AMD launched the energy efficient platform Brazos earlier this year. The new processors Ontario and Zacate target Intel’s budget CPU Atom and the first deep analysis of the performance of the processor platform has appeared. The test shows Brazos really giving it to Atom and overall paint a bright future for AMD.
AMD Brazos is primarily considered a mobile platform for netbooks and less powerful notebooks. With its more powerful out-of-order architecture and 1-2 Bobcat CPU cores the processor is more powerful than Intel Atom, and counting the integrated graphics circuit Radeon HD 6130 Atom isn’t on the same playing field.
In a big performance analysis at Anandtech they have shared benchmarks for most scenarios and beside loads of game tests where Brazos whips Atom beats and Atom + Ion but also with video playback of HD video, flash material and streaming of audio formats, something Atom can’t even do with Ion on top.
The Brazos platform have some difficulties when the video material becomes too heavy, like Blu-ray 3D and deinterlacing of video material, but the majority of heavy 1080p videos and flash media is handled without flaws. Optimizations in Adobe Flash 10.2 are required to make the playback of 1080p material on YouTube work well.
Power consumption was for long a concern with Brazos, but according to Anandtech’s numbers we have nothing to worry about. A Mini-ITX platform with MSI E350IA-E45 consumes a lot less than the equivalent Atom platform, even when Intel’s processor is working without an extra Ion circuit from NVIDIA.
All in all AMD Brazos looks like a better and more efficient processor platform than Intel Atom. There are few, if any, uses that looks better for Atom and in many tests, especially 3D, they are in different leagues. AMD Brazos is still not a powerful platform compared to a regular desktop system and it is perhaps not the moerun we were hoping for, but considering the market and the investment AMD is targeting it has managed to build a near perfect concept.
The entire article can be found at Anandtech.com.
