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
Platform: ION vs. Radeon HD 3200
The Dell zino HD uses an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3200. The mobile version of the desktop 780G chipset. We already know that Intel’s default Atom chipsets can’t decode HD video and have horrible gaming performance, but what about ION vs. AMD’s integrated solution?
The first test is H.264 decode acceleration. I fired up the latest version of Media Player Classic and tested x264 acceleration.
On a single core Athlon 2560e CPU utilization while playing back 13Mbps 1080p content ranged between 40% and 65%. Throw on the dual core X2 3250e and the numbers drop down into the 20% - 40% range.
Playable? Absolutely, with CPU power to spare.
Gaming Performance
Next up is gaming. Intel’s integrated graphics can’t play games at all with Atom, but ION definitely can. I fired up our World of Warcraft benchmark:
Hmm, that’s unexpected. ION + Atom is actually a bit faster than the 2650e and AMD’s integrated Radeon HD 3200. It’s a noticeable advantage. Neither is exactly smooth but the advantage here goes to ION.
Next up I tried Left 4 Dead and the roles reversed:
The 2650e was slightly faster than the Atom 330 + ION combination, but the dual core Athlon X2 3250e was clearly in the lead.
Overall it’s clear that ION, even while hampered by Atom is a potent little solution. And it’ll take more than just the Athlon 2650e to be noticeably faster in games across the board.
Flash Acceleration
I tested Flash 10.2 acceleration but was unfortunately met with the same problems I originally had in my GPU Accelerated Flash 10 article. With a 1280 x 720 desktop resolution full screen Hulu (480p) was smooth but took up 100% of the Athlon 2650e. If I scaled the desktop res too much higher I started to drop frames. Flash video in a window played just fine with manageable (but not low) CPU utilization.
This was a clean install of Windows 7 x64, so I’m not quite sure what’s going on here. Granted Flash 10.x is still in beta and perhaps there are still kinks that have to be worked out.
Flash is playable on the 2650e/3250e + Radeon HD 3200, and with the right hardware/driver combo it’ll work even better, but I’ve just had better experiences with ION in that regard.
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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