MSI E350IA-E45 - AMD APU Fusion
2 July 2011. Author: mas_sas
AMD Fusion - Brazos platform tested - The E350 APU
Aah, it's time for the second Fusion review based on the slowly growing popular APU from AMD, the E350. You know, the ultra small motherboards that offer fair enough performance yet come with decent integrated processor and graphics subsystem that just oozes with features and value.
Good examples of some products we have tested in the past where Intel Atom based, and let's not forget about the impact that NVIDIA ION made, the combination of a small form factor motherboard, an "okay" processor and power full graphics sparked and ignited the netbook and net-top market.
Also another segment suddenly became interested in these products, the HTPC audience. And when we look at the SOHO segment, a lot of NAS servers these days are equipped with small form factor products with ATOM. AMD however never had a real workable answer to this development and years ago they decided to pursue and bore into a new direction, yeah amongst others... Fusion, a combination of a processor and graphics processor integrated into one small die.
The idea is simple, but more complicated to manufacture then you think. AMD calls this APU, it is a processor with embedded graphics core merged directly into the die. A development that from here on will dominate the processor industry and a technology that will eat away a large piece of the IGP and low-end graphics card sales pie.
Intel started something very similar with the high end Sandy Bridge products, AMD is doing it vice versa... they start at low-end, the net-top and net-book market. For prices hovering in the 100 EUR bracket you can purchase yourself some amazing stuff, and sure let me immediately make clear that this is not high-end processor kit in terms of performance, contrary... this is netbook / entry level performance at best, but the combination of the GPU+CPU=APU is something that is very interesting.
We peek at the cutest mITX motherboard from MSI today, have a look at some of its performance on the CPU and GPU side of things but most of all, we'll discuss features as what these products bring to the table is just downright impressive for the money as you'll notice DDR3 support, SATA-600 support, HDMI support, gigabit Ethernet, 8-channel audio support and then the integrated dual-core processor at 1600 MHz and in that processor embedded DX11 ready graphics core.
The product we test today is based on the AMD E-350 APU -- Atom level processing performance with an AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics on-board.
So the low power platform we are looking at today was formerly codenamed "Brazos". All Brazos motherboards are within the same price range and power envelopes as Atom/Ion solutions. They are available in several APU variations: E-Series and C-Series, which fall within the Fusion family of APUs. On the the desktop side within the Zacate and Ontario segment, these are released: Zacate (18W max): Ontario (9W max) The Processing capability These APU "processors" feature the new x86 CPU core codenamed "Bobcat" AMD's first new x86 core since 2003 I think. It was designed from the ground up to deliver an enhanced mobile level performance. A processor tagged at a TDP of merely 18 Watts. Have a look below at the APU die. The APU we test today has two x86 CPU cores, the chip also supports full X86-64 extensions and sports a 64-bit FPU as well. Each CPU core has 32kb L1 and 512kb L2 cache per core and comes with a single channel memory controller that supports up-to 1066 MHz (but unofficially also 1333 MHz) DDR3 memory. Again note that the specified max memory speed AMD officially supports for “Brazos” is 1066MHz. The Brazos Platform
To the left the Zacate APU - To the right an overlay describing the die segments check out the size needed for the GPU.
| "Ontario"/ "Zacate"APU | Description |
| Tech/Package | FT1 BGA, 413-Ball, 19x19mm, .8mm pitch |
| TDP Configs | 18W |
| Processor Core | Bobcat (2 cores), 512KB L2/Core, 64-bit FPUs |
| Memory | DDR3, 800-1066, 1.35V/1.5V (Single Channel, 2 DIMMs) |
| Graphics Core | DX11 capable, UVD3 enabled |
| Displays | -Digital Display I/F DP0: Display Port, HDMI, DVI, LVDS -Digital Display I/F DP1: Display Port, HDMI, DVI -VGA from integrated VGA DAC |
| PowerManagement | -Core/NBP-State Transitions -Core Level: CC6 Power State -Package Level: PC6 Power State -L2 Cache power gating |
Today we test a product with the E-350, an APU that is empowering the motherboard, it is a dual-core processor SKU running at a clock frequency of 1.6 GHz
The Graphics capability You are at Guru3D, and as such this lingo is more to your liking and understanding, the embedded GPU has two 40 Shader Cores (one per SIMD) = 80 Shader Cores/APU all clocked at 500MHz for the E-350 APU. Now that's not huge, but you do you have a generic GPU at hands allowing all common tasks, a tiny bit of gaming, but where its most interesting is HD content playback. When the media-file allows it you can decode, accelerate and enhance 1080P movies for example over the GPU, allowing the CPU to do very little. Not only is that offering really good HTPC features and output, you are doing that with a low power budget as well. For example we tried decoding MVK movies at 1080P with Media Player Classic Home Cinema, when the content is DXVA enabled (pretty much all MVK content these days) you can perfectly playback the movie and post process (image sharpening / black levels etc) as well. Meanwhile the processing subsystem in the APU was active less than 30% and our total power draw merely 46 Watt. Audio wise you are covered as well, all common formats are supported and even bitstreaming both TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are supported over HDMI. The APU processor then leads to another chip, called the HUDSON chipset (IO controller chip), which functions as your a-typical Southbridge really, let's have a peek at its specifications.
As you can see, as small as this stuff really is, it oozes with the latest technology like 14 USB 2.0 ports but yeah sure, up-to six sate-600 ports, which is pretty impressive stuff. The E-350 is the APU that is empowering the motherboard, it is a dual-core processor running at a clock frequency of 1.6 GHz and that embedded graphics core is in fact Radeon HD 6310 allowing the following monitor connectors ( HDMI, D-Sub). MSI added USB 3.0 support for two ports, it also has six USB 2.0 ports, VGA and HDMI monitor outputs. Based on a Realtek CODEC we get 8 channel-audio, optionally driven though HDMI, Optical TOSLINK or analog jacks. Next to that a full Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet jack is there for speedy internet and file-transfers.
Tagged and labeled under the Vision engine there's a nice graphics subsystem embedded into the APU responsible for many tasks, embedded is a Radeon HD 6310 (Vancouver Radeon HD series 6000) which can drive real low-level games, but most of all is perfect for Full HD content playback, DXVA hardware acceleration and post processing. You guys all know UVD right, the Universal Video Decoder technology from ATI, well the 3rd generation UVD core logic has been embedded into the GPU so VC1. H.264, DIVX/XVID acceleration is all supported.
"Hudson"-M1 FCH
Tech/Package
65nm / FC BGA, 605-Ball, 23x23mm, .8mm pitch
TDP Configs
2.7W to 4.7W for typical configurations
UMI
x4 Gen1
SATA
6 Ports, 6Gb/s
USB
14 USB2.0 Ports, 2 USB1.1 Internal Ports
PCIe GPPs
4x1 Gen2
HWM
Incorporates Fan Control, VoltageLevel Sensing
CIR
CIR Reciever
Clock Gen
Integrated
So what's the Motherboard tested today ?
One of the partners that released a Brazos-based mini-ITX motherboard is MSI. Thus this product is Fusion based, the MSI E350IA-E45, featuring the Hudson-M1 chipset formerly called the Brazos "low-power platform".
The motherboard comes with two DDR3 memory slots and even a PCI Express x16 slot (really runs at PCIe x4) and four SATA 6.0 GBPs connectors, which is interesting. I expect a lot of home-servers running this product. Also in combination with a motherboard like this you can create a ridiculously nice file-server. Features wise it does not stop there though as you'll even spot two USB 3.0 connectors, 7.1 channel audio and Gigabit Ethernet.
Our AMD E-350 Zacate APU platform used a GSKILL SSD, which isn't typical of net/notebooks and net-tops. But for starts here's the CPU-Z details.
AMD Brazos CPU-Z Details:
AMD Brazos AIDA64 Extreme Sandra Details:
Test Environment & Equipment
Here is where we begin the benchmark portion of this article, but first let me show you our test system plus the software we used.
Mainboard MSI E350IA-E45
Processor AMD E350N (embedded)
Graphics Card AMD E350N (Radeon HD 6310 graphics on-board embedded)
Memory 8 GB (2x 4096MB) DDR3 Corsair Vengeance @ 1333 MHz
Power Supply Unit 800 Watt
Monitor Dell 3007WFP - up to 2560x1600
OS related software Windows 7 RTM 64-bit
DirectX 9/10/11 End User Runtime (latest available)
Accelerating & Enhancing Video
Fusion based platforms are a lot about additional features and performance. However, the key feature is, of course, the embedded GPU with video processor. The combo of the video processor and some additional shader processors inside that chipset allows for high-definition 1080P content playback, acceleration, and though limited... enhancement of overall picture quality.
Now for your regular Blu-ray content, just use PowerDVD or WinDVD and enable the PureVideo flag inside the software and you are good to go with the latest updates/revisions.
For those that use other content like the immensely popular MKV / x.264 container formats,Media Player Classic Home Cinema. This free open source software will accelerate and enhance your MKV content even at 1080P.
We have written an article on Media Player Classic Home Cinema and how to set up that software to make this happen. Some examples:
Example of 1080P The Social Media Trailer in MKV x.264 format. You'll notice a CPU load of 23% here, power consumption at this stage is roughly 46 Watts.
Another example, 1080P The Green Hornet Trailer, here we have an MP4 H.264 file and you can see that the CPU load is only 29% on average.
For both content I had some additional shaders enabled like image sharpening and darkened black levels. All that stuff is done of the available 80 Shader processors and that really helps out. That's the beauty of this design.
The reality is that it provides a flawless playback. And with optical audio TOSLINK, and VGA, DVI and HDMI connector output... that makes it a sweet alternative to build a cheap power consumption aware platform. I'm not saying it's the very best alternative, to the contrary... but it's very sufficient at the very least if you are willing to stick to software like Media Player Classic or anything that can support DXVA.
Performance - Storage SSD SATA6G & USB 3.0
With the new SATA 600 controller and USB 3.0 controllers we started adding SSD performance numbers measured on such interfaces (when applicable). Putting these in nicely styled charts would be better, but with technology so new we just do not have anything out there yet to compare to, so here are some raw peak performance numbers. We use an A-DATA N002 Solid State Drive which has both a both SATA2 and USB 3.0 port.
Above, you can see a N002 series A-DATA Solid State Drive running over the NEC USB 3.0 controller on this motherboard. The implementation works well.
Above some numbers based on the SATA3/6G/600 controller of this motherboard. The SSD is SATA III 6G, a Vertex 3 from OCZ. The end-result is disappointing really, not very good. This is a drive that can manage 500 MB/sec in read/write performance. Hence the Hudson SATA 6G implementation of the motherboard is downright poor.
Then again, for a setup like this it is nothing shamed about that performance. We measure in deliberately SATA2 mode here, not AHCI as most net-tops and net/laptops will be setup this way.
Temperatures
The solution in an HTPC environment I want, needs to be be silent. The downside is that the product does tend to get a little warm. Both the processor and internal embedded GPU peaked towards roughly 45 towards 50 Degrees C. And while that is within a safe margin, it is a little on the high side.
The memory controller is single channel and that shows alright, as such memory performance is hovering at give or take 3700 MB/sec.
Now for the charts what we'll do continuously is to compare to Intel's Atom 330 mATX solution which we tested a while ago. It's roughly what AMD is aiming and targeting against.
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.
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 819 (Performance) score. That equivalent to say a GeForce GT 210!
Now testing devices with so little power draw is a little icky and tricky to do. So we monitor the setup in three conditions, IDLE, 100% CPU load and High Definition 1080P playback. Let's have a peek at the numbers.
Power Consumption
Example of how we measure power consumption
Now granted, I was hoping to see slightly better power consumption here. The APU should consume a maximum of 18W, the IO chip roughly 4 watts, then we add a SSD. In idle we see a power draw of 28 Watt. Under CPU load roughly 37 Watt and when watching 1080P High Definition content (GPU accelerated) only 35 Watt.
Great stuff to observe really. This might be the most capable power efficient HTPC solution to date!
Much like the initial E350 board we tested, the overall experience of a E-350 based platform for me equals to fun. It's not at all high-end and please do not confuse the purpose of a product like shown today with that either. You however can browse the web really well, even with very rich web content. Next to that you have your HD video capability working extraordinary well also. Your overall applications will run fine, heck we even photo shopped on this platform which as really okay and sure, while very limited you can play a game or two. HDD/SSD performance will be fine, our tests did show peak limitation. SATA 6G performance is really poor, with our Vertex 3 SATA 6G SSD which can do 500 MB/sec read/write .. we hardly even touched 200 MB./sec, that surprised us and well, it's just poor. The reality is also that a system setup based on E350 is not about extreme performance, but still .. on SATA 6G we expected a whole lot more. USB 3.0 performance on this board was quite good really, albeit slightly slower it was matching SATA2 tested performance with up-to 175MB/sec read and 120MB/sec write performance. The video accelerator, it's capacity and features astounded me the most though. I'd have no problem with a little E-350 based mITX motherboard functioning as HTPC whatsoever. It's power efficient and offers downright superb quality with software that can utilize the graphics core as video accelerator. In combination with the sheer silence of these setups AND the fact that you can hook it into HDMI or if you wanted top, use a coaxial or Optical Toslink for your audio, makes it near perfect for the budget. The Fusion infrastructure created here is working out really well, you'll have a fairly well performing product (for our standards) on which you can manage all your generic and daily stuff on quite well. The key factors of the product tested today is the combination of the CPU+GPU, yep that APU works out well. Especially in the HD video segment this could be a really interesting product. Not only video, but also audio gets passed over HDMi or if you prefer a coaxial or even optical TOSLINK output. Next to that the product will shine at power consumption. The initial Gigabyte board we tested consumed more power then this one from MSI, our average top power consumption was just over 35 Watt, which kind of makes you giggle when you realize you are decoding full 1080P content on the HDTV. The one small negative we have to mention on this board was that tiny fan sitting on top of the APU. At default it's set at 100 RPm, which simply is noisy. Make sure you setup proper fan control in the BIOS as the fan can even disable itself when the system is in idle with low power temperatures. However when the APU is hard at work you'll likely hear (audible, not massively noisy) that fan regardless, which is a bit of a downer for HTPC setups. If I look purely at the HTPC demographic for a second here then surely decoding and enhancing 1080P content without framedrops at 35 Watts is quite honestly a very interesting prospect. And if you just need to build a nicely functioning net-PC, then sure go for it. So whatever your use will be, this is net-top performance at it's best. You can browse the web, listen to music, watch Full HD DXVA video's, and pretty much have heck of a lot of fun with it. The more advanced version of the board + APU like tested today sells for just IDR 1.265.000 as we speak, and that just makes whole lotta sense to us !
Final words and conclusion
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