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
Dell has really come into its own in the past few years. Shedding the image (and fur?) of yet another cheap PC OEM, Dell has tried to make design a more important part of its manufacturing as of late. Not every design is a win, but the zino HD appears to be the first nettop styled to have mass market appeal:
Dell's Inspiron zino HD, available in more than just pink
As soon as Dell announced the zino HD I was bombarded with emails. Not for a review of the system, but for a review of the processors inside the machine. A quick look at Dell’s tech specs for the zino HD list the following processor options:
They sound fast. But in practice, many of these chips are actually Atom competitors. I asked AMD for two of the CPUs on this list - the Athlon 2650e and the Athlon X2 3250e.
The 2650e is a single-core K8 based Socket-AM2/AM2+ processor that runs at 1.6GHz. It’s got 512KB of L2 cache and the rest of the feature set of the older K8 AM2 processors. As an AM2 chip it’s DDR2 only and physically won’t fit or work in an AM3 motherboard. Keep that in mind before you go sticking one of these where it doesn’t belong.
Based on its specs, the Athlon 2650e is a near perfect competitor for Intel’s Atom. The newly announced D510 runs at 1.66GHz (close enough), but is an in-order architecture with Hyper Threading. Bottom line? The Athlon 2650e should be faster in single threaded apps, but slower in multitasking/multithreaded applications. Great. Atom boasts a lower total TDP as well.
The Athlon X2 3250e fixes the 2650e’s biggest shortcoming by adding a second core. The clock speed drops a bit to 1.5GHz, but the rest of the specs stay the same. TDP goes up from 15W on the 2650e to 22W for the 3250e.
Dell charges an extra $65 for the 3250e upgrade. Just to put things in perspective - $10 more and you could have yourself a complete Pine Trail platform.
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AznBoi36 - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Pinetrail is useless for an HTPC ... There is HDMI, but you're limited to a max resolution of 1366x768. Pretty useless for anything above 720p HD.signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
I read somewhere that Ion 2 for Pinetrail is in the works...Penti - Sunday, January 3, 2010 - link
They can just make a mobile graphics card that sits on some of the four PCI-e lanes available, it's PCI-e 2.0 and is more then enough for a low-end graphics solution. There's no problem there. One lane (x1) for Gigabit ethernet, One lane (x1) for wireless (Mini PCI-e) leaves two lanes (x2 or 1000MB/s uni-directional) for graphics. It's enough. Easily faster then an IGP solutions. But most will probably just go with the Broadcom Crystal HD.Kobaljov - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
The Zotac created a new mini-ITX board with dual-core Pineview with HDMI (similary limited res) and 2 PCIe Mini Card and a PCIe x1 slot! Price is unknown but hopefully closer to the Intel prices than the previous Ion boards.Penti - Tuesday, January 5, 2010 - link
Sounds good, will definitively check it out. But it's still too resolution limited and a discrete chip would solve that. But you can solve that with a x1 graphic card :) Though not that cheap, I only know of HD4350. But at least you get full resolution HDMI then.essemzed - Thursday, December 31, 2009 - link
Just looking at the picture I think something is conspicuously missing: a socket for a microphone jack beside the phone one.Being a nettop it is very likely it will be used for VOIP applications too (Skype or whatever) and I'd really like to plug my headset jacks, both phone and mike, in the same place, not one in the front and one (hopefully) in the back.
Bad design, IMHO.
Sergio
signorRossi - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Ever heard of USB-attached headsets? ;-)Mic/headphone tu USB adapters exist too...
Calin - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
Also, there are USB webcams with integrated audio.essemzed - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
my point was not that it is impossible to attach an headset to the box (of course it is), but that it would be impractical if you already own one of the typical kind, i.e. analog.hardwareguy - Friday, January 1, 2010 - link
There's a mic jack on the back of the Zino HD, along with another headphone jack.http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...">http://gopaultech.com/files/2009/11/Dell-Zino-HD-B...