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.
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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.