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
Power Consumption: Higher than Atom
I don’t have a zino HD here to test, but I can hook up a 780G board and Atom 330/ION board to the same PSU and to get an idea for power consumption. The directly comparable numbers are those bars in orange and green. They use the same ATX power supply, the rest use external DC bricks.
As you’d expect, the AMD system does eat more power. At idle the Athlons actually use around the same amount of power as the Atom 330 system (presumably Pine Trail would use less but I don’t have a good apples-to-apples comparison using the same PSU). Under load, AMD is more power hungry.
The dual-core Athlon X2 3250e actually shot up the most at almost 65W compared to 44.2W for the Atom setup.
From a power efficiency standpoint you’re obviously better off with Atom. It makes sense. Intel argued that you can only scale a desktop processor down so much before it’s more efficient to start with a brand new design to address a different power envelope.
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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