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 - I
The CompuLab fitlet-XA10-LAN was evaluated using our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs. Not all benchmarks were processed on all the machines due to updates in our testing procedures. Therefore, the list of PCs in each graph might not be the same.
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. These scores are heavily influenced by the CPU in the system. It was very surprising to see that the AMD A10 Micro-6700T with unlocked TDP can easily outperform Bay Trail and Braswell-based passively cooled NUCs. In fact, only the much costlier and larger Logic Supply NUCs are able to perform better than the Compulab fitlet-XA10-LAN in the Futuremark benchmarks.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R15
We have moved on from R11.5 to R15 for 3D rendering evaluation. CINEBENCH R15 provides three benchmark modes - OpenGL, single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of select PCs in all three modes provided us the following results.
The results are similar to what one might expect based on the Futuremark benchmarks.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
50 Comments
View All Comments
ganeshts - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
I was a bit surprised too, but, I think the reason is that the ERL might have hardware acceleration for NAT. On the other side, this is a full-fledged PC. It can do a lot more than just routing / I expect consumers might want to run more CPU-intensive network-related tasks in addition to routing duties.freeskier93 - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
EdgeOS is Debian based and supports apt-get so you can install other things on it. Although it did bog down our connection a bit when someone was connected, our ERL ran OpenVPN good enough for occasional use.easp - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Not a big surprise, considering that ERL has hardware acceleration + tailored/optimized firmware. People running OpenWRT are often able to get a 50% boost out of much more modest with a bit of tuning of kernel parameters, so chances are, a little tweaking of the config would get closer to the max.trane - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
A10 Micro 6700T may be the most underrated SoC in history. A couple of years back when it first released it was faster than Bay Trail across the board, and destroyed it for GPU performance. The Discovery tablet had good battery life too - I suspect within an hour or so of Bay Trail. Sadly, it got ambushed by Intel's Bay Trail contra revenues. Is this the first commercial design for it?It's surprising that it's still faster than Intel's latest 14nm Braswell, despite being on 28nm. Though yes, it does use a cTDP up.
I look forward to see dual-core low power Zen APUs in this market.
yannigr2 - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
I was curious reading a review of this for over a year. Well, better late than never.Compulab - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Actually it was Compulab who held back the review. We had to improve the thermal characteristics of the product. Designing the heatsink and new metal panels and coating took a while.I think that the review reflects correctly the capabilities of fitlet, something we could not achieve sooner.
ely105 - Tuesday, June 28, 2016 - link
When you order the fitlet-LAN from amazon, does it have the new/improved black coating?serendip - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
An x86 SOC that runs Linux out of the box? I think I just saw a unicorn. Too bad AMD couldn't push the Mullins chips to tablet makers. I'm stuck with an Atom tablet that will probably never run Linux with full support, thanks to 32-bit UEFI nonsense and closed source drivers.Compulab - Wednesday, April 20, 2016 - link
Actually Compulab (together with Linux Mint) has been offering pre-installed "MintBox" for several years now, including MintBox Mini based on fitlet.See http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/mintbox/
2disbetter - Thursday, April 28, 2016 - link
Ganesh, thanks for writing this up. It was the first bit of exposure I've had with Compulab, and I'm very happy I found out about them. Their Airtop and Fitlab models are both very interesting products. Very very interesting.