AMD Brazos platform tested - The E350 APU review - Performance tests

DhryStone CPU test

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Since the whole program should be really small, it fits into the processor cache. It can be used to measure two aspects, both the processor's speed as well as the optimizing capabilities of the compiler. The resulting number is the number of executions of the program suite per second.

Our Dhrystone test can run completely within the CPU + cache memory itself. A perfect test to see the general efficiency per core. Though one of the oldest, Dhrystone remains a simple yet accurate and effective way to show you RAW CPU processing performance making it a very good indicator. The rest of the processors are in the charts just for scaling.

We see a small speed bump over Atom 330. The Athlon X2 7850 BE processor is included everywhere for scaling reasons, that way you can grasp a little on what kind of performance we are talking about here.

Queen CPU Test

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic "Queens problem" on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed, theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores.

For example -- with Hyper-Threading disabled -- the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. However, with HyperThreading enabled the picture is controversial, because due to architectural bottlenecks the Northwood core runs out of internal resources and slows down. Similarly, at the same clock speed AMD K8 class processors will be faster than AMD K7 ones due to the improved branch prediction capabilities of the K8 architecture.

CPU Queen test uses only the basic x86 instructions, it consumes less than 1 MB system memory and it is Hyper-Threading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core aware and is thus a multi-threading CPU Benchmark with MMX, SSE2 and SSE3 optimizations.

I also stumbled into an ATOM 230 figure from a while ago, and included it. Here Atom 330 takes the lead over the E-350 though.

3DMark 06 CPU test

3DMark06 is very CPU limited, making it a good application to check CPU performance. The scores that you see are the CPU test itself, not overall 3DMark06 scores. A nice win over the Atom 330 there, roughly half the perf of the Athlon X2 7850Be.

Game Performance?

What about game performance you might ask? Well, with 80 Shader processors at your disposal, really you might be better then competing laptop solutions, but it's as far as I am concerned a no-go unless you really forfeit hard in image quality and select a very low monitor resolutions.

For those that wonder, 3DMark Vantage returned a 812 (Performance) score. That equivalent to say a GeForce GT 210, the lowest ranking dedicated graphics card we have available in our charts.