Intel Atlas Canyon (NUC11ATKPE) and GEEKOM MiniAir 11 UCFF PCs Review: Desktop Jasper Lake Impresses

System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23

We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results. It must be noted that this is specifically an academic test for CPU prowess. No consumer should expect to use these low-power systems for serious rendering tasks.

The numbers bring out the Jasper Lake improvements over Gemini Lake perfectly. Between the Jasper Lake systems, we see ordering based on PL1 / PL2 levels - the Atlas Canyon NUC comes out on top, followed by the MiniAir 11.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Software transcoding rates again see the same behavior as what was observed for 3D rendering - Jasper Lake performs way better than Gemini Lake at similar power levels, but passively-cooled systems do not possess sufficient prowess to match actively-cooled ones for this workload irrespective of SoC generation.

The integrated GPUs are similar in both Gemini Lake and Jasper Lake - therefore, the QuickSync transcode rates (tied to the GPU clocks) scale with the GPU frequency and power budget. Atlast Canyon has the highest power budget, followed by the MiniAir 11 / June Canyon. However, the June Canyon's GPU runs at a base of 200 MHz, compared to the 450 MHz of the MiniAir 11. These dictate the relative ordering of the QuickSync transcode rates in the above graphs.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

The updated microarchitecture of the Tremont cores enable the actively cooled Jasper Lake systems to get past the June Canyon NUC. Between the Atlas Canyon and the MiniAir 11, the ordering is left to the PL1 / PL2 settings and higher boost clocks for the Pentium Silver N6005 in the former.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.

From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

While the artificial JetStream and Speedometer benchmark numbers are along expected lines - the actively-cooled Jasper Lake systems on top, with the MiniAir 11 coming in second due to the lower power budget and clocks. In the real-world WebXPRT4 workload, the JSLM-MINI gets a slight edge despite its passively-cooled nature. With a higher boost clock (3.3 GHz capable of getting reached for short durations), this workload sees it performing better than the MiniAir 11's Celeron N5095 with its 2.9 GHz boost.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a fresh load every second time the software is run.

As it turns out, GIMP does optimizations for every CPU thread in the system, which requires that higher thread-count processors take a lot longer to run. So the test runs quick on systems with fewer threads, however fast cores are also needed. All the systems being considered today are 4C/4T in nature, so it is a measure of clock speeds and power budget, with the disk subsystem playing a small role. The Atlas Canyon NUC and the ECS JSLM-MINI takes up the top spots. The CI331 nano and the MiniAir 11 are fairly close together, with the disk subsystem (better SATA SSD in the CI331 nano) giving it a slight edge. The Gemini Lake cores are well behind Jasper Lake for the disk subsystem to not matter in the relative ordering of the June Canyon NUC.