AMD Athlon 5350 Preview | PCMag
The AMD Athlon 5350 ($59.99) is a quad-core processor based on the Kabini core. It’s aimed directly at the DIY home PC builder who wants something decent, but doesn’t want to pay a whole lot for his components, either. It’s good enough for HD playback and day-to-day tasks, but is priced far less than the AMD A series, Intel Core i3, and Core i5 processors that are the mainstays of home PCs.
The Athlon 5350($76.00 at Walmart)(Opens in a new window) is made to work on AMD’s AM1 platform, which is made to be upgradable, even at the budget price points. That means you will be able to swap out the Athlon 5350 in the future when there are better AM1 APUs available. For example, you can drop one in a Biostar AM1MHP( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) or MSI AM1I motherboard, and you’ll already have the hard part of building a $100-150 system out of the way.
The Athlon 5350 is a quad-core processor with a 2.05GHz clock speed and built-in AMD Radeon R3 graphics. Its 25-watt thermal design power (TDP) rating is better than Intel Core i3 processors, but still over double that of 10-watt Intel Bay Trail (Celeron) processors. The Athlon 5350 performed decently against a few recent processors on tests. Overall performance is better than that of the low power-oriented AMD E-350, though the more mainstream AMD A8-7600($89.86 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) and Intel Core i3-4130 beat the Athlon 5350 soundly.
If you’re looking to build an inexpensive system that can handle basic, day-to-day tasks, like Microsoft Office document editing, Flash websites, and 1080p HD video playback, then the AMD Athlon 5350 is a good-enough choice. It’s made to be paired with a cheap motherboard for less than the purchase price of an Intel Core i3 or i5 processor alone.
For more details, check out the full review of the AMD Athlon 5350(Opens in a new window) on our sister site, Computer Shopper.
AMD Athlon 5350
Pros
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Inexpensive motherboards and processor.
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Fast enough for 1080p HD video.
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Low power requirements.
Cons
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Slow compared to even low-end Intel and AMD mainstream desktop CPUs.
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Some Intel platforms have even lower power requirements.
The Bottom Line
The AMD Athlon 5350 is a budget processor for PC geeks who prefer to build their own desktops. It’s middle-of-the-road in terms of features and performance, but its low price is the main lure.
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AMD Athlon 5350 Linux Benchmarks and Review
AMD Athlon 5350 Box
Later this week, AMD will launch its socket AM1/ FS1b based Kabini SoC’s, the fastest of which will be the Athlon 5350..png)
The AMD Athlon 5350 will be the fastest 25w TDP socket AM1 processor at launch. It has four “Jaguar” cores running at 2.05GHz. The other side of the chip is its 128 core Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores running at 600MHz which AMD markets as a Radeon R3. We are not going to test the GPU today since we typically focus on CPU benchmarks with our Linux test suite. Still, we are very excited to see what these new Kabini APU’s can do.
Test Configuration
We were a bit limited by the fact that we purchased the components at retail prior to the official launch. AMD and ASUS did not provide these components prior to launch.
- CPU: AMD Athlon 5350 (with retail heatsink/ fan)
- Motherboard: ASUS AM1I-A
- Memory: 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz
- SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
- OS: Ubuntu 13.10 server
- Power supply: PicoPSU 150XT
4-8GB of RAM is likely going to be the sweet spot for these chips. Once you purchase 2x 8GB UDIMMs the small incremental price to move up to the next tier of processor and motherboard combinations is not too great.
AMD Athlon 5350 Benchmarks
Today we are using our standard Linux benchmarking suite to get an idea about the AMD Athlon 5350 quad core processor performance. As a direct result of user feedback, we recently had the benchmarks all put into a single script that you can use to benchmark your own systems. As development has progressed on the next version we have moved the current script to STHbench 2013 – Download and Instructions as a resource on the forums. That guide has three simple commands that you can use with a stock installation to run our test suite and install/ compile all necessary files. No configuration is needed. For the next generation development version which currently can also run on CentOS and Mint, and expands the suite to include sysbench and redis-benchmark results, look here: (see Introducing the STHbench.sh Server Benchmarking Script).
The net goal is that we want others to be able to reproduce benchmarks and compare directly to their systems. Since we do not have access to every possible configuration, we would appreciate feedback in that thread which can be as simple as posting log files to run.
Help is always appreciated!
Hardinfo Performance
hardinfo is a well known Linux benchmark that has been around for years. It tests a number of CPU performance aspects. One major advantage is that one can run this out of the box from many Ubuntu installations.
AMD Athlon 5350 hardinfo benchmark
We do sort on UnixBench multi-threaded Dhrystone results. Generally hardinfo gives us a quick preview of the rest of the suite. For those wondering why we have dual processor results in here, consider this. A complete dual Xeon L5530 or AMD Opteron 2419 EE server can be purchased used, with RAM for about the same price as an AMD Athlon 5350 system. Likewise, Xeon L5520 pricing is under $25 per chip on ebay. We ended up spending more than $50 for the Athlon 5350 however that was pre-release retail pricing. Of course, all of these dual processor configurations are going to use more power but interesting nonetheless.
One thing we can see here is that the AMD Athlon 5350 is very competitive with the Intel Silvermont based offerings, and appears to be significantly faster than the lower-cost Intel Celeron 1007U platform we saw earlier.
For a quick recap, the Celeron J1900 and Atom C2550 are quad core Silvermont architectures while the Atom C2750 and C2758 are 8-core variants. One can clearly see the AMD SoC is very competitive with Intel’s offerings released last fall in terms of CPU performance. The Xeon E3-1200 chips are all significantly faster, but are also more costly. They also serve as a solid proxy for desktop chips.
UnixBench 5.1.3 Performance
UnixBench may be a defacto standard for Linux benchmarking these days. There are two main versions, one that tests single CPU performance on that tests multiple CPU performance. UnixBench segments these results. We run both sets of CPU tests. Here are the single threaded results:
AMD Athlon 5350 UnixBench Single Threaded CPU
In terms of single-threaded performance, the AMD Athlon 5350 stacks up just behind the Intel Silvermont based Atom and Celerons. One can see that even the low power/ clocked and over 5 year old Nehalem L5520 chips are still significantly faster in most single threaded benchmarks.
AMD Athlon 5350 UnixBench Multithreaded CPU
Moving to the multi-threaded side, we actually see that the AMD Athlon 5350 performs well against the quad core Silvermont parts. One other major takeaway from these charts is that low-power performance is slower than current generation desktop parts. However looking at a Haswell based Xeon E3-1270 V3 versus an AMD Athlon 350 there is less than a 4x differential in Dhrystone performance. On the other hand SoC’s like the Raspberry Pi and older Atom S1260 parts are generally about 1/10th the performance of the current crop of low-power processors.
c-ray 1.1 Performance
c-ray is a very interesting ray tracing benchmark. It provides both consistent results and some clear separation. Ray tracing is generally a great multi-threaded CPU benchmark. For this test we use both a simple 7500×3500 render and a more complex 1920×1200 render. Here are the results: Our c-ray benchmark shows some fairly solid performance using c-ray’s rendering benchmark.
AMD Athlon 5350 c-ray benchmark
Here we see the AMD Athlon 5350 perform significantly better than the quad core Silvermont parts. The Athlon 5350 is even competitive with a single Intel Xeon L5520 here. The 8-core Silvermont processors are faster.
Phoronix Test Suite Performance
We are using four tests from the Phoronix Test Suite: pts/stream, pts/compress-7zip, pts/openssl and pts/pybench.
- STREAM by John D. McCalpin, Ph.D. is a very well known memory benchmark benchmark.
- 7-zip compression benchmarks were a mainstay in our Windows suite so we are including it again on the Linux side as a compression benchmark.
- The pts/openssl benchmark is very dependent on the CPU architecture being used
- Python is a widely used scripting language and pyBench is a nice single-threaded Python benchmark
AMD Athlon 5350 pts benchmarks
Here we can see a significant flaw in the AMD Athlon 5350 design, memory bandwidth. The AMD Athlon 5350 is a single channel DDR3 design.
Even with 1600MHz DDR3 memory, the bandwidth provided to the CPU is anemic. With two DIMM slots on the motherboard, one does wonder why AMD would not just go for a dual channel memory controller.
Crafty Chess Performance
Crafty is a well known chess benchmark. It is also one where we saw issues last time with the Phoronix Test Suite and running on ARM CPUs. We are planning to retire this benchmark in the 2014 version of STHbench. Here are the Crafty Chess results from simply running “crafty bench”:
AMD Athlon 5350 crafty bench
Here we again reinforce the trend that the AMD Athlon 5350 has single threaded performance close to that of Silvermont architecture processors.
Power Consumption and Thermal Imaging
We hooked up our Extech TrueRMS power meter to the AMD 5350 platform and saw some excellent results
- Idle power consumption: 15.9w
- Maximum power consumption during benchmarks: 20.0w
Just to give one an example of how good this is in the server realm, here are a few lower-power/ lower end server options:
AMD Athlon 5350 Power Consumption
Overall, excellent results here but somewhat misleading.
All of the other options were tested on platforms with a BMC which provides out-of-band IPMI 2.0 and iKVM management. For those not familiar with that functionality, most server motherboards have the ability to remotely login to a management engine and get a remote desktop/ terminal, and perform power control and monitoring functions. This does add 6-7w of power draw. Still, the Athlon results are excellent. Just to visually give an example of what this looks like using a nearly silent retail fan spinning at about 2000rpm to cool the processor, we used our FLIR Ex series thermal camera on the platform:
ASUS AM1I-A and AMD Athlon 5350 Thermal Imaging
The bottom line here is that the entire platform runs very cool. We use 22C to 60C as our lower to upper bounds due to the fact that we test many dual processor setups. One can see the platform runs very cool.
Conclusion
Overall, the AMD AM1 platform is fairly compelling. With a FS1b socket, there are a variety of options for different processors and a potential upgrade path.
From our Linux benchmarking, we can see that the platform is highly competitive with the Intel Silvermont based Atom C2000 series and Bay Trail-D in terms of raw processor performance. Kabini delivers in that respect. Frankly, memory bandwidth is bad. I am interested to see how the AMD R3 graphics perform with very little main memory bandwidth. Given what we saw today, the $5-10 upgrade price versus the AMD Athlon 5150 is going to be an obvious one. The bigger question is whether it is worth it to upgrade to a quad core model versus dual core models. We do have two Sempron dual core models en-route to test so that answer should be coming shortly.
Processor review AMD Athlon 5350 Socket AM1
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Introducing the $913436$ AMD Athlon 5350 Socket AM1 Processor Review
Design and Key Features
AMD Athlon 53 Processor 50 is part of the new budget direction platform, which consists of from a whole list of components, and will allow the user to complete the hardware at his discretion.
AMD Athlon 5350 is made in a classic square shape. Its upper part is almost completely covered with a metal cover, which removes heat from the core and protects it from damage. There are informational inscriptions on the cover: processor series, brand name, country of origin. In the lower left corner there is a key for correct installation in the slot.
The lower part has 721 gilded feet and key re-image.
The processor comes with a cooling system consisting of an aluminum heatsink and a 55×55×22 mm fan with software speed control. The fan is capable of accelerating up to 3000 rpm and at the same time remaining quite silent.
The heatsink is attached to the motherboard with two spring-loaded plastic latches.
The fan is standardly attached to the radiator with four self-tapping screws. Power is supplied to it from the motherboard via a 3-pin connector.
Key Features
The Athlon 5350 is the top quad-core processor in the Kabini family, clocked at 2.
05GHz. The model is a hybrid that combines several devices at once. The processor has 2MB of L2 cache on board, a Radeon HD 8400 graphics core (128 cores) with a frequency of 600 MHz, a SATA 3.0 controller, PCI Express 2.0 interface support, a single-channel DDR3 (1600) controller, a USB 3.0 controller. The device supports up to 16GB of RAM and allows you to use SATA interfaces at speeds up to 6GB per second. Particular attention is paid to working with video and photos at the hardware and software levels.
The processor has low power consumption, and as a result, does not create problems with the cooling of the entire system and noise.
This Athlon 5350 architecture will not only reduce the cost of the motherboard, but also reduce the overall cost of the entire system.
The AMD Athlon 5350 comes in a small cardboard box with the image and name of the processor, as well as the company logo. In addition to the processor, the box contains a cooling system and documentation.
As conceived by the manufacturer, this processor is designed for systems that do not require extreme computing power and will perfectly cope with the most frequent everyday tasks: viewing photos and videos, surfing the Internet, working with documents.
$913436$AMD Athlon 5350 Socket AM1 processor presented in Citylink e-discounter
AMD Athlon 5350 processor main specifications:
- Socket: SocketAM1
- Processor frequency: 2.05 GHz
- Number of cores: quad-core
- Process technology: 28 nm
- L2 cache: 2 MB
- Thermal dissipation: 25 W
- Maximum temperature: 90 °C 900 46
- Supply voltage (minimum): 0.5 V
- Supply voltage (maximum): 1.4 V
- Graphics core model: AMD Radeon HD 8400
- Graphics core frequency: 600 MHz
- Delivery type: BOX
- Warranty: 36 months.
- Manufacturer’s website: www.amd.com/ru-ru
AMD Athlon 5350 processor review: specifications, benchmark tests
The Athlon 5350 processor was released by AMD.
The processor is designed for desktop computers.
Processor unlocked for overclocking. Total number of cores — 4, threads — 4. Maximum temperature — 76°C. Technological process — 28 nm. Cache size: L1 — 256 KB, L2 — 2 MB.
Supported socket type: AM1. Power consumption (TDP): 25 Watts.
AMD Radeon R3 Graphics is integrated into the processor with the following graphics parameters: maximum frequency — 600 MHz, number of cores — 128.
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
CPU mark
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 150538 |
Single Core
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
Multi-Core
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
5 Desktop Face Detection
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 63.717 mPixels/s |
| 3.385 mPixels/s |
Ocean Surface Simulation
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 741.453 Frames/s |
| 7.630 Frames/s |
T-Rex
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
4. 625 Frames/s |
| 0.175 Frames/s |
Video Composition
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 49.002 Frames/s |
| 7.011 Frames/s |
Bitcoin Mining
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU is |
| 218.231 mHash/s |
1. 821 mHash/s |
Car Chase Offscreen
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 9047 Frames |
| 592 Frames |
Manhattan
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 7128 Frames |
| 1136 Frames |
0 T-Rex
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 12887 Frames |
| 3232 Frames |
Car Chase Offscreen
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 9047.000 Fps |
| 592.000 Fps |
Manhattan
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
7128. 000 Fps |
| 1136.000 Fps |
T-Rex
| Top1 CPU |
| This CPU |
| 12887.000 Fps |
| 3232.000 Fps |
| Name | Meaning |
|---|---|
| PassMark — Single thread mark | 699 |
| PassMark — CPU mark | 1761 |
| Geekbench 4 — Single Core | 245 |
| Geekbench 4 — Multi-Core | 796 |
CompuBench 1. 5 Desktop — Face Detection |
3.385 mPixels/s |
| CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Ocean Surface Simulation | 7.630 Frames/s |
| CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — T-Rex | 0.175 Frames/s |
| CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Video Composition | 7.011 Frames/s |
| CompuBench 1.5 Desktop — Bitcoin Mining | 1.821 mHash/s |
| GFXBench 4.0 — Car Chase Offscreen | 592 Frames |
| GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan | 1136 Frames |
| GFXBench 4.0 — T-Rex | 3232 Frames |
GFXBench 4. 0 — Car Chase Offscreen |
592.000 Fps |
| GFXBench 4.0 — Manhattan | 1136.000 Fps |
| GFXBench 4.0 — T-Rex | 3232.000 Fps |
| Boost Core Clock | 600MHz |
| Core frequency | 267MHz |
| Floating point performance | 153.6 gflops |
| Process | 28nm |
| Number of shaders | 128 |
| Texturing speed | 4. 8 GTexel/s |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 15 Watt |
| Number of transistors | 930 million |
Features
| Family | AMD Athlon Processors |
| OPN PIB | AD5350JAHMBOX |
| OPN Tray | AD5350JAh54HM |
| Place in the ranking | 2226 |
| Series | AMD Athlon Quad-Core APU |
| Applicability | Desktop |
| Base frequency | 2. 05 GHz |
| Level 1 cache | 256KB |
| Level 2 cache | 2MB |
| Process | 28nm |
| Maximum core temperature | 76°C |
| Number of cores | 4 |
| Number of threads | 4 |
| Unlocked | |
| Maximum number of memory channels | 1 |
| Supported memory frequency | 1600 MHz |
| Enduro | |
| Maximum GPU clock | 600MHz |
| Number of iGPU cores | 128 |
| Integrated graphics | AMD Radeon R3 Graphics |
| Switchable graphics | |
| Unified Video Decoder (UVD) | |
| Video Codec Engine (VCE) | |
| DisplayPort | |
| HDMI | |
| DirectX | 12 |
| Vulcan | |
| Supported sockets | AM1 |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 25 Watt |
| AMD App Acceleration | |
| AMD Elite Experiences | |
| AMD HD3D technology | |
| Enhanced Virus Protection (EVP) | |
| Fused Multiply-Add 4 (FMA4) | |
| Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) | |
| Intel® AES New Instructions | |
| PowerGating | |
| PowerNow | |
| AMD Virtualization (AMD-V™) | |
IOMMU 2.
| |