AMD Updates Brazos with E-450, E-300 and C-60 APUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 22, 2011 12:01 AM ESTWhen AMD first introduced its Brazos platform at the end of last year it promised annual updates to the platform. Today we get the first official update to the platform. Although not a major architectural or process change, the Brazos refresh is significant nonetheless.
At the top we've got the AMD E-450, a part we previewed at Computex. The E-450 replaces the E-350 and brings with it higher clock speeds. The two CPU cores see a mild increase from 1.6GHz to 1.65GHz, while the 80-core Radeon HD 6320 GPU creeps up from 492MHz to 508MHz. Neither sounds too impressive, but the E-450 has a new trick up its sleeve: AMD Turbo Core. Similar to Llano, if there's available TDP the GPU cores in the E-450 can turbo up to 600MHz. In GPU bound games the E-450 can be up to 22% faster than the E-350.
The E-450 also adds official DDR3-1333 support (up from 1066). When combined with the faster GPU you might see significantly better gaming performance out of the E-450. Don't expect to get anywhere near Llano's performance, but AMD notes a 36% increase in 3DMark Vantage performance.
Next up is the E-300, this replaces the single-core E-240. The E-300 has two Bobcat cores, which means the refreshed E-series APUs are all dual-core parts. The CPU clock drops a bit down to 1.3GHz, as does the GPU clock (488MHz) but overall performance should go up as nearly any usage model these days will prefer two similarly clocked cores to one.
The final update in AMD's Brazos refresh is the 9W C-60. The C-60 replaces the C-50 before it. Both feature two Bobcat cores, but the C-60 adds AMD Turbo Core support - this time on the CPU and GPU. The C-60 runs at the same 1GHz clock speed as the C-50, but it can turbo up to 1.33GHz. The GPU on the other hand can turbo up to 400MHz from its 276MHz stock speed.
The refreshed Brazos parts are still built on the same TSMC 40nm process and retain the same 18W/9W TDPs. The update to enable Turbo Core is likely only a mild change to the chip and associated BIOS. The higher clock speeds and across-the-board dual-core (E-series) come courtesy of yield improvements. In addition to the extra performance, all refreshed Brazos APUs gain multimode DisplayPort support (DP++). The ++ simply means that you can carry HDMI and DVI signals over the DP connector, allowing OEMs to build systems with only a single DP output and provide passive dongles for single-link DVI and HDMI out.
The AMD E-450, E-300 and C-60 are available from PC OEMs starting today. No word on when we'll see availability in the channel.
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sinigami - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - link
for giggles, would you mind comparing your E350 against your 2310m, on this small Java benchmark?http://math.nist.gov/scimark2/run.html
sorry for asking more than one person, just scared that no one will even notice or read my plea...
sinigami - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - link
sorry to bother you, but i'm going crazy wishing i could find someone that would report their E-350 score for a little Java science benchie...would you mind taking a second to hit up http://math.nist.gov/scimark2/run.html and tell us what your thinkpad scores?
it runs inside your browsers JVM.
seems all browsers show the same performance, so it is browser agnostic.
sinigami - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 - link
i do java on the move... completely curious how the E-350 does java... can you or someone please run NIST's small java scimark?http://math.nist.gov/scimark2/run.html
use pulldown to select "Show Table" to see the overall score.
Thanks!
DanNeely - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
In single threaded tasks the E350 is about 50% faster than the atom, it's overall performance is slightly ahead of the D510 dual core 4 thread atom. With a 36% turbo the E450 should be able to burst to ~2.2x as fast on single threaded tasks giving it a large edge in user world apps.http://www.anandtech.com/show/4134/the-brazos-revi...
Arnulf - Tuesday, August 23, 2011 - link
But it is 'piss-weak', considering its rather high TDP (now to be utilized to the max.) and not-so-high IPC rate combined with very modest clockspeed.Assume there was a way for AMD to "fuse" two of these together to get a 4-core, 160 SP Brazos chip with a TDP of 38W. How would such an imaginary chip fare against say SB i5 2500T (TDP of 45W) ? Graphics would likely be on par while it would get soundly trashed in CPU and memory performance amd Intel's notes regarding 22 nm process node and its power consumption indicate that cherry-picked desktop IB should be capable of beating Brazos at its own game, the low power consumption.
fishman - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I picked up an Acer 722 netbook on friday. It came with the AMD C-60 (it was advertised to have the C-50), so it is already available.OS - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
i got one of those Acers also, its kind of a lobsided system, the gpu is pretty powerful but the cpu less so.Quad_Tube - Wednesday, July 16, 2014 - link
My thoughts entirely. I've been fixing a client's laptop with one of these C-60 APUs and despite the cheap price he paid for it my overall impression is very mixed. Not good because generally I'm very pleased with AMD's offerings, but the performance of lap-tops based on this APU will be hampered on several levels, and where it gains in certain areas it loses miserably in others.For one, the decent GPU is fused with two fairly weak CPU cores that will suffer from everything but light workloads. Their performance per clock is far below AMD Athlon II. This wouldn't matter so much if all software was designed to accelerate functions on a GPU, but as we all know this isn't happening. Hence the reason CPU architectures have evolved because there still a large reliance on that x86 architecture. The Bobcat die just isn't strong enough.
This performance deficit is further compounded by the fact most Laptop manufacturers pre-install added applications and other assorted junk, which ultimately slows a machine down. On a C-60 based machine this can not only slow it down but make it a complete nightmare to use. So the only realistic option is to try and install your own copy of Windows and have done with it.
Thirdly, AMD's drivers seem to be a bit of resource hog. I see several services running in the background, which don't seem to make any allowance for the fact these APU's need to conserve power and need to be light on resources. In contrast nVidia's stuff seems to be much simpler.
Historically I've chosen and recommended AMD to clients because in my opinion the bang-per-buck spoke for itself. A very capable quad-core CPU that can over-clock like a charm, and all for a low price? Super-duper. But having used this particular APU I'm left dismayed. For despite employing every trick in the book in terms of system optimization I'm left wanting; it's infuriating to have to wait for Opera to load, or to open the Control panel and add/remove programs. This on a laptop that has been stripped as much as possible until the only other option is to re-install a standard version of Windows. And even then, my guess is I'd be found wanting. It's a pity, since it's clear the GPU side is pretty decent; I had no problems watching 1080p video on WMP and using around 20% CPU resources..and all that on a 9 watt APU. It's clear the image quality is crisp, vibrant and stable (for the most part).
So all in all you're left frustrated unless you run a very specific set of applications: older games, watching films or typing letters. Trying to use Opera to watch You Tube video's is problematic. Trying to squeeze performance from every nook and cranny is tiresome. You need a decent CPU to run Windows 7 effectively, regardless of whether or not third-party applications can be accelerated on the GPU. And therein lies the problem: despite everything it has, despite everything it offers, the C-60 still has to call upon the CPU architecture to do the grunt of the work, and it is simply not powerful enough.
Once I re-install Windows how I like it I'll re-assess the situation, but having read the reviews I doubt I'll get to the point where I'd recommend this APU. Not this one, not in this state. AMD can do a lot better but they're cut back far too much.
zeo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Should point out that AMD Turbo Core works by over clocking one core but under clocks the other to balance out the power usage. So only the GPU will be getting a full over clock. While the CPU will only boost single core operations.While the feature is also similar to Intel's Turbo Boost. So only active when the system thinks it needs it and may be effected by system heat levels for duration time of the boost.
ET - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
It would be interesting to see how well this works out in practice. The C-60 can be considerably better than the C-50, at least on paper, so let's hope also in practice.