AMD Fusion E-350 Pro Reviews

Users have already lost their initial interest in products of this class and AMD will not be able to rake in profits by benefiting on consumer’s interest towards completely new products. The AMD Brazos platform will surely sell more or less successfully but the company will have to put much effort and choose a flexible pricing policy to ensure a market success for its Zacate and Ontario processors as well as computers based on them. It is tablet PCs that are the hot topic today but our tests cannot say if Bobcat-based processors can be employed in such systems. AMD has plans to reduce the power consumption of that processing core even further but it is unclear when these plans are going to be implemented in actual products.

AMD's Fusion APU platform is certainly interesting and overall it does work well with Linux aside from the current open-source graphics issues, which will hopefully be fixed promptly, after which we will deliver the E-350 closed and open-source graphics benchmarks for the Radeon HD 6310. Once we get our hands on a mobile Fusion system, we will also deliver power consumption results.

The E-350 Fusion APU is a wonder of integration, and AMD has set a new standard for basic computing platforms with the Brazos platform. For users whose needs are confined to simple office productivity, communications, and media consumption, the E-350 may well be sufficient. For those places where you might have considered an Atom- or Ion-based slim desktop system before, you'd now do better to consider a Brazos-based offering. In fact, we're left wondering how Intel could possibly continue its long-standing (and seemingly intentional) neglect of the graphics and video capabilities of this Atom platform for another generation. AMD has forced the issue. Without some help, the Atom will deserve to lose badly, both in "nettops" and netbooks, from here forward.

The Brazos platform really poses the question of what is fast enough from a CPU standpoint. Netbook makers often argued that Atom was fast enough, and honestly they'd be right if Atom wasn't paired with such a heavyweight OS. The E-350 offers an alternative. You get faster than Atom CPU performance (particularly in single threaded tasks) and a fairly potent GPU. The only issue is that the E-350 doesn't compete against Atom. AMD is committed to revving the Brazos platform yearly. We’ll obviously see updated graphics next year but I’m hoping for updates to the CPU cores as well. AMD has a history of not making the same mistakes as Intel, so hopefully the Brazos roadmap looks good. Now we wait for the notebooks.

The performance of the E-350 is impressive but even more so is how much better the power efficiency looks with the Brazos platform compared to these Intel offerings. Intel's CULV+ION platform not only uses more than twice as much power at idle than AMD's offering but also requires 30% or so more power at peak performance while still falling behind in many benchmarks.

There are three high-level areas of performance we can consider when looking back through the benchmark data for AMD's Zacate platform: general CPU performance, graphics/multimedia performance and performance-per-watt.