AMD Updates Brazos with E-450, E-300 and C-60 APUs
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 22, 2011 12:01 AM EST
When 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
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. Reply
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! Reply
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... Reply
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. Reply
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. ReplyOS - 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. Replyzeo - 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. Reply
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. Replyparkerm35 - Thursday, September 01, 2011 - link
At the moment they are using 40nm fab, can you imagine how good these things will become when they switch to 28nm, which is just months away!!! Replyfteoath64 - Wednesday, September 07, 2011 - link
They cannot even bump the clock speed to 2Ghz (or better still 2.4Ghz) and put 160 gpu cores in there. I would not call the E450 an update maybe it should be named E350-2 instead!. What a huge disappointment!. Reply