Voyo V3 Review - A Fanless Intel Atom x7-Z8700 (Cherry Trail) mini-PC

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, the Broadwell cores in the ECS LIVA Core perform way better compared to the Atom cores in other products. Between the Atom-based products, the four physical cores in the x7-Z8700 and the higher core clocks help the Voyo V3 edge out the other products in this benchmark.

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. These results are actually a bit surprising - perhaps, indicative of the fact that physical threads perform better than hyper-threaded resources when it comes to 7-Zip. Note that the Atom x7-Z8700 in the Voyo V3 has four physical cores compared to the 2C/4T configuration of, say, the Core M-5Y10c in the ECS LIVA Core.

TrueCrypt

As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. CPUs supporting the AES-NI instruction for accelerating the encryption and decryption processes have, till now, been the higher end SKUs. However, with Bay Trail, even the lowly Atom series has gained support for AES-NI. This has migrated down to Cherry Trail also. The Atom x7-Z8700 in the Voyo V3 does have AES-NI support. TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of the AES-NI capabilities. The TrueCrypt internal benchmark provides some interesting cryptography-related numbers to ponder. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the Voyo V3 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.

In this real-world benchmark, the situation is not as clear-cut as in the other cases. In general, the LIVA Core is the most effective. However, the Voyo V3 doesn't consistently come in second. It could have a lot to do with the memory sub-system (while most of the PCs we have evaluated before are DDR3L-based, the Voyo V3 has LPDDR3 DRAM).

Dolphin Emulator

Wrapping up our application benchmark numbers is the Dolphin Emulator benchmark mode results. This is again a test of the CPU capabilities, and the results track what we have seen in the previous benchmarks.