Games

Note that there are three gaming modes in our new test method: Low, Medium and High. They differ by graphics quality settings, resolutions, and antialiasing modes. The table above shows results for the Low mode. We chose it because it was the only one playable (more or less), given the testbeds. In regular processor tests we'll be conducting in the future the High mode will be used.

Atom with GMA 3150 failed in every game. They just wouldn't run on it. We don't say it's generally impossible, though. We could maybe find acceptable settings after some time, but our main task was different as you remember. It was a Low mode already, after all. We can but suggest that Intel makes faster built-in graphics. It's 2011 outside.

Ion completed all gaming benchmarks and even did slightly better than usual compared with Zacate. This reasonably indicates that it has a decent graphics core for its class, but Atom just doesn't have enough performance to handle it.

The competition between Zacate and Athlon II X2 is more interesting. And not quite favorable to the former. With a GPU at least as powerful, E-350 is 35% slower than Athlon II X2 250u and AMD 890GX. The reason is the same: Zacate's CPU part is underperforming.

Games (additional tests)

Below are six graphs dedicated solely to Zacate E-350. They prove the assumption we've made above. The graphs show results for all three gaming modes (Low, Medium and High) and two graphics cards: the built-in HD 6310 and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce 570 GTX.

A simple truth proved so long ago it has become an axiom: if a much more powerful graphics card hardly improves gaming results, the processor is the bottleneck. Only two games out of six demonstrated more or less substantial difference between graphics cards in the Low and Medium modes: the DX11-oriented Aliens vs. Predator and Batman: Arkham Asylum. In the other four games the difference in results was completely inadequate to the difference in graphics cards' performance. The CPU is the bottleneck.

Conclusions

AMD Zacate clearly outperforms Intel Atom processors with similar clock rates — whether those are coupled with Intel GMA (this was obvious) or NVIDIA graphics (this wasn't). Moreover, E-350 easily outdoes both Atom 330 and Atom D510 in purely computational tasks (with one exception), even though its two physical cores compete against Atom's virtual four. That's essentially the conclusion of the review, but there are some other things worth discussing.

Fistly, the comparison of Zacate + HD 6310 with Athlon II X2 + HD 4290 in games indicates that Zacate simply lacks processor power. As soon as we ran applications which required both GPU and CPU performance, it was instantly revealed that Zacate's processing power was so low it bottlenecked even its own built-in graphics. We deliberately put it this way. It's the CPU that is underperforming, not GPU that's overperforming.

Secondly, since we have a lot of data on the computational power of Zacate and Atom, we can state the obvious and justify the NVIDIA Ion chipset. Most likely Ion's GPU is not that bad, it's just that Atom is even slower than Zacate in computations. It prevents Ion from demonstrating decent results in games and other applications that involve graphics. A comparison of Atom + Ion with Zacate in the mathematical and engineering computations (which require mostly CPU power) and games may be an indirect proof of that: 100 vs. 192 and 100 vs. 133. As you can see, Atom did much better in the second case — most likely thanks to Ion.

So we believe that the key problem of the current Zacate (we hope there will be more) is that it's unbalanced 'on the inside' and the GPU part offers more performance than the CPU part can handle. But the trend of increasing performance of netbook and nettop processors is surely pleasing. Unlike Intel Atom that, sadly, remains a "socket stub," AMD Zacate is closer to regular desktop processors in terms of performance. Keep it up, AMD.

But still, today, an ultra low-voltage Athlon II X2 is much faster (the one we've tested isn't the fastest, mind you). So if extra 10-20 watts of consumed power is not a problem for you, and your reasons for building an HTPC go beyond players and BitTorrent clients, this is something you should think about.

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