AMD Zacate E-350 Processor Performance Preview


Test Systems and PCMark Vantage

 

Test System Configuration Notes: Testing Zacated at AMD's facility wasn't completely ideal, so we had to make due with the available test system we had as well as reference performance numbers you'll see in the coming benchmark graphs.  The first thing to note is that AMD configured their Zacate/Brazos systems with a Micron C300 SSD, which not only allowed us to install our benchmark suite that much faster but in tests that were storage subsystem dependent, afforded Zacate a significant advantage in IO response time.  As such we decided to fire up a fresh set of benchmark numbers on two low power mobile platforms we had currently in house -- Intel's Atom D525 1.8GHz dual-core with NVIDIA's Ion 2 and AMD's previous generation Turion II Neo K625 with discrete Radeon HD 4225 graphics.  All told these test systems should provide a good relative metric to measure Zacate and the Brazos platform's performance versus similarly equipped hyper-mobile platforms.

 HotHardware's Test Systems
 Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
AMD E-350 Zacate Processor
(1.6GHz - Dual-Core)
AMD Engineer Sample
(AMD Hudson IO Hub)
2x2GB DDR3-1066
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio
Micron C300 SSD
Windows 7 x64

System 2: 
AMD Turion II Neo K625
(1.5GHz - Dual-Core)
Acer Aspire 1551 Notebook
2x2GB DDR3-1066
Mobility Radeon HD 4225
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio
OCZ Vertex LE SSD
Windows 7 x64

System 3: 
Intel Atom D525
(1.8GHz - Dual-Core)
Asus Eee PC1215N
2x2GB DDR3-1066
NVIDIA Ion 2
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio
Micron C300 SSD
Windows 7 x64




AMD's E-350 Zacate Integrated Low Power Processor - Vital Signs

 Preliminary Testing with PCMark Vantage
 Synthetic Benchmarks

First up, we ran our test systems through Futuremark’s latest system performance evaluation tool, PCMark Vantage. PCMark Vantage runs through a host of different usage scenarios to simulate different types of workloads including High Definition TV and movie playback and manipulation, gaming, image editing and manipulation, music compression, communications, and productivity.  Most of the tests are multi-threaded as well, so the tests can exploit the additional resources offered by a quad-core CPU.


With our first test we see some interesting data.  The AMD Zacate E-350 processor trails the dual core Atom D525 by about 12% in our productivity tests but shows itself to be slightly faster than the dual core Atom in all other tests, except for the gaming test, where Zacate's integrated GPU offers over 2X the performance, and in the communications test where it shows 40% more throughput. Finally, the Turion II Neo K625's more midrange architecture allows it to stretch its legs a bit more over the Zacate and Atom dual-core low power chips here.


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