AMD Athlon 2650e & X2 3250e - Better than Atom for SFF Desktops
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 31, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Memory Bandwidth & Latency - Much Improved
Intel’s latest Atom processor (codename: Pineview) finally integrated the memory controller. It just wasn’t that impressive.
Overall performance improved a bit, but memory latency was still unusually high for some reason. It’s either due to a horribly unoptimized IMC, or an unusually potent memory controller in the previous Atom platform.
Either way, the Athlon 2560e’s is better:
| Processor | Memory Latency | Memory Read Bandwidth |
| Intel Atom D510 (1.66GHz) | 95.3 ns | 2997 MB/s |
| AMD Athlon 2650e (1.6GHz) | 75.0 ns | 4768 MB/s |
You get lower memory latency and more memory bandwidth. Two ingredients for much better performance. Which brings us to the next section...
Performance: As Expected
Both the 2650e and the X2 3250e are in our Bench database, but I’ve pulled out a few relevant numbers to help characterize their performance here.
In single threaded applications, the 2650e is roughly twice as fast as Intel’s Atom D510. This is important because the majority of desktop applications are still bound by the performance of a single thread.
I ran a couple of lighter benchmarks to put it all in perspective. Futuremark’s Peacekeeper benchmark is a browser performance test. The scores vary depending on OS and browser version, but I kept both variables static for this comparison (Windows 7 x64 + Chrome):
Simply browsing the web should be roughly two times faster on the single core Athlon 2650e compared to even Intel’s latest Atom.
The situation gets complicated the moment you add a second CPU intensive thread. The Atom D510 and 330 are both dual-core processors with Hyper Threading. They can work on four threads of instructions at the same time. Look at any of the multithreaded workloads and the Athlon 2650e loses out:
Fortunately for AMD (and Dell), the majority of those workloads are things like video encoding or 3D rendering. Two tasks you simply shouldn’t be doing in any serious fashion on something this underpowered. The exception would be video encoding for publishing on the web (e.g. YouTube); a reasonable usage case for even the most entry level machine.
That’s where the Athlon X2 3250e comes into play. You get the single threaded performance of the 2650e, but better multithreaded performance than an Atom D510.
Mix single and multithreaded workloads and the Athlon 2650e is still a bit faster than the Atom D510.
There are some workloads where the Atom D510 is able to persevere, but they are limited.
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AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Pinetrail is useless for an HTPC ... There is HDMI, but you're limited to a max resolution of 1366x768. Pretty useless for anything above 720p HD.signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
I read somewhere that Ion 2 for Pinetrail is in the works...Penti - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
They can just make a mobile graphics card that sits on some of the four PCI-e lanes available, it's PCI-e 2.0 and is more then enough for a low-end graphics solution. There's no problem there. One lane (x1) for Gigabit ethernet, One lane (x1) for wireless (Mini PCI-e) leaves two lanes (x2 or 1000MB/s uni-directional) for graphics. It's enough. Easily faster then an IGP solutions. But most will probably just go with the Broadcom Crystal HD.Kobaljov - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
The Zotac created a new mini-ITX board with dual-core Pineview with HDMI (similary limited res) and 2 PCIe Mini Card and a PCIe x1 slot! Price is unknown but hopefully closer to the Intel prices than the previous Ion boards.Penti - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Sounds good, will definitively check it out. But it's still too resolution limited and a discrete chip would solve that. But you can solve that with a x1 graphic card :) Though not that cheap, I only know of HD4350. But at least you get full resolution HDMI then.essemzed - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Just looking at the picture I think something is conspicuously missing: a socket for a microphone jack beside the phone one.Being a nettop it is very likely it will be used for VOIP applications too (Skype or whatever) and I'd really like to plug my headset jacks, both phone and mike, in the same place, not one in the front and one (hopefully) in the back.
Bad design, IMHO.
Sergio
signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Ever heard of USB-attached headsets? ;-)Mic/headphone tu USB adapters exist too...
Calin - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Also, there are USB webcams with integrated audio.essemzed - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
my point was not that it is impossible to attach an headset to the box (of course it is), but that it would be impractical if you already own one of the typical kind, i.e. analog.hardwareguy - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
There's a mic jack on the back of the Zino HD, along with another headphone jack.http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...">http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...