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
Dell has really come into its own in the past few years. Shedding the image (and fur?) of yet another cheap PC OEM, Dell has tried to make design a more important part of its manufacturing as of late. Not every design is a win, but the zino HD appears to be the first nettop styled to have mass market appeal:
Dell's Inspiron zino HD, available in more than just pink
As soon as Dell announced the zino HD I was bombarded with emails. Not for a review of the system, but for a review of the processors inside the machine. A quick look at Dell’s tech specs for the zino HD list the following processor options:
They sound fast. But in practice, many of these chips are actually Atom competitors. I asked AMD for two of the CPUs on this list - the Athlon 2650e and the Athlon X2 3250e.
The 2650e is a single-core K8 based Socket-AM2/AM2+ processor that runs at 1.6GHz. It’s got 512KB of L2 cache and the rest of the feature set of the older K8 AM2 processors. As an AM2 chip it’s DDR2 only and physically won’t fit or work in an AM3 motherboard. Keep that in mind before you go sticking one of these where it doesn’t belong.
Based on its specs, the Athlon 2650e is a near perfect competitor for Intel’s Atom. The newly announced D510 runs at 1.66GHz (close enough), but is an in-order architecture with Hyper Threading. Bottom line? The Athlon 2650e should be faster in single threaded apps, but slower in multitasking/multithreaded applications. Great. Atom boasts a lower total TDP as well.
The Athlon X2 3250e fixes the 2650e’s biggest shortcoming by adding a second core. The clock speed drops a bit to 1.5GHz, but the rest of the specs stay the same. TDP goes up from 15W on the 2650e to 22W for the 3250e.
Dell charges an extra $65 for the 3250e upgrade. Just to put things in perspective - $10 more and you could have yourself a complete Pine Trail platform.
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signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Sorry if I sounded impolite or nitpicking, it wasn't meant so. I just wanted to point out that it isn't a big deal that the Zino hasn't a mic jack on the front.But you actually can get an adapter for your analog headset for a few bucks.
bse8128 - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
When comparing power consumption, isn't really fair to compare with the old Atom boards with a i945GC chipset. I'd much prefer to see a comparison with for example the Intel D945GSEJT, using a i945GSE chipset like the EEE Box.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
I agree, but I needed something that allowed me to use a standard ATX power supply in order to do an apples-to-apples comparison. I included DC based platforms as a reference point though.Take care,
Anand
ganeshts - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Anand, I believe AMD has made it very clear in its driver release that support for Adobe Flash acceleration will be restricted to the HD4000 series and later. Users of the 3xxx series (and as a result the chipsets with Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics like the ZinoHD) will probably never be able to benefit from GPU Flash acceleration.Not wanting to sound like a Nvidia fanboy here (actually my HTPC uses a 3450 from ATI), but ATI really has a lot of catching up to do in terms of software support for its great hardware.
johnsonx - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
This AMD engineer here: http://blogs.amd.com/home/2009/11/30/it-came-it-sa...">http://blogs.amd.com/home/2009/11/30/it...n-update...claims he was able to get flash acceleration working on the ZinoHD.
AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
We'll just have to wait for Flash 10.xxx to get out of beta and actually work properly, before we draw any of these conclusions.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
AMD told us that the 3200/780G would be accelerated and that the release notes were just pointing out their focus for acceleration.Hmm..
Take care,
Anand
Wirmish - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
"Hmm, that's unexpected. ION + Atom is actually a bit faster than the 2650e and AMD's integrated Radeon HD 3200."Intel use is CPU to boost his GPU performance:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-028231...">http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/CS-028231...
World of Warcraft is in the list.
shabby - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Its new years eve, take the rest of the day off :)Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
I'm going to go do just that :)Take care,
anand