Compulab fitlet-XA10-LAN Review: A Fanless AMD UCFF PC for Networking Applications
by Ganesh T S on April 19, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Networking
- AMD
- Fanless
- Industrial PC
- Passive Cooling
- CompuLab
Performance Metrics - II
In this section, we mainly look at benchmark modes in programs used on a day-to-day basis, i.e, application performance and not synthetic workloads.
x264 Benchmark
First off, we have some video encoding benchmarks courtesy of x264 HD Benchmark v5.0. This is simply a test of CPU performance. As expected from the Futuremark results, the unlocked TDP of the AMD A10 Micro-6700T works wonders, and, thanks to being a quad-core solution, emerges as the best of the lot if the Intel Core-series based NUCs are not considered.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression MIPS ratings when utilizing all the available threads.
TrueCrypt
As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. The AMD A10 Micro-6700T does have acceleration for AES. TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of the available cryptography acceleration. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the CompuLab fitlet-XA10-LAN and how it would compare with other select PCs. This is a purely CPU feature / clock speed based test.
Agisoft Photoscan
Agisoft PhotoScan is a commercial program that converts 2D images into 3D point maps, meshes and textures. The program designers sent us a command line version in order to evaluate the efficiency of various systems that go under our review scanner. The command line version has two benchmark modes, one using the CPU and the other using both the CPU and GPU (via OpenCL). The benchmark takes around 50 photographs and does four stages of computation:
- Stage 1: Align Photographs
- Stage 2: Build Point Cloud (capable of OpenCL acceleration)
- Stage 3: Build Mesh
- Stage 4: Build Textures
We record the time taken for each stage. Since various elements of the software are single threaded, others multithreaded, and some use GPUs, it is interesting to record the effects of CPU generations, speeds, number of cores, DRAM parameters and the GPU using this software.
Dolphin Emulator
Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the Dolphin Emulator benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities. It is one of the very few benchmarks where the fitlet-XA10-LAN doesn't come in the top half of the benchmarked systems. That said, it appears that the Dolphin emulator is particularly severe on AMD systems, given that the Zotac ZBOX CA320 nano (based on the AMD A6-1450) came in quite a bit behind the others.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
50 Comments
View All Comments
Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Why such an old CPUBurntMyBacon - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Does AMD have something newer in this category? J/KSeemed to compare pretty well against its newer counterparts, though.
Qwertilot - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Why not? It hardly seems to be holding it back for its intended uses.Flunk - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Cost, obviously.jardows2 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Looks very attractive for a router. The throughput is adequate for pretty much anything but gigabit connections (lucky dogs who have that available!). Can use the microSD slot for the OS, and not mess with mSATA for most use cases. Do they have a "less featured" package - say without the wireless card or battery backup?freeskier93 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
With a different/better configuration I'd bet you could break 900 Mbps with this box. Ars just did a homebrew router and they were breaking 900 Mbps with iperf. The box Ars used was a Celeron with Intel NICs. The Intel NICs are comparable which is why I'd bet you could break 900 Mbps with this AMD box.The problem is price, makes no sense. It's even harder to justify these homebrews when you can buy a Ubiquity EdgeRouter for less than $100 and it will handle gigabit very well. There's a lot of other things to consider with a gigabit connection to get full speed. We used to have a gigabit connection (with the Ubiquity EdgeRouter) and would speed test at about 970 Mbps up/down. Real world test downloading a Steam game I'd top out at about 800 Mbps, but the limit appeared to be disk IO related (even with a Samsung 850 EVO). Honestly gigabit connection is a waste for 99% of internet usage, we only had it because we were living in Longmont, CO, who rolled out their own fiber network and it was dirt cheap (cheaper than Comcast).
Gray05 - Thursday, April 21, 2016 - link
What is the OpenVPN performance like on a Ubiquity EdgeRouter? Can it match what these x86 builds do?For me, the whole purpose of a homebrew router/firewall is for the OpenVPN performance. The advanced features made available by using pfSense is a nice bonus, but that's just icing.
WorBlux - Thursday, March 9, 2017 - link
I'm not sure if the Ubiquity EdgeRouter has hardware acceleration for AES. It has a dual core 500 MHz MIPS router, with packet acceleration hardware.The Compulab Fitlet on the other hand definitely does the sort of AES acceleration that can easily saturate it's network controller with OpenVPN encrypted traffic (assuming you using an AES tunnel)
However where theFitlet falls short is in processing a lot of packets. Where it shines is that it's and x86 system with excellent support for Linux distributions, letting you do a little more that just routing.
Stuka87 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
Fore purely networking use cases, I prefer the PCEngines APU2c4. It doesnt have all the video and extra ports that you will never ever use. It also cost a lot less.jardows2 - Tuesday, April 19, 2016 - link
I see those are now released. I hadn't checked for a while, and last time I looked they were still in testing phase. On the price side, I reckon that without the "extras" the price would be dropped a fair bit. PCEngines would still be cheaper, but how does the GX-412TC processor in it compare to the A10 Micro-6700T for networking tasks?