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AMD's Fusion APU Pitted Against 21 Desktop CPUs
crookedvulture writes "When AMD unveiled the Bobcat CPU architecture behind its first Fusion APUs, the company claimed its Atom-killer would achieve 90% of the performance of mainstream desktop processors. But does it? This article compares the AMD E-350's performance to more than 20 desktop CPUs between $87 and $999 to find out, and the results aren't particularly encouraging. Although Fusion offers much better integrated graphics than Intel's latest Atom, neither stands much chance of keeping up with even low-end desktop CPUs. The E-350 does offer very low power consumption and impressive platform integration, making it a good choice for home-theater PCs and mobile systems. Desktop users are better off waiting for Llano, a Fusion iteration due out this spring."
why wouldn't they just make desktop procs with it and leapfrog ahead again?
Ok wait, so AMD's next-gen "atom-killer" successfully trumps Intel's next-gen Atom, but "the results aren't particularly encouraging" because it doesn't also beat full-fledged desktop processors? Seriously, talk about misleading.
In other news, iPods aren't the best at 3D graphics rendering, and cars are not the best choice for transatlantic shipping.
This is a test of CPU/GPU integration at the low end to start with - and a successful test at that.
Alphanos
I bought an Acer Aspire One 522 recently. It's a netbook with a 10.1" screen, 1280x720 resolution, and the new Fusion chip, so it has a Radeon 3250... I can actually run games on this device. I installed StarCraft II, dropped all the settings to minimal, and received playable framerates (after upgrading to 2GB ram). I blogged about it for those wanting more info. I need to make another post about Linux, because I have Ubuntu running near perfectly on it now.
I have no idea what business this new architecture has going against powerful desktop rigs, but for low-power applications, like a netbook, this offers a balance of computing power and energy consumption that's really nice, and beats what I've seen before.
Read the entire article, not terrible impressed.
Here's the TL;DNR, IGP's all suck, but more importantly the CPU parts of these IGP+CPU solutions are also terrible. Whodathunkit.
What's more alarming is that the IGP's in the i5 are as terrible. No 13" Macbook pro for me then.
Really most users today do not do much with there PCs but run a browser and email. It will run Office just fine and most software you would expect to find in most offices today. It should sell like hotcakes. Look how well the Atom does for so many tasks.
Yes if you are doing CAD, Gaming, editing video then this sucks.
For most other people it will be small, cheap, cool, and good enough.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Full-sized desktop processors are quite a bit faster than either the Atom D525 or the E-350.... Once you get past that realization, the next one follows almost immediately: the E-350 APU is the new champ in its weight class.... The E-350 Fusion APU is a wonder of integration, and AMD has set a new standard for basic computing platforms with the Brazos platform. For users whose needs are confined to simple office productivity, communications, and media consumption, the E-350 may well be sufficient. For those places where you might have considered an Atom- or Ion-based slim desktop system before, you'd now do better to consider a Brazos-based offering. In fact, we're left wondering how Intel could possibly continue its long-standing (and seemingly intentional) neglect of the graphics and video capabilities of this Atom platform for another generation. AMD has forced the issue. Without some help, the Atom will deserve to lose badly, both in "nettops" and netbooks, from here forward."
This quote is probably taken out of context as usual by Intel fanboy's. It was designed to compete with the Atom, and it beats it hands down. Not to mention AMD allows you to use OpenCL on their Fusion lines now and in the future. Im sure once people start accelerating their software with the on die GPU's it will speed things up quite a bit. Also, they could be releasing more newer fusion processors using Bobcat cores that will reach 90 percent. These processors were released specifically to compete with Atom, not reach the 90 percent goal the first iteration.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
EG, Pentinum 2ghz compared to atom D525 or amd E250
Yeah. So it does basic tasks perhaps as good as the some of the cheapest Atoms you can find. Although these Atoms aren't necessarily all that cheap when compared to machines that aren't stuck in the low profile form factor. Conventional desktops easily extend into the same price range as Atom based machines while not being quite so anemic.
Then you've got the issue of software support.
I can recompile all of the stuff I use for a different platform. Your typical office user probably can't.
It might end up being NT Alpha all over again.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Obviously, at $140, you're paying a premium for miniaturization, for low power draw, for Brazos' expanded graphics and video capabilities versus Atom, and perhaps for protection from rogue elements of society.
seriously, he cant handle a $140 price tag for all the latest tech and high performance all in a small package? yeah, he's a cheap bastard.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Nothing like comparing a ULV processor to a $1000, 130watt processor.
also, they took the 90% performance (mis)quote out of context and rode it for the whole review.
I've been using the mediocre Intel IGP's for years on the last couple laptops. The GPU on these new AMD chips wipe the floor with the 2 year old Intel IGP on the laptop that I'm typing this on. Even basic home video editing doesn't really use the GPU, those goofy home videos are all CPU work.
Having the fastest computer doesn't mean much for most people. It's the form factor and utility that counts. Heck, we're one hop-skip-and-a-jump away from perfectly adequate ARM based machines that people will use instead of Intel or AMD... oh, wait... that was the iPad and it came out last year.
LOL, and to think that we used to measure computer speed by how fast it could recalculate a "large" Excel spreadsheet.
"AMD's performance target for Bobcat was 90% of the performance of K8 at the same clock speed"
Taken from this review at Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4023/the-brazos-performance-preview-amd-e350-benchmarked/3
This makes sense to me for "mainstream desktop processors". Other than my gamer friends, I don't know anybody that is using anything more modern than an Athlon 64 X2, which is the K8 architecture.
The PC market has rarely been defined by "good enough". PCs are sold not by what they can do, but by specifications, even to consumers who know next to nothing about those specifications. I'd guess 90% of PCs being used now could be replaced with something with half the computational power, and the user would not notice. The point I'm making is that technobabble sells, and if someone tells your layman that for a hundred bucks more they could double the processor speed, despite that having little to no effect on real world performance, they'll go for it.
Personally, I'm a gamer, so this is all a little irrelevant to me.
Grammar Nazis' --- I'm assuming that was deliberate.
I don't understand why no group has yet developed a viable, energy efficient 64 bit RISC alternative to the x86 (ARM64, anyone?). The x86 and x86_64 carry around a lot of transistor baggage needed to be maintain 4 decades worth of backwards compatibility, and their CISC architecture has proven less energy efficient than RISC design. Why do giants like Intel and AMD continue throwing money into improving what will always suck?
I've been waiting for a good low-power CPU to come along that'll play 1080p and fit in an ITX rig, and it looks like this could be the one. It'll be nice to run Boxee on a computer that actually fits in my TV cabinet.
I recently assembled a mini-ITX SFF PC with a Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3, 2x2GB KVR DDR3-1333, & a 640GB 5400rpm HDD in an Antec ISK-100 with its 90W power brick (W7 x64 Enterprise). It draws 20W at desktop idle, 27W playing 1080P YouTube videos, and 30W playing Left 4 Dead 2 at 1333x768 with medium settings (high 20s FPS). It does not lag out during moderate productivity multitasking (unlike the Atom D510 SFF PC I made for my parents last year). I can't hear it from two feet away.
As noted in a comment above, this platform is not designed to compete with processors that pull as much juice by themselves as this entire system does. It's aimed squarely at Atom/Ion and beats that combo handily. It's also sufficiently powerful that with the lower-cost ASRock board, it's possible to put together a computer that satisfies at least 75% of computer users with less than $300, is the size of a dictionary, and uses less electricity than an incandescent light bulb. Desktop users are NOT better off waiting for Llano if they use their computers to check email, play Facebook games, watch YouTube videos, and occasionally produce a document in Office.
I'm looking to build a NAS in the not too distant future that I can realistically use for the next 5-10 years. It should have:
-support for ECC RAM. Something that is going to running up all the time with today's size of memory with data you care about will get errors, and for that you need ECC RAM.
-negligible idle power. Preferably something in the 10-20 Watt range before HDDs are added.
-Lots of SATA ports. Preferably 7+.
-low price
-USB 3 for easy, convenient backup. If you have a NAS it's going to take more than 1 HDD to back it all up, and you probably want that in some form of redundant RAID. USB 3 seems to be the most convenient way to connect that sort of thing.
AMD is the only player likely to grace us with ECC support with all of the above, as Intel require the purchase of a Xeon for that, and getting a low idle power Xeon bumps up the price too much. Unfortunately AFAICT there is no ECC support with Bobcat, so hopefully AMD have some sort of low cost, low idle power Llano processor waiting in the wings, and they have maintained their policy of ECC support as they have with Athlon/Phenom.
Bobcat is pretty cool though. Unfortunately it's competing with the computers I already have and the 30 Watts it would save has too long a payback period for me to consider selling/ditching the old gear.
Very low power consumption, decent processor throughput and decent integrated GPU performance. For me its really the first and third that matter most so I am definitely in the market for designs based on this architecture.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You pay a premium for tiny. I remember when I got my Nomad Jukebox 3, the iPod of that generation was selling for a couple hundred dollars more and had less disk space, but it was a fraction of the size. People are willing to pay a lot of money for something that's tiny, whether or not that's the wisest course of action.
Umm.... It is an X86. What the heck are you talking about software support? Put Windows 7 or Linux on it and use what every you want?
And it is a lot better than the cheapest Atom and makes a lot less heat and uses a lot less power than chips above the Atom!
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"not much but a browser" is an outdated statement, since that now includes watching video and playing games - even news sites' main pages weigh in the megabytes. The Linux Flash player sucks up a lot of CPU for some reason.
I have an old 800 MHz computer that really isn't useful for browsing the web any more, although it used to be fine.
I've seen nothing on Slashdot about Nufront's 2GHZ dual core A9 chip. I know it's early days for that, but I would have liked to see that in any benchmarks which can be done on non-windows boxes. I suspect that at 2 watts (1/7th the power -- at least for the chip itself) the Nufront demo boxes are quite competitive with the Atom and the AMD Fusion systems. But I need to see the benchmarks to see my suspicions confirmed or stomped.
What? If "good enough" wasn't what the PC was sold on, "IBM Compatibles" would have never gotten off the ground. The PC has lived off of "good enough" most of it's life. It didn't become the best option personal computer wise until about 1995, and by 2005, they had reached the point that people stopped caring about the speed so much. So, they only sold on performance for about 10 years.
And this chip has flash and H.264 acceleration features. Just run a browser and email.
Yes a modern browser can do a lot but it still isn't a cad system.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I miss my Nomad Jukebox it was the best MP3 player I ever owned for the money.
I've still got mine, I just need to get new batteries.
This isn't an ARM chip.
(I personally think AMD should be picking up ARM designs, to help us shake off the burden of x86, but that's not what this is about.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The original 8088 instruction set is crap, but it has improved since.
I've ranted on the theme of 8086 evolution and adequacy several times in the past. You do know that the 8086 instruction set was designed in 1976-1978? I recall 1976. Year of the first cheap four-function calculator, the TI-30. It was also the year of the Summer Olympics in Montreal, where Canada as host country failed to win a single gold medal (courtesy I figured out later of East German steroids). The 1976 summer Olympics also featured the original decimal conversion bug, when Nadia was awarded a 1.0 gymnastics score due to a shortage of display digits. Intel engineers took notes and later conducted a replay attack.
35 years later, the planet's deployed x86 execution capacity is on the order of 10^18 instructions per second. Failures don't come any bigger than that.
Would the course of history differ much if someone teleported back to 1976 and beat the Intel engineers responsible with the clue stick of winsome orthogonality?
I would settle for one change only: an eight bit segment register offset instead of the four bit offset, giving the original PC a 16MB address space. 16MB has you covered until machines become powerful enough for a multitasking OS. It also has the PC encroaching on traditional IBM markets right out of the starting gate, and might have died a grim death of a thousand memos before IBM publicly announced the product.
And then, if it hadn't been so crippled, maybe fewer people would have rushed into the marketplace to fix it. Maybe Apple would have controlled the original PC marketplace instead, and locked the whole thing down with pentalobular vengeance.
This first fusion chip underwhelms me, but it's the tip of a program with bigger splashes to come. Since I'm older than dirt, I also recall that the original Pentium 60 was nearly booed out of the marketplace. Hotter and more expensive than a DX4, without any real benefit to show for it unless you had a fetish for fast (and wrong) floating point math. There were howls of outrage at the unfathomable 30W TDP (IIRC, the figure doesn't come up in a quick Google). You needed a heat sink the size of your hand and maybe *gasp* even a fan.
Superscalar, DOA. Fusion, DOA. Perhaps let's not jump to conclusions yet. The entire industry is built on the ashes of suckhood.
Want to bet? Take a lot at sales number. i3s outsell i7s for the simple reason they are good enough and cheaper.
I think you would surprised just how few people will take that upgrade. If you are looking at say a $299 notebook that works well vs a $399 notebook I think a lot fewer people will get the upgrade.
Now if you are talking about an 1199 vs 1299 notebook you are correct.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sure there are tons of people out there that insists on buying computers that waste so much power they could cook meals for a couple dozen people with the heat dissipated by their CPUs alone. They have a massive ego that requires the notion they have the fastest computer possible, even though their computer will run at less than 10% utilization almost all the time. Game vendors keep writing code evermore inefficient, same for Microsoft OSes. Some actually do need a fast computer, perhaps for encoding HD video, performing very complex calculations or something else.
Since I migrated from Windows to Linux about 10 years ago, freeing myself from 99% of bloatware, I found out that CPU speed is becoming more and more irrelevant with each new CPU generation. Even with a 4 year old computer, I do simultaneously share a 10Mbps broadband connection, burn a DVD, play flight gear flight simulator, run e-mail server, MySQL, on the same 4GB RAM system with a dual core CPU, no damaged DVD medias, even with the game running at maximum CPU priority. Try that on Windows, any Windows !
People, save on your power bill, free yourself from wasteful computing, migrate to Linux. It will run exceptionally well on any new computer, it will also run very well on anything designed for Windows Vista. The minimum computer that Windows 7 requires just to boot and load Office is a huge computer for Linux.
Migrate to Linux. Make your computer work for you instead of to evil software corporations. The computer is *yours* after all.