Java

Intel played a spiteful trick on Atom, having deprived it of instruction reordering. As a result, even those extra threads don't let it surrender with dignity and E-350 outperforms it by 25%. Both Celerons are still out of reach, but at least E-350 lags behind Celeron E1400 by about the same 25%.

Web browsing

The thrashing continues and even worsens, becoming sesquialteral. That both Celerons are even farther ahead is also sad. Anyway, Zacate looks more suited to this task than the counterpart.

Audio encoding

Intel Atom's ability to handle four threads simultaneously help. Although the two threads of E-350 are more efficient, it loses the competition. But it's no wonder, considering how this test is run. Celerons are as far ahead as they have been.

Video encoding

This task is somewhat atypical for both processors, considering their target audience. But it uncovers their computing capabilities well nevertheless. As you can see, performance is almost the same, with AMD taking a slight lead.

Conclusions

Those who thought the Brazos platform would be revolutionary might be disappointed because it's not. The new solution is, without a doubt, slightly faster than Pine Trail, but it belongs to the same class in terms of processor performance. Neither solution can compete with three-year-old low-end desktop processors. However, to expect that would've been wrong, though — we all know about K8/K10 performance, and one can only do so much and no more. In its time (about five years ago), Athlon 64 X2 3600+, the lowest-end model in the series, competed with Pentium D well, but yielded to Conroe at once. We also know how Athlon X2 BE-2350 managed against 'older' Pentium E2000 (which was slightly faster than Celeron E1000, but slower than Celeron E3000). And both AMD processors worked at about 2 GHz, while E-350 is clocked at 1.6 GHz. Of course, AMD optimized much while moving from K8 to K10, but that didn't make up for the lower clock rate (and the smaller L1 cache).

But there's another point of view as well. Yes, even the highest-end Brazos (Zacate) sends us back five or six years ago. But back then the same performance was achieved by a multi-chip platform: a processor consuming dozens of watts, a Northbridge that needed power too, a dedicated graphics chip. In terms of performance and features, the today's Radeon HD 6310 is more advanced than both integrated and discrete solutions of that time (mid-end and even some high-end), so it saves a few dozens of watts. Speaking of prices, the aforementioned platform cost a few hundred dollars back then. Now it's a single small chip, and the same amount of money buys you a whole mobile PC. So it's not that bad. But, of course, we can't stop wishing for higher performance.

As for the Zacate-versus-Atom comparison, we can see they perform very similarly, E-350 being about 10% faster than D525. Both have benefits and drawbacks, of course. Atom is better in terms of power consumption (13W vs. 18W) and does well in multi-threaded environments. In turn, Zacate offers higher efficiency per thread which helps a lot sometimes, just look at the Web browsing and Java tests. And nettops and netbooks work with these two things a lot.

Another advantage of E-350 is that it's a true APU with as many as 80 stream processors operating at 500 MHz. Not bad — on the level of Radeon HD 5000/6000. Speaking of quantity, AMD essentially integrated a low-end discrete graphics solution into the new processors, and a desktop one at that — HD 5450 has the same two SIMD units, 40 processors in each, just the clock rate is 650 MHz. Of course, these two implementations are not equal, because HD 5450 has own memory which it doesn't have to share with CPU cores, but the rest is comparable. And it's a head taller than any of AMD's previous integrated solutions, namely Radeon HD 4290 of the 890GX chipset. The latter only had 40 stream processors (even though those worked at 700 MHz) and previous-generation features.

So, drawing a bottom line, the Brazos platform is an ace up AMD's sleeve in the competition with Pine Trail. In applications where at least some work can be offloaded to stream processors performance will be much better. Much depends on software developers, of course. But some relatively mainstream tasks, e.g. HD video playback (Flash included), should benefit already today. Anyway, the integrated graphics core deserves a dedicated review, perhaps even more than one. And today we focused on the processor itself, which turned out to be slightly better than Atom (meaning it was also better than AMD's previous mobile solutions like Athlon Neo). But it's not revolutionary — those three-year-old low-end Celerons are still far ahead.

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