULV (Celeron SU2300) + ION ends up being comparable to the E-350, so what we're really talking about is a less expensive chip. It ought to win the power argument as well, and it has a better GPU. That's all well and good, but it's hardly revolutionary.
Excuse me? Maybe you have gotten me confused with someone else. I have not been accusing you or anyone else of BIAS since the "Core 2" days, but you are clearly accusing me.
I could care less if AMD is a performance leader or not, as long as I can continue in getting great performing chips at a cheap price I am happy regardless of platform.
I wasn't bashing the article per-say, I'll get what I can take, if anything I was expecting something longer detailing more aspects of the platform.
In the end, it all comes down to cost. If Brazo's can out-perform an Atom (Without Ion) Mini-ITX in most situations, yet have costs in the same ballpark, it's a winner. - Shouldn't be hard to do, and it seems to may have done it.
That's some nice selective quoting Jarred. Maybe you should read the entire article instead of picking a few sentences that try and prove your point. You claim to be unbiased, but then why did you go through the text and find the most negative quote you could?
If you actually READ the article, the overall impression is very positive. Brazos does exactly what it set out to do. At it's price point and power envelope, it is a very impressive offering. I can't wait to see Anandtech compare it with much pricier hardware, and talk endlessly about Intel products that have not been released yet.
Some things are so predictable.
BTW, Brazos is one tiny piece of silicon. But I expect you and others to paint that as a negative and complain how it's more about making money for AMD than anything else.
Our lineup of laptops to compare Brazos with will include the standard low-cost, low performance offerings, just like it does with Atom.
So on the Intel side, we'll have at least one Atom N450, one N550, one CULV (SU4100), I'll toss in the bottom Arrandale ULV i3-330UM as one more point of reference, and I'll even throw in the MacBook Pro 13. The only ION platform I reviewed is unfortunately the HP Mini 311, and I don't have a full set of results -- no one will even send me an Atom + NG-ION system.
On the AMD side, we'll have the Toshiba T235D (Nile K625), and maybe bring back the MSI Wind or Acer Ferrari (something to represent the Congo era). Of course we'll have Brazos as well, and I would love to have C-30, C-50, and E-350 represented. We'll see if we can make that happen.
As far as selective quoting, that's the conclusion of the article. There are other paragraphs in the conclusion that essentially state exactly what I've stated. Let me quote them as well:
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
That's like more than half of the conclusion (even the intro to the conclusion is somewhat negative, saying Brazos "doesn't deserve that kind of praise"), with some positive parts in there about the price of Brazos systems. We can beat the Better-Than-Atom drum all we want, but that's only one target. Better at roughly the same price is good and will get plenty of design wins -- I mentioned how many of them were at CES in the previous article.
But even if Brazos sells, unfortunately AMD isn't making a ton of money off of it. Say the chip package costs $20 and AMD sells it for $50; well, Intel's SNB probably costs under $100 to package and they sell it for $200+. Anything is better than losing market share, but what AMD really needs is to (like in the K8 days) get out parts that they can legitimately sell for more than $200.
Yes, it is positively faster than Atom, but who actually cares about Atom? AMD needs to target CULV and either achieve the same performance at Atom power draw or run 50% faster than CULV at CULV speeds. That is what THG and Jarred are saying.
Agreed. You can't expect much from a chip built on 40nm process, integrating the north bridge, an entry-class GPU and two CPU cores, while shrinking the die size to barely over 70mm^2. It shocks Atom from any aspect, performance, power efficiency, die size and an important concern for OEM manufacturers: the price. Priced at no higher than $100, it is a good deal compared to D525+ION combo which costs $113 ($63 for the CPU and $50 for the GPU).
AMD is surely doing its best, and given current technology AMD can do nothing better than this. Perhaps things will be much better with the introduction of Gen 2 APUs built on 28nm process, which means two times core count (hmm...quad-core, that makes Gen 2 APU more than "enough") with a much more competitive GPU based on the new architecutre.
It's one year from now and Intel won't be introducing 32-nm based Atom--with no architectural advance but a simple die shrink, perhaps with a better IGP, but still far from AMD's--until Q1 2012. So AMD is actually keeping a fast pace on its Fusion Program, in less than two years they will come up with really convincing chips, NOT NOW.
Sorry pal, but you guys are thoroughly considered to be the biggest Intel fanboys on the net, it's considered a given at this point. For one, synthetic benchmarks should be dropped altogether. They consistently produce results that favor Intel (many of them are compiled with ICC, bit of an odd choice, don't you think?), moreso than any real-world benchmarks favor Intel. So that instantly skews your aggregate results, and because you rely on them for your power use results, those are skewed too.
Here's a general history of your bias:
Core2: It WAS faster than AMD's competing chips, but when I bought one, it wasn't nearly as fast as I expected it to be based on hardware reviews, compared to the Athlon 64 it replaced. It also still had the Pentium 4 denormal bug, but this was ignored by you guys. I encountered it many times, I had to avoid certain DSP applications because of it. I also owned a Phenom 9500 later with the OMGBAD TLB errata, never encountered the TLB errata that made it so awful...
Nehalem: Not appreciable faster than Core2 in many real world applications, but much faster at video encoding: Anandtech's response: Make synthetics and video encoding like 90% of the review article.
Phenom II: reasonably close to Nehalem, a normal person couldn't tell the difference in normal use. Anandtech's response: Well, it is comparable in gaming, but you should still get a Nehalem for it's superior synthetic benchmarks and video encoding(whether you ecode or not). Then you say that Core2 has issues with stuttering in games, whereas P2 and i7 don't have stuttering in games because of the IMC. RLY? You never mentioned that when you were touting Core2 as the gaming CPU to buy.
Core i5: Anandtech went way the heck out of their way to promote this as a "must have upgrade" to "last year's" Nehalem: Thinking people scratched their head at this one.
Sandy Bridge: Not necessarily too much faster than Nehalem in the real-world(and therefore not necessarily too much faster than Core2), but even better at video encoding. So, let's keep on pushing the video encoding, run the benches ignoring that most of the performance comes from a bump in clockspeed, and imply that every single one can OC anywhere from 4.5 to 5ghz, even though we know that they won't last an entire month at those speeds.
"Sorry pal, but you guys are thoroughly considered to be the biggest Intel fanboys on the net, it's considered a given at this point."
True, but I think it's more actually. Anandtech's true colours really shone through when they violated their own policy and included overclocked Nvidia cards. And justified it by saying that Nvidia "insisted".
And you'll notice that this can't give a compliment to AMD without some sort of slight or caveat somewhere. Well Brazos is good, but Atom sucks so it's really nothing special etc. etc. Or they will talk about what Intel has in the pipeline instead of just giving AMD credit and leave it at that.
None of this is intended to survive real scrutiny in the comments section. The intent of the subtle Intel praise and subtle negativity towards AMD in every article is that people who don't read or understand tech but who want to research their next purchase will stumble on this via google, skim over the article, and say "well gosh, Intel is just flat out better, I'd be cheating myself if I bought AMD".
No, the intent is to tell the facts as they are and not make excuses for AMD *or* Intel. All of you looking to root for the underdog (AMD) aren't doing them any favors by overlooking their faults. I understand it's very difficult to compete with a company that makes tons more money than you do, but pretending a product with flaws is perfect isn't going to help. The fact is that AMD has a product with good power characteristics, moderate performance, and a reasonable GPU. It's better than Atom. CULV and ULV are also substantially better options than Atom (unless the only criterion you're interested in is minimum cost). Brazos should beat the current Atom chips in every meaningful way.
On the other hand, have you noticed how most of the Brazos netbooks appear to be going after a higher price segment? I suppose that's necessary when you do a full Win7 install with at least 2GB RAM, but that means the $300 market will remain in the hands of crap like Atom (or equally bad crap like Brazos netbooks with 160GB HDDs, Win7 Starter, and 1GB RAM).
We had CULV with Celeron SU2300, and I think Intel may have simply done their best to kill that off when people saw what you could get for $400 in an ultraportable (i.e. the Acer Aspire 1410). Or maybe Acer killed it off because they make more money on the Timeline 1810 and wanted people to go there for dual-core computing? Either way, things are done as business decisions.
Look, I'm glad we have AMD. I've used a lot of their products. I've built AMD systems for a lot of friends. In nearly every case in the past three years, I've used AMD because they offer good performance at a great price, and the person really just needs office, email, and Internet. If that's what you're after (and you don't care about power draw), even the four year old socket 939 dual-core parts are still fine. I should know -- I have one of them and my eight-year-old daughter uses it to play some of the current web games and activities targeting her age group.
Without AMD, Intel prices go up, their performance stagnates, and consumers don't win. So if you don't need Sandy Bridge, Arrandale, Core 2, or even K10 levels of performance, by all means get a Brazos system. It should sip power, handle a lot of multimedia tasks quite well, and it should be pretty darn cheap.
Just don't pretend that it's the only way to build a good chips, because Llana and Bulldozer shows that AMD certainly knows Bobcat only works in the "low cost above all else" category of computers. The GPU is an order of magnitude better than GMA 3150, but it's apparently at the same level as NVIDIA's ION. The CPU is up to twice as fast as Atom, but then so is Intel's Core 2 CULV. That's all I'm saying, and all of that is true. We already had "Brazos" 12 months ago with CULV + ION (or G 310M if you prefer). Now, we're getting about the same thing for a lower price. That's great for cost but does nothing for performance.
Well, when somebody's job involves propaganda and influencing public perception, generally, they respond to being called-out with "we're not biased, we're like Fox News: Fair and Balanced". Upon being pressed further, the paid shill will accuse the accuser of being anything from paranoid to delusional or even flat out crazy... Because, of course, we live in a world where nobody ever conspires to do anything dishonest for profit, especially not our beloved Intel. *raucous laughter*
Nowhere along the line does anyone expect you to say "Oh noez, u r haz caught me!!!". Go read any other tech forum on the web, people all over the world say "yeah, there's this benchmark on Anandtech, but I'd take it with a grain of salt, we all know whose side their on... *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*"
You Anand-Loves-Intel people are seriously retards. In every article the last three years AnandTech has basically said that Intel rocks the performance market, but sucks below $200 where AMD is king. They have also unilaterally praised Intel's notebook CPUs during that timeframe.
Now why would this be? Is it a giant conspiracy theory? No! It's because starting with the Core2 series Intel's high performance offerings have completely obliterated AMD's, and AMD gives worse laptop performance with worse battery life at the same time. This is not unique to AnandTech. This is what pretty much everyone else has been saying.
Wait a minute, didn't Conroe come out three years ago? You see, I was under the impression that Conroe destroyed K8, and then AMD scrapped the original K9 and K10 designs and went for an upgraded K8 to compete against the Core 2 Quads but fell horribly short.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is exactly what happened. Check ANYWHERE and see that AMD has been limping along for the past three years.
Clock for clock, K10.5 and Penryn are pretty much neck and neck, depending on application. The comparison is quite difficult though; Penryn comes in a variety of flavours with differing inclusive L2 cache sizes, plus has SSE4.1 and 4.2 whereas K10.5 has SSE4a and generally sports an exclusive L3 cache. You are correct in that AMD hasn't really gotten to a level where they can compete on performance, however they've done pretty well with K10.5 derivatives so I'm not sure that could be considered "limping along".
Sorry pal, but I can't be an Intel fanboy when I'm using Phenom II X3 720+HD6870 on my PC and still waiting for my pre-ordered APU nettop :)
AMD is surely doing its besting in giving us the Atom-killer with higher performance, better power efficiency at similar price margin. What I'm trying to emphasize here is that DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM BRAZOS, as it's impossible to get super-computer-like performance with a 74 mm^2 chip built on 40nm process, otherwise AMD may used some technology from Martians lol.
The problem is that no-one cares if you can out perform an Atom. Even Snapdragon (ARM7) can outperform Atom. Brazos will be most underwhelming and will only belong in netbooks. CULV will continue to dominate the low end and ultra portable markets while Bulldozer will have to compete with everything else.
Weird, because I have, in my last 4 or 5 builds for myself and friends, considered buying intel until I looked at what AnandTech thought, at which point I went AMD Ati.
I'm curious to know if Brazos/Zacate have enough CPU power to decode HD video in software.
Why bother? While it's undeniable that hardware-accelerated playback is much more power and CPU efficient, there are times when it is lower quality or downright incompatible with a given video file. And not all file and video formats are supported in hardware (eg, what about WebM, or the various weird formats video cameras and the like record in?).
I use DXVA on my Radeon 4870 for most of my media viewing, but there are times when I have to fallback to FFDShow for some files, whether it's because of a poorly encoded video, odd choice of container or problems with the ATI drivers. It would be useful to know if Brazos/Zacate have enough CPU grunt to decode a 1080p video in software when the occasion arises.
I respect the person, when they are a public source of information, and admits fault publically and busts ass to fix the wrong. Props. i understand it takes people, personal time and guts to do it. I have been there before albeit not quiet as public :)
as far as netbooks with ssd's--i shoved a 2nd gen intel 160 in a n10j (remember that one jarred?) . the experience is unbelievably satisfying for anything other then games on an external monitor.....there is a reason why intel limits the display rez on these any way they can.
that said i think another way to summarize the chip is that it is a relevant chip in an irrelevant chip segment (tdp wise and current application of apu/cpu/gpu). the atom..this thing....they all would be amazing in a phone but are mediocre at best in a computer no matter which way you dice it
the Only good thing about this is that this should cause intel to push for the next tick or tock or whatever of the atom..i think at this point they have to go lower then 45nm for it....hopefully this means sooner ivy bridge and haswell [at least not delayed] so they push desktop to 22 and open 32 capacity for atom
i shudder to think where either of these products (atom and brazos) would be today had TSMC hit ~30-20nm sooner without delays last year which would have allowed ARM to leverage the new manuf standard....
if there was one improvement you guys could make at AT to Mobile is to standardize cpu's more--buy a couple SB mobile, so not only can you test the product as sold but can also provide better guidance around cpu performance.....took 11 months to show exactly how much "slower" a fast mobile dual core is compared to a quad core mobile....yikes..seems like a no brainer...coulda bought a 620m 11 months ago and showed the data....maybe even borrowed one from intel.
When you're talking about raw cpu potential, you mean multi-threaded apps. However, many of the things we use today are single threaded, and that is where AMD's OOO beat's Atom hands down. Remember, a dual core atom with hyperthreading beats a 3.4ghz P4 with Hyperthreading in multithreaded benches, but the P4 owns the Atom in single thread performance.
Keep in mind that when you are reading this comment, your Chrome or Safari or Firefox or whatever browser you use is multi-threaded so multi-core benches really count in real-world use. Photo editing, audio transcoding, instant messaging, all these software used in nettops today are INDEED multi-threaded (probably no significant improvement on triple to quad cores, but it makes a lotta difference when you have more than one core) The problem here is HT: it actually does nothing in most cases and even impacts gaming performance as threads compete for limited resources and can provide decent performance boost only when the software is carefully optimized for HT. Atom can come close to Brazos in multi-threading, yeah, that's right, because the softwares tested are HT optimized.
While the browser might be multithreaded, the stuttering Flash video is STILL using a single core/thread.
Atom needs HT to get any reasonable "benchmarketing" results. But you know what? Desktop experience is pretty much orthogonal from "throughput computing" performance Atom or Niagara provide.
HT/SMT is _GREAT_ for throughput(i.e. server) while often giving NEGATIVE gain for UI/GUI desktop performance that relies on many simple single thread-ed tasks.
It was that way back in the NetBurst days, then on Niagara, then on Atom and now on Nehalem/SNB.
The single major benefit of HT on desktop is when having 1 physical core is hampering the scheduler. But that advantage is the wild card of the 2001, not 2011.
When you launch any program you are spawning multiple threads. Often there are more than 4. But most of them are short lived. In most cases, having 2 cores helps applications launch faster. But having more than two helps not a bit in most situations. I have a unique perspective on this since I have 2 machines that both have the same motherboard, hard drive, and RAM, and one is a E6600 and one is a Q6600, both clocked at 3.2GHz. The Q6600 is only noticably faster when you launch an "abnormal" number of applications simultaneously. For example, I have a script that opens 4 pdf's, 2 excel spreadsheets, 2 calc spreadsheets, 2 word docs, 2 swriter docs, a ppt file, an impress file, an mp3 in media player, an avi file in vlc, a quicktime video, a bmp in paint, a txt in notepad, a log in wordpad, and a few others i cant remember at the moment. Only in extreme cases like this is the quadcore faster than the dual core.
Actually, whenever you launch a program you are creating 1 thread. It may then create new threads, or make system calls (which may create threads of their own). But, it certainly isn't always. Also, when describing an application as "multi-threaded", the usual emphasis is on concurrent execution of said threads. Threads created by system calls may execute concurrently, but the original application thread will wait for them to respond sequentially. Case in point - open notepad: 1 thread. Open a file in notepad - up to 20 threads. The original program is still a single thread, it just now makes requests to other threads inside the same process - this incurs less penalty than making requests to other processes. That's a benefit, but number of cores doesn't affect it. I do hope you didn't buy a quad core just to make apps load faster though. Mine gets plenty of it's workout from encoding and compiling, and a bit of action from games.
I though the new CPUs would beat the crap out of the super crappy Atom but in many ways it´s just the same, it´s basically AMDs Atom version with a better IGP at a lower cost. AMD as to try harder to beat Intel in this game.
By the way, can you tell when will Anandtech review Sansy Bridge mobile CPUs? They seem perfect for my next laptop with a very good performance and hopefully lower power requirements.
So you think a cpu that is aprox 60% faster on real world usage, turning the Atom computer from unsusable to tolerable, on the same cost is disapointing.
Well for the the 20 years i have followed the evolution there has not been a single cpu, - and nor will there for the foreseable future - be a cpu that will change how the market works.
As of now every OEM and their brother is going for e350 for the simple reason that it does get the job done for 90% of the users, at a fraction of the cost of a core2/AMD whatever.
There can be at least 800 pcx. on one wafer, that in the region of 6-7 usd per die, add packaging and shippihng - the marginal - marginal - cost is at most 4 usd here. And you have a marginal cost in the region of 11usd, probably a few usd more than the Atom. The result is already showing.
People dont give a s..t about all kind idiotic benchmarks. The OEM dont care if its AMD or Intel anymore, as long as there is no complaints from the customers. Atom is the reason that people still know what a cpu is, because it simply is to slow even for women. The results is that bobcat will sell like hotcakes. At a selling price of fx. 40usd, that is a good business for AMD, as the fixed cost can be shared to next version and a broader portfolio. As the pincount is lower than Atom, there is no reason to beliewe it will no go to 300usd.
The funny thing is it seems we all know what to expect. Its the context that matters.
Jarred says they are using bm that suits their readers. Thats right, but thats not the right choice. What is so brilliant about Johans server test, is that he test the cpu in scenarios where they will be used - server situations. Its very simple. He dont use test outside of the purpose of the cpu. The reviews of bobcat should reflect the same methology.
There is absolutely no reason to test the bobcat in scenarios where it will not be used - or only in very rare situations. The wider consequences of doing so is forcing the manufaturas - here AMD - to produce 4 core bobcats with 1Mb l2 cache. The effect would be an idiotic waste of ressources. The customers should rather use the money on better screen, battery or ssd.
For the ssd discussion the interesting thing about the atom is, that it can hardly use a 5400rpm hd, therefore the extra power of the e350 with a 7200rpm (or a very cheap-slow ssd) turns into real user experience.
Quite a strange that neither AMD not the author didn't notice the difference between C-50 and C-30 because the former has two cores while the last only one core.
And, BTW, C-Brazos has not only lower cpu frequency but gpu one also. How really he will stack up to Atom?
I dont need to reach for my Atom 450 with 3150 graphics to tell you the difference, and neither do you. The Atom is hardly capable of computing. But was never invented to be used as a pc, and should not be used as such. Bobcat is. Adding 1080p and fx. 25% Mhz on later Atom revisions, is not going to change that conclusion.
C-30 is a piece that sucks. I don't quiet understand the point why AMD have single-core APUs while dual-core parts don't use that much power. With only one core enabled, running at 1.2GHz, C-30 can hardly do anything because it's within the performance margin with a decade-old Pentium 3. Getting such a part on the level of the CPUs ten years ago is definitely a very idiotic decision. E350 and C-50 are impressive parts but I really got shocked when AMD decides to ship single-core APUs.
The c30 Market exists and I believe is growing. You actually know it well yourself. Now you've got your gaming/encoding workstation beast of a computer and you now don't want to touch it because it's busy actually doing something (even if that's gaming) and you've got email to send, leters to write, recipes to cook in the kitchen - maybe even listening to movies and general multimedia stuff on the go... Does the movie look any different using a C30 or a i7 on the same screen? no. Ditto for the rest. Now what should be interesting you is how long it lasts off a single charge or how warm your pants get - not to mention how much it costs... cb
I can see the market, I just have trouble seeing how C30 should get there. AMD dont have the engi ressources to help integrating Its ARM low-cost land - where is the advantage of 5w here?
I agree. My dual core atom build was disliked by my sister due to low performance in flash games, and commented that our old laptop with a single core pentium-m was faster. Anyways, it was good as a file server, photo slideshow and 720p video on a 1080p display.
Good thing, we still don't have a netbook. Brazos, it is, before summer. I still can't believed they axed the AMD CEO.
I am what you might call an Atom victim. I say this because I used Atom allot , and suffered allot when: my Flash video was stuttering even in 480p , system took too long to boot , video streams would run crappy ETC... So here are a few things I really want to see tested on the Brazos systems when they arrive: 1. Win7 (Starter / no bloat) start and shut down times 2. CPU load during 720p flash playback 3. Browser start-up time (i know its very small , but make a script or something and give me the numbers :) ) 4. flash games fluidity (not a big fan but it is important) 5. maybe office install time
I hope Jarred reads your comment. Because it is real world situations. When i installed win 7 starter on my atom rig, it said it would take several minutes. It turned into several hours - lol, and after the first update with 31 updates, restarting the computer took more than an hour. For a restart. LOL
I dont know how difficult it is to measure. Just starting word or the browser takes a life time :) - damn it nearly reminds me of window 3.11 on a 386 sx. Loading pages like anandtech is like someone chopped your internet connection to a quarter speed.
Oh, I read it, and I'll do my best to run such tests on a couple laptops (Atom, Brazos, and CULV hopefully). If I can get enough time, I'll even try to do the same with an SSD in each system to see how much that improves the situation. So, outside of the "Jarred hates AMD and is paid by Intel" discussions on the first page, which I'm now done with, if you have other benchmark/test suggestions you'd like please, PLEASE list them here. I'll include as large a variety of tests as I can.
OK, here's a suggestion: compare those real world situations using different hard drives, 5400-rpm HDDs, 7200-rpm HDDs and value SSDs(not the speed monsters like Force 240 or C300 but entry-level SSDs like Kingston V Series or Intel X-25V. I mean, if the CPU is a more serious bottleneck than the HDD, adding an SSD won't help much. I've preordered an APU netbook and am planning to install it with an SSD but I wonder if it deserves such upgrade.
Are you bats**t crazy? The idea behind a CPU test is to reduce all bottlenecks BUT the CPU. From there you can do system tests but for any single variable part specific tests you need to have as complete a set of constants as possible.
I am Batman crazy, and I think he's being reasonable. Mostly because he isn't talking about CPU tests, but also because he isn't talking about CPU tests. Secondly - none of the "real world situations" he was listing are going to be focused on one area of system performance. In the real world it doesn't matter what causes the bottleneck, only that you have shite performance.. PS Jarred, I actually like this artice. Haters gonna hate.
Occasionally, I hear someone mention wanting to buy a new laptop. When I ask them what they want to use it for, I don't get a straight answer. When I recommend they get something only when they've worked out what they need it to do, they go away to think about it... and that's usually the last I hear about it. :P
Benchmarking something we might not expect to be done on a netbook, HTPC or cheap desktop can still be helpful, especially if we know how much juice is required to complete the whole task. It's great to know the actual limitations of a new processor architecture before purchasing a system built around it - how silly would you feel having started encoding a large video file whilst assuming your hardware is up to the task if you could've found out before that the processor simply capable enough and that you may be waiting a long time and using too much power if you gave it a go?
Jarred - as many benches as you like, however there have been some good suggestions about application loading time, SunSpider testing, Flash performance and that sort of thing so they may be the best place to start. I appreciate that testing out of the ordinary may be a bind though; might be worth having two articles on it - part 1 on media and part 2 on productivity. Saves you needing to get it all done right away. I appreciate your efforts and your honesty - I'd think something was wrong if people were gushing en masse over AMD's first Fusion product without the slightest bit of criticism or concern.
Nitrousoxide said the following which got me thinking...
"It's one year from now and Intel won't be introducing 32-nm based Atom--with no architectural advance but a simple die shrink, perhaps with a better IGP, but still far from AMD's--until Q1 2012. So AMD is actually keeping a fast pace on its Fusion Program, in less than two years they will come up with really convincing chips, NOT NOW. "
Is Cedar Trail that delayed? In any case, when the Enhanced Bobcat products appear, they'll be at 28nm as opposed to Cedar Trail at 32nm, and if Cedar Trail isn't noticably faster than Pineview, they may end up actually being behind AMD for a decent amount of time.
I've been wondering if it would benefit AMD to take the Bulldozer module approach with Bobcat, but until we see Bulldozer's performance, I'm not sure it's fair of me to speculate. That said, if it only adds a small amount of die space, AMD could still realistically shrink their APU even with SMT present thanks to a smaller process.
The first Cedar Trail will appear in Q4 2011 when 22-nm Ivy bridge comes out. So we will expect to see products shipping 32-nm Atoms sometime around CES 2012. No OoO architecture, no DX11 capable GPU(but at least should get the same level performance of a Gen 1 HD Graphics instead of the crappy GMA500/3150). So it will basically be a die-shrinked Pineview, which of course, consumes less power. It should rival Brazos at least in CPU performance, but whether it can keep up with Gen 2 APUs remains to be seen.
And that's Intel's problem here, it doesn't want Atom to be that fast because, as Jarred said, it will pose a threat to CULVs. And now it's more focused on Z series aimed at embedded market, where ARM dominates.
I would like to see how Brazos fares in older games than what are in AT's test suite. Games from the years 2003-2007 Like Warcraft 3 for one and some source games like HL2 and maybe Far Cry and what else? ideas? :)
Someone said old games, Open Arena is still played by a few people and uses more CPU than it deserves so I think it could, if time allows, be a pretty decent test for low power parts.
There is a flash game called Bloons Tower Defense 4. It will fully load 2 3GHz cores. There is a fast-forward mode that will only work if your pc has enough power.
Another really importat thing to test: - Overall system power consumption during 1 hour of HD playback (the monitor could be turned off to eliminate it as a variable) . In other words will this outlast an Atom netbook during a long flight ?
Regarding "nitrousoxide"'s suggestion : a value SSD for sure is something which users will definitely want to put in their Brazos systems, so yes test that. As for 5400 vs 7200 , i would skip that altogether , HDDs in an ultra portable is so 2010 :) ... Anybody can spare 70 $ for a descent SSD and add an external HDD for more space.
yet another important one: CPU usage while video chatting in Skype. On Atom 450 it's around 75% on both threads and while it works flawlessly , you can't do anything else with the machine without sound/video artifacts in the conversation, plus web browsing is crazy slow.
Seems that not so many people using a netbook need that feature lol. Tomshardware already pointed out that Brazos doesn't haven enough GPU muscle to gain any decent performance boost even with OpenCL. GPU accelerated applications is where Llano should shine, but not Brazos. Anyway I'm also expecting to see if 80 Shaders can make any difference with OpenCL.
I've been in the industry a LONG time and finally, we're in a world that benchmarks are starting to matter very little for most people. It's a huge comment and expected to generate a lot of thought at the very least and probably some abuse too. So let me qualify this:
When I replace my Compaq 311c - or buy something similar for my wife, what am I going to be interested in? Basically it's the machine's abilities, form factors and PRICE. What are the most processor intensive tasks? Photo editing, maybe a bit of video editing (Cut paste before offloading any encoding to a capable desktop). Can it handle video at full res? My 311c even handles 90% of what I need it to and that's on a N260 platform + ION Basically everything except gaming. My old ion did this, and this seems to handle it far better.
So what does Brazos offer me? A glimpse at 3x and 4x core capabilities based on this architecture (Am I foolish to believe that there will be processors supplied with more modules up to 18W?)
Can it provide me with media playback for over 4 hours on battery? maybe even longer....
Can it handle HTPC duties? Sure.
Can it be overclocked / what will the ceiling be on later revisions? Probably around double the mark at 18W and later revisions.
So what am I interested in? Well, Price. It's better than atom, more efficient than atom, Cheaper than atom...
Now here's the thing... Bloatware kills these machines. I'm not against installing things that people need but I'm insisting on a pro-choice movement. Can't you just register the product for the warranty and link in to a app store for all the bloatware? Maybe even have a "the way it was meant to be installed" link on the desktop that magically removes all the bloat and restores the registry to Plain vanilla factory settings?
Anecdotally, on my 311c the machine became unusable after my wife installed some basic photo editing software and had 50Gb of photos and video on the 311c - so I dropped in a 500Gb HDD and scrapped every ounce of bloatware and... it's better than new. I'm now about to create a nLite slipstreamed image for the complete install to test on the old hard drive as well as a macrium reflect image. - Why?? because of the bloatware state that transfers the maintenance and installation of the machine to the user's time account.
Yes, this is an unrelated rant but the total cost of ownership is reflected also in the use of my time.
So in summary, Brazos review:
Benchmarks: how much extra do I get together with cost savings over atom? e.g. 10% savings in cost of machine together with 20% increase in performance = 33% more per $ with Brazos. Battery life is as good so there is an all things being equal scenario.
Is brazos fast enough to convert people over above current netbook expectations? Obviously but to what degree remains to be seen.
Will it make a difference in the ultraportable market? Sure.
What are the hurdles? Well, purchasing departments obviously, when it comes to the professional sector that IMHO are notoriously anti-AMD together with PC support that follows in the anti-AMD sentiment.
Private purchasers are swayed by salesmen that again favour Intel hugely - not without reason in the Notebook market.
Thus IMHO the success or failure of Brazos will simply be determined - not by the marketing performed by AMD but by the marketing muscle behind the notebook manufacturers.
More importantly though it will be greatly influenced by the swarming behaviour of consumers in particular segments - or the creation of new segments that will likely determine the success or failure of these new and fickle market segments.
Likely emerging swarms I can identify with are: Low cost good enough to work on notebooks, Forward upgradable (software) simple HTPCs, Linux based, with a downloadable install image. - Although x86 should lose out to ARM in this market.
In conclusion, Brazos is now the undisputed champ of the cheapest usable and fastest 2 handed machine available for pre-order today that can handle everything but extreme gaming-like workloads and heavy workstation loads with ease. We all know that Intel will match it sometime soon but we also know that there will be a price premium for the intel machine (Basic economics - the market leader can afford to charge a higher price).
What remains to be seen is of there's a killer application that will phase it out of the market (DX12?) gaming etc. or if this will remain the value champion in terms of basic office productivity and home entertainment needs.
I am pretty sure it cost on battery time to feed the ooo of the bobcat, especially on the leaking but dense tsmc process. Therefore i predict the reviewers and many lead users will say: Ohh wait for 32/28nm version, it will have half the idle power usage, 30% higher clock and 20% lower TDP, all at the same time. And when it arives they will say, ahh- this is what bobcat should have been.
But that is simply missing the point of the product and its weak side - and not taking the customers perspective. Right now it seems TSMC 40nm process is expensive. It might seem like an idiotic point for a marginal die cost of 6-7 usd, but its the weakest side of this product. If you have to sell the product for say 40usd, its simply difficult to reach the 300usd nettop market.
Said another way, i think the market for cheaper 40nm bobcat, is far greater than the market for a new more expensive 32nm version, as the 40nm version is just tolerable or "good enough" on all the performance variable for most users - especially the new third world markets. I think thats exactly the lesson from the Atom adoption. It was all about price.
Therefore what is going to be interesting is not so much the benchmark of the bobcat itselves but more the total performance/cost the nettops/laptops will give. I would fx. like to see a review of the new Lenovo 11 inch thingy, or if there is some 13/14 inch on the way.
Krumme, you made me smile with your prediction (1st paragraph). As far as anybody knows, except in the rare circumstance that the fabs burn down, chip prices always drop (a lose reference to the memory fabs burning down in the 90's).
Still, the inverse can also be assumed - there's never been a better time to upgrade than the present.
The economics of it all is really what we're getting into. Does the price/performance for the total cost present a strong enough argument to a significant number of people?
33% increase in price/performance at a price point 10% lower may not seem to be a tipping point except when you look at the granularity of the decision matrices.
Big words but an idea that you know: e.g. atoms can't youtube at 720p (except for ion and that's rare) So if AMD cheapbooks (not a netbook or a notebook but dirt cheap and well sort of capable) on a decent screen for the price - well, that may be it.
I believe that there are enough applications that people spend enough time with for these to be worthwhile. Facebook, movies on the go, scaled down work machines for travel etc for which these are more favourable than tablets and Monsterbooks (Big notebooks) and the form factor makes sense.
I agree that youtube HD might be be the most for a starter.
What could be a major issue could just be a tipping point in the cognitive interpretation of what is subjective felt as slow (ATOM) in relations to what is not noticed for normal office work (the rest). - the distinction for most user is slow - not noticed. its not slow - fast distinction.
Fx. for my wife there no such thing as a fast computer. There is a computer, and a computer that is not working. But if i gave her my Atom, i am pretty sure she will ask something like "can it not be faster?". She have my old core duo laptop with a slow ssd, and she doesnt recognice it as slowly. But she notice its got good battery life and low noise :) - the funny thing its basicly a better computer for officework than the core2, core2 penryn, and i5 laptops that i have now.
So the cognitive tipping point together with the application you list, is the difference. I think its just about the right price. If we in ½ a year see bobcat nettops going to 300 usd i think they are the right way.
If i was the board of AMD i would use the bobcat to get the brand to the end of the world, and use it to get most for the shares when all the stuff have to go :)
Please , when writing the review of the Brazos platform , make sure to cover the following points: - Win 7 boot and shut-down times - how much it takes to install apps (Skype/Messanger/Office etc) - Starcraft 2 frames while watching a replay of pro players - fan noise during idle - maybe if it can play a HD live stream
Thanks PS: is it possible for you guys to delete comments?
At least for HTPCs you can definitely get one fanless APU-based board. Temperature hardly go over 40 degrees at full load, no fans, quite impressive (I guess the hard drive becomes the main noise source lol).
I imagine the scenario will change like it does with graphics cards. Some low end models come with a fan and in no time at all, out comes a passively cooled variant.
Jarred, while I also didn't quite understand some of your wording about brazos vs atom in this particle article, ignore all the hate. The reason AT is #1 is because you say it how it is. Don't let a group of AMD fanboys trolling the web tell you otherwise.
I very much appreciated your summaries about brazos vs atom without providing benchmarks, knowing full well that benchmarks will arrive eventually.
I've been buying AMD processors since Thunderbird, but that might change soon.
I think he is saying he might buy i5 or i7.. To which I respond, lets see how Bulldozer does. If AMD can't pull something off with a a complete redesign then go for the i5/i7
They do what is right: to distinguis between synthetic bm and real world use. And the result: "Several other companies announced other notebooks and netbook alternatives at CES 2011 that use the same AMD E-350 APU, so it's hard to say if the HP Pavilion dm1 is the best of the bunch, but it certainly is better than any netbook we've reviewed to date.
And by the time when Bulldozer is released, intel will be releasing updates for its previous year's release of 'TANKER' truck versions of fourth generation CPUs... ;(
we are waiting for a Dozer with twocpus, defeating workstation performance of xeons & i7 2Ks.. may be the release date confirmed at 2012... ??!!!
"The biggest point in favor of Brazos isn't performance, though. It's going to be cost. If AMD can get partners to put out $400 netbooks (hopefully without Win7 Starter and with more than 1GB RAM..."
Just bought a proper laptop with a 32nm dual core, Win7-64 home premium, 4 GB RAM and a built in optical drive for $399.99. Not sure why anyone would spend 4 to 5 hundred dollars on an anemic netbook, especially an Atom.
"users that want good H.264 decoding in a 10.1” form factor"
Not sure anyone needs high def on such a small, low resolution display.
Was it 11.6 inches or 15.4 inches? People like small laptops. People like laptops with a lot of battery life. People don't want an I5 with bad graphics.
If you are a frequent flier and need an ultra portable or netbook with long battery life, great, a netbook might be just what you need...
Problem is that people are buying netbooks because they are cheap and using them in a way that they were not intended. In fact 2 of my friends have purchased netbooks and both are using them as a desktop replacements . Both friends have hooked up external drives, external mice, and external optical drives. Since there are not enough USB connectors one is using a powered USB hub. The other friend likes the speed of a wired network so he has a network cable running to his. The things are slow as molasses and expensive once you buy all the extras netbooks don't come with. All the extra cables make for a tangled mess that is no more portable than a desktop computer.
Rather than upgrade the first friend's netbook I just gave her one of those Acer netbooks for Christmas.
If you read slickdeals, you'll notice there is a 230+ post thread on the Dm1z. They got the price down to $407. I guess it just depends on if you want 3 hours of battery life, or 6.
This is the year of the tablet, no one will buy buying netbooks, if you want something smaller then a notebook then you'll buy an apple/android tablet - they are the sexy new thing.
If you want a notebook then you'll buy one with a proper cpu as that's what you really need to run windows comfortably.
A geeks HTPC is perhaps the only place I can really see this working but that's not a huge market.
Tablet is just an alternative, not replacement for netbooks. If you like a tablet, grab one for sure; but that's not the case for most people. And please note that tablet is just at its very beginning.
Regardless of what the machine has in it, what truly matters is what it can do for the consumer. So, as long as manufacturers put down what it can do, such as "9 hour battery life (typical)" or "watch movies in full HD" or suchlike on the packaging, that'll do just nicely. If someone sees an AMD logo at the same time, it can only be a good thing.
Laptop manufacturers should flock readily to Brazos due to the cheaper platform cost so it shouldn't be too hard to sell plenty of netbooks.
I had some high hopes for AMD getting back in the game somehow. God knows I loved them in the XP days. After the P!!! 800MHz, it was Athlons for a couple of years until wolfdales.
Bulldozer has been hyped for so long, i was hopping for something really interesting like reverse hyperthreading, but instead we get a hardperthreading.
And then there was Fusion. Pretty much everyone was waiting for that. CPU and GPU in one chip! How do you do that!?!?! They took so long Sandy Bridge came rolling by so casually, no one even noticed.
And AMD laptops, oh my how they are just so behind. Performance somehow feels terrible even comparing to a Core 1 Duo vs Turion X2, and its just hot and sucks battery.
I've been telling everyone to hold off on their netbook purchases as AMDs got something twice as fast coming out, but at 1GHz, it will be twice as fast, only folded in half! UGhhhhh!
Llano sounds good, however I expect it'll run into bandwidth issues when you jack the settings up too highly. As a result, I'm looking forward to how overclocking benefits such systems.
A Turion X2 was merely a mobile Athlon 64 X2, so not exactly difficult for a dual-core Core CPU to win a battle there. However, Bobcat performs close to a similarly clocked Turion X2 with a fraction of the power and heat.
I read a few pages of comments and there were so many flames for bias.
I think Anandtech is the only site I know of that actually does fair reviews. I think the article is fine. Was totally hoping that AMD's APU was going to revolutionize the netbook market but sadly it's not going to be this first gen iteration, stupid Atom setting the bar so low. Well, I still kinda hope I can still watch movie on my laptop without burning my stomach on AMD's new APU. Can you guys have a test like that? Where you lay on a bed and have the laptop on your stomach while watching a movie? >,<
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151 Comments
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SeetheSeer - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Anand,I don't mean to be rude, but I'm curious why you are constantly fixated on bitstreaming support for HTPC's. Why is it any better than 5.1 channel LPCM? The only difference I've managed to find between the two are vague, superstitious assertions that LPCM is harder to sync correctly with the video than bitstreaming. In fact, LPCM actually has one advantage: you can mix in overlaid sounds, such as commentary, which AFAIK is impossible with bitstreaming.
Thanks,
Confused Seer
n0b0dykn0ws - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
The reason is that without a protected audio path, or stripping the DRM, audio quality is reduced when it is decoded and PCM is sent over HDMI.I'm not sure about PCM when a PAP is available, but when native Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio are bitstreamed to a compatible audio receiver there is no quality loss (outside of what is done by the AVR).
Between the two, blu-ray owners prefer the lossless option. Lossless PCM versus lossless DTHD/DTSMAHD decoding at the AVR level is equal otherwise, but not in this case.
I don't think the PCM route will ever be 'fixed', at least not without jettisoning DRM, which is unlikely.
n0b0dykn0ws
heffeque - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
You mean DRM protected movies. Normal HD movies downloaded on P2P networks don't have that problem.Taft12 - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I am strongly against copyright infringement, but this is such a good example of how content providers are providing an inferior product to the illegal alternative. It is a huge, huge problem in the industry.I paid for a DVD, why must I sit through FBI warnings and deal with down-converted output when a less legitimate copy does not have this nuisance?
knedle - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Yeah, it's like "you bought a movie, so now you can download pirated version and get everything you paid for"Zoomer - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Wouldn't AnyDVD fix the problem?Dribble - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
That's what I had to use to play my perfectly legal copy of Inception using my laptop with my fully patched fully legal bluray software.I think I should charge the bluray consortium for my copy of AnyDvD because it's only only way I can play back my legally owned films!
SeetheSeer - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Yes, but so long as you use HDMI you have that PAP. And all of the points in question have been about LPCM over HDMI. So that doesn't really answer the question.OCedHrt - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I had always assumed that the AVR may do a better decoding of the encoded audio. I'm not sure if the decoding process is lossless for audio.n0b0dykn0ws - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Just because it is a HDMI connection does not ensure a PAP. Especially in older chips.If the solution can do LPCM over HDMI without reducing the quality one bit (or Hz) then most people wouldn't care. Bitstreaming ensures 100% quality intact.
n0b0dykn0ws
SeetheSeer - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I directed my post to Anand, not seeing that Jarred wrote the article. However, my point still stands when directed in a larger context to the site as a whole.krumme - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
For loads of irrelavant multithreaded benchmarks, cpu heavy gaming benchmarks and encoding benchmarks that absolutely none of the target customers is going to use - if they know the names of the situations at all.Who cares about ordinary surfing, wav-mp3 conversion, zip, l4d type gaming and just plain ordinary office work?
Lets prepare for comparing battery life to Atom, efficiency to culv, power to core2. And let the 75mm2 on 40nm TSMC for 100usd all included stand as a minor issue compared to to abolutely catastrofic lack of bluray 3D
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Well that's because "ordinary surfing, audio conversion and plain ordinary office work" can not be benchmarked. A test relies on data to convince everyone because it makes no sense the test says "it works fluently in surfing and office work". Everyone believes that APU is a nice chip, but it cannot do well in benchmark, and therefore, the media has a reasonable motivation to write the test in the way Intel PR told them :)JarredWalton - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Sorry, but you're completely wrong. Intel said nothing to me; AMD would have loved for us to be a lot more positive, but that's not how I see things. Atom is definitely "too slow", CULV was fine about a year ago, but even web surfing demands a lot.Things I'll be happy to try and quantify: Facebook performance. I am on FB a lot, and it can be a bit sluggish even on my desktop. Sure, Bejeweled Blitz and Zuma Blitz are casual games and not something everyone needs, but I can say without doubt that they suck on Atom. Will they be better on Zacate or Ontario chips? I doubt it, simply because I don't think Flash games leverage the GPU enough. (Zuma Blitz for instance pegs one of my Core 2 Quad CPU cores at 100% when I play it.)
If "works fluently for surfing and office work" is all you want/need, you can use pretty much any computer built post-2004 and be happy. If you throw in video playback, as stated, that's the killer app for Brazos. If you're after a snappy experience, I don't think even an SSD will pull Atom or Brazos up to the level where I can do everything outside of gaming and never think, "this is taking too long." But hey, I'll be happy to try it. Give me some way to quantify this in a graph, though, because subjectively saying it "works fluently" is marketing speak for "slow but fast enough to run Windows 7". Next year, even ARM will be in that same category.
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I'm sorry but you pretty much misunderstood what I said. I mean, that's what's happening in my country, where all the media are downplaying APUs by comparing it to a Core i3 or Athlon or Phenom or something else that is irrelevant. I never doubted the fairness of your test on Anandtech (except the ones for Phenom II X6s) and I'm just saying a common approach taken by many media manipulated by Intel PRs.JarredWalton - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I get accused of being anti-AMD so often that it's almost laughable. (See the comments in the Global Foundries/AMD article from last week.) While many people can easily get by with slower CPUs, I'm sure I'm not one of them, and I have trouble believing most of our readers are.Facebook is a huge one for example; as a parent, what happens when your kid starts to complain about all his/her favorite Facebook games running like poop on their new laptop? I don't play Farmville (anymore at least... LOL), but virtually every Facebook game that leverages graphics seems like it will kill anything less than Core 2 Duo. I suppose we can take the Apple approach and just blame Flash, but that's a cop-out as well. People are making millions of dollars by creating Facebook games, and because of the ease of creation that Flash affords, we get content from unexpected avenues.
Anyway, if anyone wants to accuse me of Intel fanboyism, read the last paragraph of my intro to an old Buyers' Guide (back in the days when AMD was actually ahead): http://www.anandtech.com/show/1550 Pretty much every BG I did up until Core 2 Duo launched said something to the effect of "AMD is the better choice". Unfortunately, the shoe is on the other foot now.
kc77 - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
It's seems Anandtech always gets in to trouble when it forgets the level of quality it's readers expect from it.If a Core2Duo is the bees knees then what was the purpose of Atom? Atoms purpose is the same as Brazos and that is to fit into small form factors at lower power, and lower price than what CULV processors can fit into. The bone to pick isn't that one time long ago you said something positive about AMD. The problem is that you've done an editorial with two benches and IR and from there you've interjected paragraph upon paragraph which questions the validity of Brazos even though the benches aren't really there for us to see in detail in order to agree with the articles premise or even disagree with it.
Atom wasn't "low-hanging fruit" when it didn't have a competitor, but now it is ? When has AMD ever been able to come close to Intel in power per watt in any market? I can't remember when it's ever happened.
You said this, "This is essentially the killer app of Brazos compared to Atom, and it’s important to keep things in perspective. These chips have a much better IGP than Atom, but at least on the nettop side of things the faster AMD E-350 isn’t miles ahead of Atom D510 in the CPU department. When we drop clock speeds down to 1.0GHz (dual-core C-50) from 1.6GHz (E-350) and compare that to the Atom N550 (1.5GHz)… well, 62.5% of the performance of E-350 compared to 90.4% of the performance of D510 means that in some tests the N550 will probably beat the C-50 for raw CPU potential. Yeah, that’s a concern for me. The GPU is the real difference, so naturally a video decoding test is the best-case scenario. I suspect C-50 will be underpowered for most 3D games, even if the DX11 GPU inside Brazos is fast enough—it will just be the AMD equivalent of Atom + NVIDIA ION, only without as many discrete chips."
What benchmark did you use here? What was power like? We have no idea. I can't agree with the premise because you've provided no numbers other than you downclocked a E-350 processor to 1Ghz and compared it to a DC processor running at 1.5. You shimmy over to talk about CPU prowess using what benchmark we don't know and then parry over to talk about weak GPU performance based on what? Certainly not anything earlier in the article. The logic to make certain statements is weak to say the least because they are written just by themselves with their supporting evidence being nothing more than "feeling" or suspicions, which in the later paragraphs starts talking about how great Brazos is again. Huh? (BTW less discrete chips at this price point matters.)
The problem isn't that there's some disparaging remarks against AMD. The problem is that the article goes too far with opinion without enough benches to back up what it's saying.
"Unfortunately, the shoe is on the other foot now." Based on what?
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Way to ignore what I've said about Atom from the beginning, but let's just grab snippets from a few of our Atom review conclusions:HP 5103 (N550): "Looking just at the performance side of things, then, the current Atom landscape fails to impress. Intel knows this, and so do the manufacturers, which is why the focus with netbooks now is more about providing an inexpensive secondary mobile device where you can access all of your regular programs and data, albeit slowly."
HP 5102 (N450): "Great Build, but Still Atom... Given we’re looking at a netbook that’s now past its prime, we’re still generally impressed with what the Mini 5102 offers. The build quality is far better than anything we’ve seen from a netbook to date, with the best keyboard in a 10” netbook we've ever used. It also comes with a matte screen that’s much easier to use outdoors, though contrast ratio is still poor. However, for $100 more than the competition this is essentially the same old Atom performance."
ASUS 1215N: "A Decent Netbook, but Atom Remains Slow... CULV will eat the dual-core Atom for lunch and not even bother spitting the bones out. You don’t even need to ask about Core i3 or its ULV equivalent."
Samsung N210: "At the end of the day, the insides of the Samsung N210 aren't likely to inspire, and they weren't supposed to. Netbooks just aren't exciting kit where hardware and performance are concerned...."
Or the first Pineview netbook review, the ASUS 1005PE: "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back... Internally, the changes haven't resulted in a system that's significantly faster, but the one change is very noticeable. Our initial tests indicate that Pineview has improved battery life on the 1005 laptops by a whopping 25%. If you want a netbook that can last 10+ hours and you want to spend less than $400, the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE has exactly what you need.... The 1201N is significantly faster than anything you're likely to see from Pine Trail netbooks. Dual-core Atom 330 trumps single-core N450, and ION pummels the GMA 3150, takes its lunch money, and sends it crying home to mama.... The latest release of Atom brings quite a few changes, but the net result isn't quite as impressive as we were hoping. We have an integrated memory controller in the CPU along with a GPU on package. Those are cost saving measures that also provide some benefits in terms of power requirements. What they apparently don't provide is a significant improvement in performance."
The Pine Trail launch was when I wanted something more like Brazos. I wanted a GPU more like ION, and we got GMA 3150. However, that was over a year ago! It's great that Brazos is better than Atom in the GPU department, but look at our nettop preview of Brazos. 1.6GHz E-350 vs. 1.66GHz D510, and the performance difference is anywhere from 10% to 75% faster for AMD. Great. Now cut the clock speed of the E-350 down to 1.0GHz, and chop the GPU clock almost in half, and I'm a lot more concerned.
E-350 is looking like a solid offering, and the Lenovo ThinkPad X120e is probably the most compelling laptop I've seen so far with Brazos. Battery life will probably be six hours instead of 10-12 (just an estimate -- it might hit eight), but performance should be about 60% faster than C-50. 60% is a huge difference; I don't think anyone would disagree with that. At 1.2GHz with the single-core C-30, some CPU tasks should still be faster on AMD than Atom N450, but 1.0GHz on an architecture that appears to be slower clock-for-clock than K8 and CULV makes me concerned.
Sorry if that's not specific enough for you. How about this. One year ago, I wrote a roundup of three CULV laptops. The title: "Intel Core 2 CULV Roundup: Who Needs Atom?" From the conclusion again: "CULV is a great way to balance performance, battery life, and cost while keeping a small size. Given the choice, we'd either go with one of the CULV models or we'd move up to CULV with switchable graphics; Atom remains more of a secondary (or tertiary) computer. Sure they cost more, but we feel the cost is justified."
I don't know how many times I have to say Atom is a lousy solution for most users before it sinks in. So when someone comes along and states that "Atom wasn't "low-hanging fruit" when it didn't have a competitor, but now it is?" you're clearly running around with blinders on. We gave exactly one editors' choice award to an Atom netbook; that was the ASUS 1001P, which happened to deliver a nice matte screen with a high contrast ratio along with all the usual Atom shortcomings. We called it our favorite netbook, and so it was, but even then we ended the review with this:
"The final caveat is that you need to stop and ask yourself: do you want a netbook, or do you want to pay ~$100 more for an 11.6" CULV machine like the Acer Aspire 1410 or Gateway EC14? If your only concerns are price, size and battery life with no regards to performance, a netbook will do the job. With over twice the computing power, a much more livable WXGA screen resolution, 802.11n/Gigabit Ethernet, and not much in the way of a size, weight, or battery life penalty, it's hard not to recommend going the CULV route."
So please don't try to pawn me off as an Intel shill, or someone that changes tune every time AMD comes out with a new part, or whatever other label you happen to have. Brazos isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread; it's merely "better than Atom", which was marginal at best. I've been pointing at CULV as the minimum target I'd recommend to most people for over a year now, so if Brazos chips can't hit CULV performance levels I'll be disappointed. Then I'll end up with, "well, CULV for $100-$150 less" and walk away saying it looks like an okay platform but there's plenty of room for improvement. And the next iteration with up to four Bobcat cores isn't exactly what I'm looking for; how about two cores in a netbook that can clock up to 2.0GHz and still not require more than 12W? That's what I want from Brazos today, because then it would be faster than CULV in every test, it would have a better GPU, and it would actually decimate Atom netbooks.
Okay, I'm done. Carry on with the flame wars.
kc77 - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I don't think you get where I'm coming from. You can provide bad things you've said about Atom until the cows come home. That's not apart of my concern nor does it factor much into my statements. My issue is not that there's some bad things said about AMD. The problem is that this editorial and no other is lacking in benchmarks to support the claims that it is making.Yet somehow you're able to come up with a thesis on performance and comment with worry and suspicion when you haven't provided much in the way of benchmarks. This isn't about flaming you. This is about wondering on the lack of quality. You have your opinion for sure, but in THIS editorial there's not much to back it. That's the issue. A secondary issue is the lack of logic when making statements when they aren't backed by real benchmarking numbers. Lets take a look at your restatement.
"It's great that Brazos is better than Atom in the GPU department, but look at our nettop preview of Brazos. 1.6GHz E-350 vs. 1.66GHz D510, and the performance difference is anywhere from 10% to 75% faster for AMD. Great. Now cut the clock speed of the E-350 down to 1.0GHz, and chop the GPU clock almost in half, and I'm a lot more concerned."
Houston we have a problem! You haven't provided benches so that we can SEE it for ourselves as to why exactly you are concerned. This isn't PCWorld or Fudzilla it's Anandtech. There's a difference at least in my eyes. What CPU test did you run? Was it Photoshop? Cinebench? Angry Birds? What was is it that gave you that suspicion, worry or concern? We don't know. We will never know until you provide what metric you used.
"So please don't try to pawn me off as an Intel shill, or someone that changes tune every time AMD comes out with a new part, or whatever other label you happen to have. "
Did I say you were? Nope. Don't pass me off as just another person who is critiquing your editorial because there were unfavorable things said about AMD. I could care less. You've said other things in the past, but they were backed up by benches so there's no need to say anything. It was what it was. However you do make it easy for people to say such things when you say...."And the next iteration with up to four Bobcat cores isn't exactly what I'm looking for" BASED ON WHAT BENCHMARK!?? Good grief I'm not looking for AMD praise I'm looking for a benchmark that backs up claims like these.
whatthehey - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Seriously? Is that all you've got? You people with your "Anandtech is all about Intel" are delusional. Let me try to help: "look at our nettop preview of Brazos". The article in question actually LINKED the article. Here it is again:http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-perf...
PS CS4: Brazos is 9% faster than Atom.
x264 1st pass: 7% faster than Atom
x264 2nd pass: 5% faster
3dsmax: 26% faster
CB singlethreaded: 65% faster
CB multithreaded: 11% faster
Par2: 4% faster
Winrar: 6% faster
But those are all CPU intensive benchmarks! Well, yeah, that's the point of a CPU comparison. You don't benchmark a CPU by running a test that's bottlenecked by the hard drive. Hell, if Brazos is only 65% faster than Atom in the best-case result, I'm even more concerned than what Anandtech is voicing in this editorial piece! E-350 should be the lowest Brazos offering, but the C-30 and C-50 appear to be there to compete with netbooks for battery life, even if they may end up slower in everything outside of video decoding and GPU-intensive tasks.
kc77 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Thanks for link to the E-350 which has benchmarks. The remarks about performance within this article are about C-50 and C-30 in this article. So seriously that's what I'm talking about. Thanks for helping though.Iketh - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Hey buddy, I very much appreciated the summaries without benchmarks. The benchmarks will come later. If you don't like it, screw off, because I want to read them. They've done this many times before and have always backed themselves up later with data.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
I've rarely if ever seen anandtech's comments get so narrow to the side :Pkc77, dude, read the articles, read the benchmarks, read about the architecture... Atom is weak at best. Plus, if you are looking for Atom performance benchmarks then go to an article about that, no need to reiterate the same data several dozen times. Furthermore, I get the feeling Anandtech and its writers expect a level of knowledge from the readership. Apparently there are exceptions to the assumed knowledge levels. But by all means, challenge their posture and you will find that they are not lying or pulling things out of their.... hats.
Bobcat is good, but the power benefits from dropping the clock to 1GHz while also crippling the GPU is negligible, Jarred is talking about that. He is saying that Bobcat can and/or should compete against CULV, not Atom. That is his frustration. He figures a quad-core bobcat will still be crippled by low clockspeeds, and I agree with him on that.
kc77 - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
"kc77, dude, read the articles, read the benchmarks, read about the architecture... Atom is weak at best. Plus, if you are looking for Atom performance benchmarks then go to an article about that, no need to reiterate the same data several dozen times."Did you not read what I was saying. I don't need benchmarks for Atom we know what that is already. As you said they are in other articles.
"Furthermore, I get the feeling Anandtech and its writers expect a level of knowledge from the readership. Apparently there are exceptions to the assumed knowledge levels. But by all means, challenge their posture and you will find that they are not lying or pulling things out of their.... hats."
Um this is about UNRELEASED hardware. Not hardware that can be bought. If it was purchasable then maybe it's readers would know about the hardware, which if that's the case Why come here? To read something I already know?
"Bobcat is good, but the power benefits from dropping the clock to 1GHz while also crippling the GPU is negligible, Jarred is talking about that."
You don't need to repeat what he said. I read that. However he made remarks on performance and didn't tell us anything in regards to what we ran and what score it got. Instead he provided insight that was half-technical without any becnhamrks to say why. ... That's the problem,
"He is saying that Bobcat can and/or should compete against CULV, not Atom. That is his frustration. "
Well maybe he should work for AMD and control their product lines. With all of this rambling it's going to come down to price. $100 regardless of performance matters in where these CPU's are marketed .
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
And that's why I think choosing the right test suite (though I may not know what is a "right test suite") and counterpart for APU is important for such tests. But I really don't want to see APU being said "Oh, it sucks when you play Call of Pripyat and Farcry 2" or "It's incredibly slow in heavy H264 encoding".AnandThenMan - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I have no idea what you're rambling on about. But again another article that is negative towards AMD just for the sake of being negative. Why don't you just forget completely abut anything AMD and not write about them?Sorry but this is a horrible article.
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Come on Anand has always been positive towards AMD's Fusion APUs, just because Intel sucks with its Atoms and have been too conservative on refreshing the Atom product line for years.bjacobson - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
huh? He seemed very kinda to AMD. What I saw was:"Atom just can't keep up"
"Brazos dips at places but that's probably drivers"
Why isn't a drivers issue with Atom? I've had a heck of a time getting the right decoding working on my gma500 but my 1.3ghz Atom with that GMA500 can decode 1080p24 video, or stream over wifi + decode 720p (don't have the bandwidth for the 1080p usually).
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
GMA 500 was a horribly supported GPU, unfortunately. Not sure if the newer Z series will be better, but let's hope so. GMA 500 managed H.264 offload, but at least the system I tested was totally unstable (crashing several times per day). Last I looked, the drivers were still a year old.bjacobson - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
yes it was poorly managed, the crashing multiple times/day was because Acer shipped them with the wrong driver and drivers not installed correctly.Once I tracked down the correct one straight from Intel's site, and installed manually via "Upgrade Driver" (and specifically not running the intel setup.exe), it ran fine no more crashing.
bjacobson - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
actually that's not entirely true, transparency still doesn't work without crashing eventually in Windows 7-- but it's much faster without transparency so I leave it turned off.Hacp - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Perhaps you miss the point of bobcat? It is to offer cheap netbooks with good battery life and good enough performance. Will it be able to do everything? No. But is it cheap? YES! Will it have good battery life? Yes!jharper12 - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Thanks for the good article. Have you considered the trend towards GPU use in browsers while pondering the future of this platform? IE already does this, but as a user of Chrome I know it's currently a lab feature. Google plans to unload more and more to the GPU, whenever possible. That bodes exceedingly well for browser experience with a Fusion chip.Dan Fay - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Jared,In future benchmarks of Brazos platform-based machines, could you provide some more single-threaded benchmarks? Versus Atom, that's where the Bobcat processor gets interesting, as its OOOE engine should allow it to get higher single-threaded performance than Atom. For heavily multithreaded applications, it's not at all surprising that Atom's and Bobcat's performance are so close together, as Atom's SMT allows it to better keep its in-order pipeline filled.
Single-threaded performance is important in these comparisons because a major criticism of Atom is that it doesn't "feel" very fast, mainly because it doesn't respond quickly enough to OS/UI events, which are usually single-threaded in nature.
Finally, what might help capture Facebook performance is to run something like SunSpider. SunSpider is pretty easy to run anyway, so why not?
JarredWalton - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I'm not sure what you're getting at... obviously, doing high-end CPU-intensive tasks on Atom (or Brazos or CULV) isn't really the intended use. It's why I include PCMark, and I'm open for suggestions on other tests that truly show the difference. I've used enough laptops and desktops to say that for basic tasks, even Atom still feels very sluggish, but it might be tolerable in a pinch. Brazos looks to be about the same, only now you can get HD video decoding as a benefit. But calling the lack of Blu-ray 3D support "catastrophic"... well, I'll just respectfully disagree.Despite all the hype and the effort, everyone I hear thinks the 3D experience is marginal at best. A few people really like it, most are ho-hum, and there are a LOT of people that really dislike 3D. Active 3D gives a lot of people headaches, for example. Passive is better in that regard, but it still requires more effort on the part of your eye muscles. Normally I'd say exercising your muscles is good, but I'm not sure that's the case with the eyes. Either way, it's still uncomfortable for enough people that it's a concern.
Ultimately, for netbooks and ultraportables, I really don't care too much about lack of 3D support. It's something probably less than 5% of the market cares about. On HTPCs it's a bigger issue, but I'm not reviewing the HTPC aspect, hence the statement, "If you’re looking for the ultimate HTPC chip, we’ll have to investigate that area in further detail" -- and be "we" I mean "someone else at AnandTech, probably Ganesh. :-)
nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Really looking forward to your test! Have seen many of the tests posted on other sites but they are not convincing enough as most of them are choosing the wrong test suite and wrong counterparts. Hope Anandtech can come up with a test suite designated for netbooks/ultraportables and, never ever compare APUs to the Mobile Cores (1st or 2nd Gen) or any mighty chips on the desktop, I'm just tired of seeing APUs being stated "incredibly slow compared to a X2 250or Pentium G6950" :)omelet - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
What do you expect them to compare it to? Obviously Atom will be in the comparison, but what else should they include? Brazos is going to be slow cpu-wise compared to anything except for Atom.knedle - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Problem with "ordinary surfing" is that you can do it on PIII 1GHz or Core i7 and it will still work the same.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
lol? Was there a punchline I missed, or was it that P3 can run today's content rich web?Edgar_Wibeau - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
One thing. Atom is strong when two similar threads run on the same core. On a dual core that's 4 threads naturally. Only in this scenario D525 is in the same league as E-350. But please tell me, which are the scenarios when 4 similar threads run under high load on a netbook or TnL notebook? You write that in your Flash scenario only one core is heavily loaded. But when only one heavy thread is running, or even one on each core, then E-350 leads by a big margin. And it likely still runs noticeably faster with three threads.So what ist the everyday-task on a netbook that runs four similar* threads at full load that justifies to say an atom D525 is practically as fast as an E-350?
Oh, and please try Flash 10.2 when you're testing Flash games, see blogs.amd.com/fusion
I don't know anybody playing facebook games in my country btw. Facebook yes, several. But FB games?
*similar means, I've only seen benchmarks for one program at four threads. What happens when four absolutely different tasks (or e.g. two programs with two threads each) are run on a dualcore hyperthreading CPU, I don't know.
AnandThenMan - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Tomshardware has a decent article up on the Brazos platform, a good read. Anandtech dares not do a similar article because AMD really embarrasses Intel's Atom.StevoLincolnite - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I agree.The general consensus on Brazos seems to be rather good around the web.
It's an excellent alternative to Atom.
JarredWalton - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
You mean like our old Brazos preview, where we show E-350 leading the Atom in virtually every test? Yes, we certainly don't dare to do that! That would be horrible to report the truth, because that's only what we've been doing for years. But then you know that, because you've been accusing us of bias pretty much since Core 2 arrived and took a commanding lead over the AMD chips. The only *ONLY* reason we haven't done a complete writeup of a retail Brazos platform is because we don't have one for testing yet. I'm working to get some Brazos laptops in, and the sooner the better, but we don't have them yet.Funny thing is that THG's article isn't particularly gung ho on Brazos either: "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."
As I've said, Atom is so slow that just about anything is faster. Intel is afraid to make Atom faster because then it encroaches on their ULV chips and the Pentium class processors (which case about twice as much as Atom). But I won't give AMD a pass for making something 25%-50% faster than Atom, because CULV was already about twice as fast. It looks like the slowest dual-core CULV (Celeron SU2300) + ION ends up being comparable to the E-350, so what we're really talking about is a less expensive chip. It ought to win the power argument as well, and it has a better GPU. That's all well and good, but it's hardly revolutionary.
StevoLincolnite - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Excuse me? Maybe you have gotten me confused with someone else.I have not been accusing you or anyone else of BIAS since the "Core 2" days, but you are clearly accusing me.
I could care less if AMD is a performance leader or not, as long as I can continue in getting great performing chips at a cheap price I am happy regardless of platform.
I wasn't bashing the article per-say, I'll get what I can take, if anything I was expecting something longer detailing more aspects of the platform.
In the end, it all comes down to cost.
If Brazo's can out-perform an Atom (Without Ion) Mini-ITX in most situations, yet have costs in the same ballpark, it's a winner. - Shouldn't be hard to do, and it seems to may have done it.
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Was directed at AnandThenMan... didn't show up in the threaded view very well. :-)AnandThenMan - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
That's some nice selective quoting Jarred. Maybe you should read the entire article instead of picking a few sentences that try and prove your point. You claim to be unbiased, but then why did you go through the text and find the most negative quote you could?If you actually READ the article, the overall impression is very positive. Brazos does exactly what it set out to do. At it's price point and power envelope, it is a very impressive offering. I can't wait to see Anandtech compare it with much pricier hardware, and talk endlessly about Intel products that have not been released yet.
Some things are so predictable.
BTW, Brazos is one tiny piece of silicon. But I expect you and others to paint that as a negative and complain how it's more about making money for AMD than anything else.
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Our lineup of laptops to compare Brazos with will include the standard low-cost, low performance offerings, just like it does with Atom.So on the Intel side, we'll have at least one Atom N450, one N550, one CULV (SU4100), I'll toss in the bottom Arrandale ULV i3-330UM as one more point of reference, and I'll even throw in the MacBook Pro 13. The only ION platform I reviewed is unfortunately the HP Mini 311, and I don't have a full set of results -- no one will even send me an Atom + NG-ION system.
On the AMD side, we'll have the Toshiba T235D (Nile K625), and maybe bring back the MSI Wind or Acer Ferrari (something to represent the Congo era). Of course we'll have Brazos as well, and I would love to have C-30, C-50, and E-350 represented. We'll see if we can make that happen.
Look at the Mini 5103 review and that's what I'm planning. What else would you like? (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4066/hp-mini-5103-lo...
As far as selective quoting, that's the conclusion of the article. There are other paragraphs in the conclusion that essentially state exactly what I've stated. Let me quote them as well:
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
That's like more than half of the conclusion (even the intro to the conclusion is somewhat negative, saying Brazos "doesn't deserve that kind of praise"), with some positive parts in there about the price of Brazos systems. We can beat the Better-Than-Atom drum all we want, but that's only one target. Better at roughly the same price is good and will get plenty of design wins -- I mentioned how many of them were at CES in the previous article.
But even if Brazos sells, unfortunately AMD isn't making a ton of money off of it. Say the chip package costs $20 and AMD sells it for $50; well, Intel's SNB probably costs under $100 to package and they sell it for $200+. Anything is better than losing market share, but what AMD really needs is to (like in the K8 days) get out parts that they can legitimately sell for more than $200.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Yes, it is positively faster than Atom, but who actually cares about Atom? AMD needs to target CULV and either achieve the same performance at Atom power draw or run 50% faster than CULV at CULV speeds. That is what THG and Jarred are saying.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Yeah, don't worry man, if it is inline then it is a reply to whoever is less indented above.nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Agreed. You can't expect much from a chip built on 40nm process, integrating the north bridge, an entry-class GPU and two CPU cores, while shrinking the die size to barely over 70mm^2. It shocks Atom from any aspect, performance, power efficiency, die size and an important concern for OEM manufacturers: the price. Priced at no higher than $100, it is a good deal compared to D525+ION combo which costs $113 ($63 for the CPU and $50 for the GPU).AMD is surely doing its best, and given current technology AMD can do nothing better than this. Perhaps things will be much better with the introduction of Gen 2 APUs built on 28nm process, which means two times core count (hmm...quad-core, that makes Gen 2 APU more than "enough") with a much more competitive GPU based on the new architecutre.
It's one year from now and Intel won't be introducing 32-nm based Atom--with no architectural advance but a simple die shrink, perhaps with a better IGP, but still far from AMD's--until Q1 2012. So AMD is actually keeping a fast pace on its Fusion Program, in less than two years they will come up with really convincing chips, NOT NOW.
d00ki_br0wn - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Sorry pal, but you guys are thoroughly considered to be the biggest Intel fanboys on the net, it's considered a given at this point. For one, synthetic benchmarks should be dropped altogether. They consistently produce results that favor Intel (many of them are compiled with ICC, bit of an odd choice, don't you think?), moreso than any real-world benchmarks favor Intel. So that instantly skews your aggregate results, and because you rely on them for your power use results, those are skewed too.Here's a general history of your bias:
Core2: It WAS faster than AMD's competing chips, but when I bought one, it wasn't nearly as fast as I expected it to be based on hardware reviews, compared to the Athlon 64 it replaced. It also still had the Pentium 4 denormal bug, but this was ignored by you guys. I encountered it many times, I had to avoid certain DSP applications because of it. I also owned a Phenom 9500 later with the OMGBAD TLB errata, never encountered the TLB errata that made it so awful...
Nehalem: Not appreciable faster than Core2 in many real world applications, but much faster at video encoding: Anandtech's response: Make synthetics and video encoding like 90% of the review article.
Phenom II: reasonably close to Nehalem, a normal person couldn't tell the difference in normal use. Anandtech's response: Well, it is comparable in gaming, but you should still get a Nehalem for it's superior synthetic benchmarks and video encoding(whether you ecode or not). Then you say that Core2 has issues with stuttering in games, whereas P2 and i7 don't have stuttering in games because of the IMC. RLY? You never mentioned that when you were touting Core2 as the gaming CPU to buy.
Core i5: Anandtech went way the heck out of their way to promote this as a "must have upgrade" to "last year's" Nehalem: Thinking people scratched their head at this one.
Sandy Bridge: Not necessarily too much faster than Nehalem in the real-world(and therefore not necessarily too much faster than Core2), but even better at video encoding. So, let's keep on pushing the video encoding, run the benches ignoring that most of the performance comes from a bump in clockspeed, and imply that every single one can OC anywhere from 4.5 to 5ghz, even though we know that they won't last an entire month at those speeds.
Yours Truly,
Long Time Reader
AnandThenMan - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
"Sorry pal, but you guys are thoroughly considered to be the biggest Intel fanboys on the net, it's considered a given at this point."True, but I think it's more actually. Anandtech's true colours really shone through when they violated their own policy and included overclocked Nvidia cards. And justified it by saying that Nvidia "insisted".
And you'll notice that this can't give a compliment to AMD without some sort of slight or caveat somewhere. Well Brazos is good, but Atom sucks so it's really nothing special etc. etc. Or they will talk about what Intel has in the pipeline instead of just giving AMD credit and leave it at that.
Paulsbo.Otellini - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
None of this is intended to survive real scrutiny in the comments section. The intent of the subtle Intel praise and subtle negativity towards AMD in every article is that people who don't read or understand tech but who want to research their next purchase will stumble on this via google, skim over the article, and say "well gosh, Intel is just flat out better, I'd be cheating myself if I bought AMD".JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
No, the intent is to tell the facts as they are and not make excuses for AMD *or* Intel. All of you looking to root for the underdog (AMD) aren't doing them any favors by overlooking their faults. I understand it's very difficult to compete with a company that makes tons more money than you do, but pretending a product with flaws is perfect isn't going to help. The fact is that AMD has a product with good power characteristics, moderate performance, and a reasonable GPU. It's better than Atom. CULV and ULV are also substantially better options than Atom (unless the only criterion you're interested in is minimum cost). Brazos should beat the current Atom chips in every meaningful way.On the other hand, have you noticed how most of the Brazos netbooks appear to be going after a higher price segment? I suppose that's necessary when you do a full Win7 install with at least 2GB RAM, but that means the $300 market will remain in the hands of crap like Atom (or equally bad crap like Brazos netbooks with 160GB HDDs, Win7 Starter, and 1GB RAM).
We had CULV with Celeron SU2300, and I think Intel may have simply done their best to kill that off when people saw what you could get for $400 in an ultraportable (i.e. the Acer Aspire 1410). Or maybe Acer killed it off because they make more money on the Timeline 1810 and wanted people to go there for dual-core computing? Either way, things are done as business decisions.
Look, I'm glad we have AMD. I've used a lot of their products. I've built AMD systems for a lot of friends. In nearly every case in the past three years, I've used AMD because they offer good performance at a great price, and the person really just needs office, email, and Internet. If that's what you're after (and you don't care about power draw), even the four year old socket 939 dual-core parts are still fine. I should know -- I have one of them and my eight-year-old daughter uses it to play some of the current web games and activities targeting her age group.
Without AMD, Intel prices go up, their performance stagnates, and consumers don't win. So if you don't need Sandy Bridge, Arrandale, Core 2, or even K10 levels of performance, by all means get a Brazos system. It should sip power, handle a lot of multimedia tasks quite well, and it should be pretty darn cheap.
Just don't pretend that it's the only way to build a good chips, because Llana and Bulldozer shows that AMD certainly knows Bobcat only works in the "low cost above all else" category of computers. The GPU is an order of magnitude better than GMA 3150, but it's apparently at the same level as NVIDIA's ION. The CPU is up to twice as fast as Atom, but then so is Intel's Core 2 CULV. That's all I'm saying, and all of that is true. We already had "Brazos" 12 months ago with CULV + ION (or G 310M if you prefer). Now, we're getting about the same thing for a lower price. That's great for cost but does nothing for performance.
ghost_of_goebbles - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Well, when somebody's job involves propaganda and influencing public perception, generally, they respond to being called-out with "we're not biased, we're like Fox News: Fair and Balanced". Upon being pressed further, the paid shill will accuse the accuser of being anything from paranoid to delusional or even flat out crazy... Because, of course, we live in a world where nobody ever conspires to do anything dishonest for profit, especially not our beloved Intel. *raucous laughter*Nowhere along the line does anyone expect you to say "Oh noez, u r haz caught me!!!". Go read any other tech forum on the web, people all over the world say "yeah, there's this benchmark on Anandtech, but I'd take it with a grain of salt, we all know whose side their on... *wink, wink, nudge, nudge*"
Dustin Sklavos - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
We do?See, this is why I feel out of the loop being a relatively new guy. Nobody told me I could get paid to shill Intel here. :(
redisnidma - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Keep pretending. :)seapeople - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
You Anand-Loves-Intel people are seriously retards. In every article the last three years AnandTech has basically said that Intel rocks the performance market, but sucks below $200 where AMD is king. They have also unilaterally praised Intel's notebook CPUs during that timeframe.Now why would this be? Is it a giant conspiracy theory? No! It's because starting with the Core2 series Intel's high performance offerings have completely obliterated AMD's, and AMD gives worse laptop performance with worse battery life at the same time. This is not unique to AnandTech. This is what pretty much everyone else has been saying.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Wait a minute, didn't Conroe come out three years ago? You see, I was under the impression that Conroe destroyed K8, and then AMD scrapped the original K9 and K10 designs and went for an upgraded K8 to compete against the Core 2 Quads but fell horribly short.Yeah, I'm pretty sure that is exactly what happened. Check ANYWHERE and see that AMD has been limping along for the past three years.
silverblue - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
Clock for clock, K10.5 and Penryn are pretty much neck and neck, depending on application. The comparison is quite difficult though; Penryn comes in a variety of flavours with differing inclusive L2 cache sizes, plus has SSE4.1 and 4.2 whereas K10.5 has SSE4a and generally sports an exclusive L3 cache. You are correct in that AMD hasn't really gotten to a level where they can compete on performance, however they've done pretty well with K10.5 derivatives so I'm not sure that could be considered "limping along".JarredWalton - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
But K10.5 came out when in comparison to Penryn? Nehalem was already shipping.nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Sorry pal, but I can't be an Intel fanboy when I'm using Phenom II X3 720+HD6870 on my PC and still waiting for my pre-ordered APU nettop :)AMD is surely doing its besting in giving us the Atom-killer with higher performance, better power efficiency at similar price margin. What I'm trying to emphasize here is that DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM BRAZOS, as it's impossible to get super-computer-like performance with a 74 mm^2 chip built on 40nm process, otherwise AMD may used some technology from Martians lol.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
The problem is that no-one cares if you can out perform an Atom. Even Snapdragon (ARM7) can outperform Atom. Brazos will be most underwhelming and will only belong in netbooks. CULV will continue to dominate the low end and ultra portable markets while Bulldozer will have to compete with everything else.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Weird, because I have, in my last 4 or 5 builds for myself and friends, considered buying intel until I looked at what AnandTech thought, at which point I went AMD Ati.bjacobson - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
are you kidding me, Toms is always pro Intel from what I've seen.Look at their WoW Cataclysm benchmark, they don't once question why there's no improvement between cores 3->4 and 4->5 but there is between 5->6.
He was pretty kind to AMD in this review.
Jeez I'm going to stop reading these comments they are getting polluted!
Voldenuit - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
I'm curious to know if Brazos/Zacate have enough CPU power to decode HD video in software.Why bother? While it's undeniable that hardware-accelerated playback is much more power and CPU efficient, there are times when it is lower quality or downright incompatible with a given video file. And not all file and video formats are supported in hardware (eg, what about WebM, or the various weird formats video cameras and the like record in?).
I use DXVA on my Radeon 4870 for most of my media viewing, but there are times when I have to fallback to FFDShow for some files, whether it's because of a poorly encoded video, odd choice of container or problems with the ATI drivers. It would be useful to know if Brazos/Zacate have enough CPU grunt to decode a 1080p video in software when the occasion arises.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
Aye I run into this problem all the time.DILLIGAFF - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Jarred -thank you!I respect the person, when they are a public source of information, and admits fault publically and busts ass to fix the wrong. Props. i understand it takes people, personal time and guts to do it. I have been there before albeit not quiet as public :)
as far as netbooks with ssd's--i shoved a 2nd gen intel 160 in a n10j (remember that one jarred?) . the experience is unbelievably satisfying for anything other then games on an external monitor.....there is a reason why intel limits the display rez on these any way they can.
that said i think another way to summarize the chip is that it is a relevant chip in an irrelevant chip segment (tdp wise and current application of apu/cpu/gpu).
the atom..this thing....they all would be amazing in a phone but are mediocre at best in a computer no matter which way you dice it
the Only good thing about this is that this should cause intel to push for the next tick or tock or whatever of the atom..i think at this point they have to go lower then 45nm for it....hopefully this means sooner ivy bridge and haswell [at least not delayed] so they push desktop to 22 and open 32 capacity for atom
i shudder to think where either of these products (atom and brazos) would be today had TSMC hit ~30-20nm sooner without delays last year which would have allowed ARM to leverage the new manuf standard....
if there was one improvement you guys could make at AT to Mobile is to standardize cpu's more--buy a couple SB mobile, so not only can you test the product as sold but can also provide better guidance around cpu performance.....took 11 months to show exactly how much "slower" a fast mobile dual core is compared to a quad core mobile....yikes..seems like a no brainer...coulda bought a 620m 11 months ago and showed the data....maybe even borrowed one from intel.
D
Hacp - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
When you're talking about raw cpu potential, you mean multi-threaded apps. However, many of the things we use today are single threaded, and that is where AMD's OOO beat's Atom hands down. Remember, a dual core atom with hyperthreading beats a 3.4ghz P4 with Hyperthreading in multithreaded benches, but the P4 owns the Atom in single thread performance.nitrousoxide - Friday, January 14, 2011 - link
Keep in mind that when you are reading this comment, your Chrome or Safari or Firefox or whatever browser you use is multi-threaded so multi-core benches really count in real-world use. Photo editing, audio transcoding, instant messaging, all these software used in nettops today are INDEED multi-threaded (probably no significant improvement on triple to quad cores, but it makes a lotta difference when you have more than one core)The problem here is HT: it actually does nothing in most cases and even impacts gaming performance as threads compete for limited resources and can provide decent performance boost only when the software is carefully optimized for HT. Atom can come close to Brazos in multi-threading, yeah, that's right, because the softwares tested are HT optimized.
mino - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Multithread my ***.While the browser might be multithreaded, the stuttering Flash video is STILL using a single core/thread.
Atom needs HT to get any reasonable "benchmarketing" results.
But you know what? Desktop experience is pretty much orthogonal from "throughput computing" performance Atom or Niagara provide.
HT/SMT is _GREAT_ for throughput(i.e. server) while often giving NEGATIVE gain for UI/GUI desktop performance that relies on many simple single thread-ed tasks.
It was that way back in the NetBurst days, then on Niagara, then on Atom and now on Nehalem/SNB.
The single major benefit of HT on desktop is when having 1 physical core is hampering the scheduler. But that advantage is the wild card of the 2001, not 2011.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
You should watch out about calling a single threaded program that windows 7 throw onto multiple thread multi-threaded since it probably isn't,overzealot - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
OS's can't split threads. Nice try though!Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
When you launch any program you are spawning multiple threads. Often there are more than 4. But most of them are short lived. In most cases, having 2 cores helps applications launch faster. But having more than two helps not a bit in most situations. I have a unique perspective on this since I have 2 machines that both have the same motherboard, hard drive, and RAM, and one is a E6600 and one is a Q6600, both clocked at 3.2GHz. The Q6600 is only noticably faster when you launch an "abnormal" number of applications simultaneously. For example, I have a script that opens 4 pdf's, 2 excel spreadsheets, 2 calc spreadsheets, 2 word docs, 2 swriter docs, a ppt file, an impress file, an mp3 in media player, an avi file in vlc, a quicktime video, a bmp in paint, a txt in notepad, a log in wordpad, and a few others i cant remember at the moment. Only in extreme cases like this is the quadcore faster than the dual core.overzealot - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
Actually, whenever you launch a program you are creating 1 thread. It may then create new threads, or make system calls (which may create threads of their own). But, it certainly isn't always.Also, when describing an application as "multi-threaded", the usual emphasis is on concurrent execution of said threads.
Threads created by system calls may execute concurrently, but the original application thread will wait for them to respond sequentially.
Case in point - open notepad: 1 thread. Open a file in notepad - up to 20 threads. The original program is still a single thread, it just now makes requests to other threads inside the same process - this incurs less penalty than making requests to other processes. That's a benefit, but number of cores doesn't affect it.
I do hope you didn't buy a quad core just to make apps load faster though. Mine gets plenty of it's workout from encoding and compiling, and a bit of action from games.
psiboy - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
While Anandtech theorises Tom's Hardware has delivered.... go and read their comparisons.... http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/asrock-e350m1-...H83 - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I have to say i´m disappointed by those results.
I though the new CPUs would beat the crap out of the super crappy Atom but in many ways it´s just the same, it´s basically AMDs Atom version with a better IGP at a lower cost. AMD as to try harder to beat Intel in this game.
By the way, can you tell when will Anandtech review Sansy Bridge mobile CPUs? They seem perfect for my next laptop with a very good performance and hopefully lower power requirements.
krumme - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
So you think a cpu that is aprox 60% faster on real world usage, turning the Atom computer from unsusable to tolerable, on the same cost is disapointing.Well for the the 20 years i have followed the evolution there has not been a single cpu, - and nor will there for the foreseable future - be a cpu that will change how the market works.
As of now every OEM and their brother is going for e350 for the simple reason that it does get the job done for 90% of the users, at a fraction of the cost of a core2/AMD whatever.
There can be at least 800 pcx. on one wafer, that in the region of 6-7 usd per die, add packaging and shippihng - the marginal - marginal - cost is at most 4 usd here. And you have a marginal cost in the region of 11usd, probably a few usd more than the Atom. The result is already showing.
People dont give a s..t about all kind idiotic benchmarks. The OEM dont care if its AMD or Intel anymore, as long as there is no complaints from the customers. Atom is the reason that people still know what a cpu is, because it simply is to slow even for women. The results is that bobcat will sell like hotcakes. At a selling price of fx. 40usd, that is a good business for AMD, as the fixed cost can be shared to next version and a broader portfolio. As the pincount is lower than Atom, there is no reason to beliewe it will no go to 300usd.
krumme - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
But disagree how it should be interpreted.First of all thanx to Jarred for participating
The funny thing is it seems we all know what to expect. Its the context that matters.
Jarred says they are using bm that suits their readers. Thats right, but thats not the right choice. What is so brilliant about Johans server test, is that he test the cpu in scenarios where they will be used - server situations. Its very simple. He dont use test outside of the purpose of the cpu. The reviews of bobcat should reflect the same methology.
There is absolutely no reason to test the bobcat in scenarios where it will not be used - or only in very rare situations. The wider consequences of doing so is forcing the manufaturas - here AMD - to produce 4 core bobcats with 1Mb l2 cache. The effect would be an idiotic waste of ressources. The customers should rather use the money on better screen, battery or ssd.
For the ssd discussion the interesting thing about the atom is, that it can hardly use a 5400rpm hd, therefore the extra power of the e350 with a 7200rpm (or a very cheap-slow ssd) turns into real user experience.
Aone - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Quite a strange that neither AMD not the author didn't notice the difference between C-50 and C-30 because the former has two cores while the last only one core.And, BTW, C-Brazos has not only lower cpu frequency but gpu one also.
How really he will stack up to Atom?
krumme - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Who cares about the temp?I dont need to reach for my Atom 450 with 3150 graphics to tell you the difference, and neither do you. The Atom is hardly capable of computing. But was never invented to be used as a pc, and should not be used as such. Bobcat is. Adding 1080p and fx. 25% Mhz on later Atom revisions, is not going to change that conclusion.
nitrousoxide - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
C-30 is a piece that sucks. I don't quiet understand the point why AMD have single-core APUs while dual-core parts don't use that much power. With only one core enabled, running at 1.2GHz, C-30 can hardly do anything because it's within the performance margin with a decade-old Pentium 3. Getting such a part on the level of the CPUs ten years ago is definitely a very idiotic decision. E350 and C-50 are impressive parts but I really got shocked when AMD decides to ship single-core APUs.flexcore - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Could be for set-top boxes or embedded applications where single 1.2ghz is good. I don't think this cpu is for consumer computing.krumme - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
agree - but what exactly is the market for c30 here?789427 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
The c30 Market exists and I believe is growing. You actually know it well yourself.Now you've got your gaming/encoding workstation beast of a computer and you now don't want to touch it because it's busy actually doing something (even if that's gaming) and you've got email to send, leters to write, recipes to cook in the kitchen - maybe even listening to movies and general multimedia stuff on the go...
Does the movie look any different using a C30 or a i7 on the same screen? no.
Ditto for the rest.
Now what should be interesting you is how long it lasts off a single charge or how warm your pants get - not to mention how much it costs...
cb
krumme - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I can see the market, I just have trouble seeing how C30 should get there.AMD dont have the engi ressources to help integrating
Its ARM low-cost land - where is the advantage of 5w here?
cjs150 - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Every main CPU has a purpose and I am happy to use Intel or AMD.I have a home file server based on Atom. Atom may be a pretty poor CPU, but for a file server it is fine.
Brazo's looks to be a perfect choice for a low power HTPC, every aspect being better.
Would I use either of them for a desktop machine - no. My gaming machine has an i5-750, my work machine an i3
zodiacfml - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I agree.My dual core atom build was disliked by my sister due to low performance in flash games, and commented that our old laptop with a single core pentium-m was faster. Anyways, it was good as a file server, photo slideshow and 720p video on a 1080p display.
Good thing, we still don't have a netbook. Brazos, it is, before summer. I still can't believed they axed the AMD CEO.
sebanab - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I am what you might call an Atom victim. I say this because I used Atom allot , and suffered allot when: my Flash video was stuttering even in 480p , system took too long to boot , video streams would run crappy ETC...So here are a few things I really want to see tested on the Brazos systems when they arrive:
1. Win7 (Starter / no bloat) start and shut down times
2. CPU load during 720p flash playback
3. Browser start-up time (i know its very small , but make a script or something and give me the numbers :) )
4. flash games fluidity (not a big fan but it is important)
5. maybe office install time
Anyway looking forward to the review!
krumme - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
I hope Jarred reads your comment. Because it is real world situations.When i installed win 7 starter on my atom rig, it said it would take several minutes. It turned into several hours - lol, and after the first update with 31 updates, restarting the computer took more than an hour. For a restart. LOL
I dont know how difficult it is to measure. Just starting word or the browser takes a life time :) - damn it nearly reminds me of window 3.11 on a 386 sx. Loading pages like anandtech is like someone chopped your internet connection to a quarter speed.
JarredWalton - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Oh, I read it, and I'll do my best to run such tests on a couple laptops (Atom, Brazos, and CULV hopefully). If I can get enough time, I'll even try to do the same with an SSD in each system to see how much that improves the situation. So, outside of the "Jarred hates AMD and is paid by Intel" discussions on the first page, which I'm now done with, if you have other benchmark/test suggestions you'd like please, PLEASE list them here. I'll include as large a variety of tests as I can.nitrousoxide - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
OK, here's a suggestion: compare those real world situations using different hard drives, 5400-rpm HDDs, 7200-rpm HDDs and value SSDs(not the speed monsters like Force 240 or C300 but entry-level SSDs like Kingston V Series or Intel X-25V. I mean, if the CPU is a more serious bottleneck than the HDD, adding an SSD won't help much. I've preordered an APU netbook and am planning to install it with an SSD but I wonder if it deserves such upgrade.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Are you bats**t crazy? The idea behind a CPU test is to reduce all bottlenecks BUT the CPU. From there you can do system tests but for any single variable part specific tests you need to have as complete a set of constants as possible.overzealot - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
I am Batman crazy, and I think he's being reasonable.Mostly because he isn't talking about CPU tests, but also because he isn't talking about CPU tests.
Secondly - none of the "real world situations" he was listing are going to be focused on one area of system performance.
In the real world it doesn't matter what causes the bottleneck, only that you have shite performance..
PS Jarred, I actually like this artice. Haters gonna hate.
silverblue - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Occasionally, I hear someone mention wanting to buy a new laptop. When I ask them what they want to use it for, I don't get a straight answer. When I recommend they get something only when they've worked out what they need it to do, they go away to think about it... and that's usually the last I hear about it. :PBenchmarking something we might not expect to be done on a netbook, HTPC or cheap desktop can still be helpful, especially if we know how much juice is required to complete the whole task. It's great to know the actual limitations of a new processor architecture before purchasing a system built around it - how silly would you feel having started encoding a large video file whilst assuming your hardware is up to the task if you could've found out before that the processor simply capable enough and that you may be waiting a long time and using too much power if you gave it a go?
Jarred - as many benches as you like, however there have been some good suggestions about application loading time, SunSpider testing, Flash performance and that sort of thing so they may be the best place to start. I appreciate that testing out of the ordinary may be a bind though; might be worth having two articles on it - part 1 on media and part 2 on productivity. Saves you needing to get it all done right away. I appreciate your efforts and your honesty - I'd think something was wrong if people were gushing en masse over AMD's first Fusion product without the slightest bit of criticism or concern.
Nitrousoxide said the following which got me thinking...
"It's one year from now and Intel won't be introducing 32-nm based Atom--with no architectural advance but a simple die shrink, perhaps with a better IGP, but still far from AMD's--until Q1 2012. So AMD is actually keeping a fast pace on its Fusion Program, in less than two years they will come up with really convincing chips, NOT NOW. "
Is Cedar Trail that delayed? In any case, when the Enhanced Bobcat products appear, they'll be at 28nm as opposed to Cedar Trail at 32nm, and if Cedar Trail isn't noticably faster than Pineview, they may end up actually being behind AMD for a decent amount of time.
I've been wondering if it would benefit AMD to take the Bulldozer module approach with Bobcat, but until we see Bulldozer's performance, I'm not sure it's fair of me to speculate. That said, if it only adds a small amount of die space, AMD could still realistically shrink their APU even with SMT present thanks to a smaller process.
nitrousoxide - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
The first Cedar Trail will appear in Q4 2011 when 22-nm Ivy bridge comes out. So we will expect to see products shipping 32-nm Atoms sometime around CES 2012. No OoO architecture, no DX11 capable GPU(but at least should get the same level performance of a Gen 1 HD Graphics instead of the crappy GMA500/3150). So it will basically be a die-shrinked Pineview, which of course, consumes less power. It should rival Brazos at least in CPU performance, but whether it can keep up with Gen 2 APUs remains to be seen.And that's Intel's problem here, it doesn't want Atom to be that fast because, as Jarred said, it will pose a threat to CULVs. And now it's more focused on Z series aimed at embedded market, where ARM dominates.
Tasslehoff Burrfoot - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I would like to see how Brazos fares in older games than what are in AT's test suite. Games from the years 2003-2007 Like Warcraft 3 for one and some source games like HL2 and maybe Far Cry and what else? ideas? :)fabarati - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
What about Itunes movie encode for iphones? That should be a fairly common usage, and something that could take a lot ot time.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Someone said old games, Open Arena is still played by a few people and uses more CPU than it deserves so I think it could, if time allows, be a pretty decent test for low power parts.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
League of Legends. (on max settings)There is a flash game called Bloons Tower Defense 4. It will fully load 2 3GHz cores. There is a fast-forward mode that will only work if your pc has enough power.
sebanab - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Another really importat thing to test:- Overall system power consumption during 1 hour of HD playback (the monitor could be turned off to eliminate it as a variable) . In other words will this outlast an Atom netbook during a long flight ?
Regarding "nitrousoxide"'s suggestion : a value SSD for sure is something which users will definitely want to put in their Brazos systems, so yes test that.
As for 5400 vs 7200 , i would skip that altogether , HDDs in an ultra portable is so 2010 :) ...
Anybody can spare 70 $ for a descent SSD and add an external HDD for more space.
sebanab - Thursday, January 20, 2011 - link
yet another important one:CPU usage while video chatting in Skype.
On Atom 450 it's around 75% on both threads and while it works flawlessly , you can't do anything else with the machine without sound/video artifacts in the conversation, plus web browsing is crazy slow.
nitrousoxide - Saturday, January 15, 2011 - link
Seems that not so many people using a netbook need that feature lol. Tomshardware already pointed out that Brazos doesn't haven enough GPU muscle to gain any decent performance boost even with OpenCL. GPU accelerated applications is where Llano should shine, but not Brazos. Anyway I'm also expecting to see if 80 Shaders can make any difference with OpenCL.789427 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I've been in the industry a LONG time and finally, we're in a world that benchmarks are starting to matter very little for most people.It's a huge comment and expected to generate a lot of thought at the very least and probably some abuse too.
So let me qualify this:
When I replace my Compaq 311c - or buy something similar for my wife, what am I going to be interested in?
Basically it's the machine's abilities, form factors and PRICE.
What are the most processor intensive tasks? Photo editing, maybe a bit of video editing (Cut paste before offloading any encoding to a capable desktop).
Can it handle video at full res?
My 311c even handles 90% of what I need it to and that's on a N260 platform + ION
Basically everything except gaming. My old ion did this, and this seems to handle it far better.
So what does Brazos offer me?
A glimpse at 3x and 4x core capabilities based on this architecture (Am I foolish to believe that there will be processors supplied with more modules up to 18W?)
Can it provide me with media playback for over 4 hours on battery? maybe even longer....
Can it handle HTPC duties? Sure.
Can it be overclocked / what will the ceiling be on later revisions? Probably around double the mark at 18W and later revisions.
So what am I interested in? Well, Price. It's better than atom, more efficient than atom, Cheaper than atom...
Now here's the thing... Bloatware kills these machines. I'm not against installing things that people need but I'm insisting on a pro-choice movement. Can't you just register the product for the warranty and link in to a app store for all the bloatware? Maybe even have a "the way it was meant to be installed" link on the desktop that magically removes all the bloat and restores the registry to Plain vanilla factory settings?
Anecdotally, on my 311c the machine became unusable after my wife installed some basic photo editing software and had 50Gb of photos and video on the 311c - so I dropped in a 500Gb HDD and scrapped every ounce of bloatware and... it's better than new. I'm now about to create a nLite slipstreamed image for the complete install to test on the old hard drive as well as a macrium reflect image. - Why?? because of the bloatware state that transfers the maintenance and installation of the machine to the user's time account.
Yes, this is an unrelated rant but the total cost of ownership is reflected also in the use of my time.
So in summary, Brazos review:
Benchmarks: how much extra do I get together with cost savings over atom?
e.g. 10% savings in cost of machine together with 20% increase in performance = 33% more per $ with Brazos. Battery life is as good so there is an all things being equal scenario.
Is brazos fast enough to convert people over above current netbook expectations? Obviously but to what degree remains to be seen.
Will it make a difference in the ultraportable market? Sure.
What are the hurdles? Well, purchasing departments obviously, when it comes to the professional sector that IMHO are notoriously anti-AMD together with PC support that follows in the anti-AMD sentiment.
Private purchasers are swayed by salesmen that again favour Intel hugely - not without reason in the Notebook market.
Thus IMHO the success or failure of Brazos will simply be determined - not by the marketing performed by AMD but by the marketing muscle behind the notebook manufacturers.
More importantly though it will be greatly influenced by the swarming behaviour of consumers in particular segments - or the creation of new segments that will likely determine the success or failure of these new and fickle market segments.
Likely emerging swarms I can identify with are: Low cost good enough to work on notebooks,
Forward upgradable (software) simple HTPCs, Linux based, with a downloadable install image. - Although x86 should lose out to ARM in this market.
In conclusion, Brazos is now the undisputed champ of the cheapest usable and fastest 2 handed machine available for pre-order today that can handle everything but extreme gaming-like workloads and heavy workstation loads with ease. We all know that Intel will match it sometime soon but we also know that there will be a price premium for the intel machine (Basic economics - the market leader can afford to charge a higher price).
What remains to be seen is of there's a killer application that will phase it out of the market (DX12?) gaming etc. or if this will remain the value champion in terms of basic office productivity and home entertainment needs.
Hope I haven't bored you ...
cb
krumme - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I am pretty sure it cost on battery time to feed the ooo of the bobcat, especially on the leaking but dense tsmc process. Therefore i predict the reviewers and many lead users will say:Ohh wait for 32/28nm version, it will have half the idle power usage, 30% higher clock and 20% lower TDP, all at the same time. And when it arives they will say, ahh- this is what bobcat should have been.
But that is simply missing the point of the product and its weak side - and not taking the customers perspective. Right now it seems TSMC 40nm process is expensive. It might seem like an idiotic point for a marginal die cost of 6-7 usd, but its the weakest side of this product. If you have to sell the product for say 40usd, its simply difficult to reach the 300usd nettop market.
Said another way, i think the market for cheaper 40nm bobcat, is far greater than the market for a new more expensive 32nm version, as the 40nm version is just tolerable or "good enough" on all the performance variable for most users - especially the new third world markets. I think thats exactly the lesson from the Atom adoption. It was all about price.
Therefore what is going to be interesting is not so much the benchmark of the bobcat itselves but more the total performance/cost the nettops/laptops will give. I would fx. like to see a review of the new Lenovo 11 inch thingy, or if there is some 13/14 inch on the way.
789427 - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Krumme, you made me smile with your prediction (1st paragraph). As far as anybody knows, except in the rare circumstance that the fabs burn down, chip prices always drop (a lose reference to the memory fabs burning down in the 90's).Still, the inverse can also be assumed - there's never been a better time to upgrade than the present.
The economics of it all is really what we're getting into. Does the price/performance for the total cost present a strong enough argument to a significant number of people?
33% increase in price/performance at a price point 10% lower may not seem to be a tipping point except when you look at the granularity of the decision matrices.
Big words but an idea that you know:
e.g. atoms can't youtube at 720p (except for ion and that's rare)
So if AMD cheapbooks (not a netbook or a notebook but dirt cheap and well sort of capable) on a decent screen for the price - well, that may be it.
I believe that there are enough applications that people spend enough time with for these to be worthwhile. Facebook, movies on the go, scaled down work machines for travel etc for which these are more favourable than tablets and Monsterbooks (Big notebooks) and the form factor makes sense.
cb
krumme - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
I agree that youtube HD might be be the most for a starter.What could be a major issue could just be a tipping point in the cognitive interpretation of what is subjective felt as slow (ATOM) in relations to what is not noticed for normal office work (the rest). - the distinction for most user is slow - not noticed. its not slow - fast distinction.
Fx. for my wife there no such thing as a fast computer. There is a computer, and a computer that is not working. But if i gave her my Atom, i am pretty sure she will ask something like "can it not be faster?". She have my old core duo laptop with a slow ssd, and she doesnt recognice it as slowly. But she notice its got good battery life and low noise :) - the funny thing its basicly a better computer for officework than the core2, core2 penryn, and i5 laptops that i have now.
So the cognitive tipping point together with the application you list, is the difference. I think its just about the right price. If we in ½ a year see bobcat nettops going to 300 usd i think they are the right way.
If i was the board of AMD i would use the bobcat to get the brand to the end of the world, and use it to get most for the shares when all the stuff have to go :)
sebanab - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Please , when writing the review of the Brazos platform , make sure to cover the following points:- Win 7 boot and shut-down times
- how much it takes to install apps (Skype/Messanger/Office etc)
- Starcraft 2 frames while watching a replay of pro players
- fan noise during idle
- maybe if it can play a HD live stream
Thanks
PS: is it possible for you guys to delete comments?
sebanab - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
sebanab you are a total noob!(comments are listed on 2 pages you tool :) )
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
lol +10nitrousoxide - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
fan noise? that varies among manufacturers...some prefer lower temperature with higher rev fans while some go for a more silent but hotter solution.sebanab - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
That is true . Actually what I'm interested in is : will the fan stay still during idle , or will it spin all the time?ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
again, that is vendor specific. There will be system tests posted as they become available :)nitrousoxide - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
At least for HTPCs you can definitely get one fanless APU-based board. Temperature hardly go over 40 degrees at full load, no fans, quite impressive (I guess the hard drive becomes the main noise source lol).silverblue - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
I imagine the scenario will change like it does with graphics cards. Some low end models come with a fan and in no time at all, out comes a passively cooled variant.nitrousoxide - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Watch your words, you should feel lucky that Anand's comment section doesn't have a "delete comment" button for administrators.Iketh - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
Jarred, while I also didn't quite understand some of your wording about brazos vs atom in this particle article, ignore all the hate. The reason AT is #1 is because you say it how it is. Don't let a group of AMD fanboys trolling the web tell you otherwise.I very much appreciated your summaries about brazos vs atom without providing benchmarks, knowing full well that benchmarks will arrive eventually.
I've been buying AMD processors since Thunderbird, but that might change soon.
krumme - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
No. Remember Bobcat is made by AMD. Atom is made by Intel.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
I think he is saying he might buy i5 or i7.. To which I respond, lets see how Bulldozer does. If AMD can't pull something off with a a complete redesign then go for the i5/i7Lolimaster - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
A brazos review should look like this:http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=6...
There's no point to choose any Atom not even a CULV. A regular high frequency dual/quad core for the ones who really need the power.
Hope the article title reflects than this Fusion platform is awesome.
krumme - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
They do what is right: to distinguis between synthetic bm and real world use. And the result:"Several other companies announced other notebooks and netbook alternatives at CES 2011 that use the same AMD E-350 APU, so it's hard to say if the HP Pavilion dm1 is the best of the bunch, but it certainly is better than any netbook we've reviewed to date.
"
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
That is a system test. Anand does those but doesn't have systems to test.Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
They dont compare frame rates of the other systems.Lolimaster - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
This is what a journalist should look when talking about brazos:http://forum.notebookreview.com/notebook-news-revi...
Real world use. The Asus 1215 with the Atom slug lags hard.
iammohan - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
And by the time when Bulldozer is released, intel will be releasing updates for its previous year's release of 'TANKER' truck versions of fourth generation CPUs... ;(we are waiting for a Dozer with twocpus, defeating workstation performance of xeons & i7 2Ks..
may be the release date confirmed at 2012... ??!!!
nitrousoxide - Sunday, January 16, 2011 - link
It's coming right away. Q2 2011, and it will crush the Sandy Bridge i7s but Intel has LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge EX 6-core and 8-core parts waiting for it.ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
I hear rumors that AMD might reintroduce the FX moniker. I can't help but feel a little giddy.silverblue - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
That's great, but I shudder to think of the prices they will charge...lakedude - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
"The biggest point in favor of Brazos isn't performance, though. It's going to be cost. If AMD can get partners to put out $400 netbooks (hopefully without Win7 Starter and with more than 1GB RAM..."Just bought a proper laptop with a 32nm dual core, Win7-64 home premium, 4 GB RAM and a built in optical drive for $399.99. Not sure why anyone would spend 4 to 5 hundred dollars on an anemic netbook, especially an Atom.
"users that want good H.264 decoding in a 10.1” form factor"
Not sure anyone needs high def on such a small, low resolution display.
Hacp - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Was it 11.6 inches or 15.4 inches? People like small laptops. People like laptops with a lot of battery life. People don't want an I5 with bad graphics.lakedude - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Acer Aspire AS5742z-4685 15.6" Notebook, Intel Pentium P6100 (2.0GHz), 4GB DDR3 Memory, 320GB HDD, DVD Super Multi-Drive, Intel GMA HD, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit...$399.99 free shipping, no tax from Buy.com
Got second one from Staples.com for the same price but had to pay tax on that one.
Newegg had em at that price for Cyber Monday but they sold out.
http://livehotdeals.com/acer-aspire-as5742z-4685-1...
Perhaps not the best choice for battery life or ultra portability, but otherwise superior to any current netbook.
lakedude - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
If you are a frequent flier and need an ultra portable or netbook with long battery life, great, a netbook might be just what you need...Problem is that people are buying netbooks because they are cheap and using them in a way that they were not intended. In fact 2 of my friends have purchased netbooks and both are using them as a desktop replacements . Both friends have hooked up external drives, external mice, and external optical drives. Since there are not enough USB connectors one is using a powered USB hub. The other friend likes the speed of a wired network so he has a network cable running to his. The things are slow as molasses and expensive once you buy all the extras netbooks don't come with. All the extra cables make for a tangled mess that is no more portable than a desktop computer.
Rather than upgrade the first friend's netbook I just gave her one of those Acer netbooks for Christmas.
Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
If you read slickdeals, you'll notice there is a 230+ post thread on the Dm1z. They got the price down to $407. I guess it just depends on if you want 3 hours of battery life, or 6.nitrousoxide - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
unfortunately it's impossible to find that notebook you described. it is the dream notebook for many people including me, but it's just in your dream.Ryard - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Hard to find? Yes.Deal ends really quickly? Yes.
Impossible? No.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?sduid=...
Acer Aspire AS5742Z-4685 NoteBook / Laptop -- Pentium P6100 | 15.6" screen | 4GB DDR3 | 320GB HDD | HDMI out -- $400
There are even a few other ones that come pretty close to lakedude's specs for $400 (eg less RAM or minus DVD drive).
nitrousoxide - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Deal ends so quickly :(Ryard - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
The key to Slickdeals is patience and vigilance.nitrousoxide - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
thx bro for recommending this site. so many deals never imagined before :)lakedude - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Hardly impossible, hardly a dream.I missed Newegg's Cyber Monday sale but I've purchased 2 notebooks at that price, once from Buy.com, and once from Staples.com.
Dribble - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Don't see where this really fits in in 2011?This is the year of the tablet, no one will buy buying netbooks, if you want something smaller then a notebook then you'll buy an apple/android tablet - they are the sexy new thing.
If you want a notebook then you'll buy one with a proper cpu as that's what you really need to run windows comfortably.
A geeks HTPC is perhaps the only place I can really see this working but that's not a huge market.
nitrousoxide - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Tablet is just an alternative, not replacement for netbooks. If you like a tablet, grab one for sure; but that's not the case for most people. And please note that tablet is just at its very beginning.silverblue - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Regardless of what the machine has in it, what truly matters is what it can do for the consumer. So, as long as manufacturers put down what it can do, such as "9 hour battery life (typical)" or "watch movies in full HD" or suchlike on the packaging, that'll do just nicely. If someone sees an AMD logo at the same time, it can only be a good thing.Laptop manufacturers should flock readily to Brazos due to the cheaper platform cost so it shouldn't be too hard to sell plenty of netbooks.
Byte - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
I had some high hopes for AMD getting back in the game somehow. God knows I loved them in the XP days. After the P!!! 800MHz, it was Athlons for a couple of years until wolfdales.Bulldozer has been hyped for so long, i was hopping for something really interesting like reverse hyperthreading, but instead we get a hardperthreading.
And then there was Fusion. Pretty much everyone was waiting for that. CPU and GPU in one chip! How do you do that!?!?! They took so long Sandy Bridge came rolling by so casually, no one even noticed.
And AMD laptops, oh my how they are just so behind. Performance somehow feels terrible even comparing to a Core 1 Duo vs Turion X2, and its just hot and sucks battery.
I've been telling everyone to hold off on their netbook purchases as AMDs got something twice as fast coming out, but at 1GHz, it will be twice as fast, only folded in half! UGhhhhh!
Lolimaster - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
That's the low end of Brazos(Ontario), Zacare runs at 1.6Ghz. Is the only netbook chip now and it delivers, no more sub-par performance (Atom).If this Fusion chip brings this performance prepare for the mainstream one, Llano.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
llano is just a slightly modified re-badged K10. Trinity is Bulldozer which is a completely new and unique design. Basically:Bobcat - Atom
Llano - CULV (Conroe)
Bulldozer - Core i5-i7 (Nehalem)
silverblue - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
Llano sounds good, however I expect it'll run into bandwidth issues when you jack the settings up too highly. As a result, I'm looking forward to how overclocking benefits such systems.silverblue - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
A Turion X2 was merely a mobile Athlon 64 X2, so not exactly difficult for a dual-core Core CPU to win a battle there. However, Bobcat performs close to a similarly clocked Turion X2 with a fraction of the power and heat.mschira - Monday, January 17, 2011 - link
Engadget has a review on an HP 11" notebook with Fusion.http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/hp-pavilion-dm1...
They had it for a week and seemed to kinda liked it, performance, battery life and price seem nicely balanced.
Now what would be really great if one could overclock the 1.6Ghz APU a bit when plugged in.
That would be really great...
Cheers
M.
ninjaquick - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 - link
Cuz the Atom is so fast...digitalzombie - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 - link
I read a few pages of comments and there were so many flames for bias.I think Anandtech is the only site I know of that actually does fair reviews. I think the article is fine. Was totally hoping that AMD's APU was going to revolutionize the netbook market but sadly it's not going to be this first gen iteration, stupid Atom setting the bar so low. Well, I still kinda hope I can still watch movie on my laptop without burning my stomach on AMD's new APU. Can you guys have a test like that? Where you lay on a bed and have the laptop on your stomach while watching a movie? >,<
lakedude - Thursday, February 10, 2011 - link
NewEgg had a Dell laptop on sale, with similar specs to the laptop I mentioned earlier for under $400.Get em while they are hot!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
The Dell seems to lack an HDMI port, if that is important hold out for a deal on the Acer.
DELL Inspiron N5030 (iN5030-2112B3D) Notebook Intel Pentium T4500(2.30GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 320GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW Intel GMA 4500MHD