Logic Supply LGX AG150 Fanless System Review: Cedar Trail or Cedar Trial?
by Dustin Sklavos on May 28, 2012 11:30 PM EST- Posted in
- kiosk
- Systems
- Atom
- Cedar Trail
Conclusion: A Good Product Held Back By Bad Drivers
It's reasonable to suggest that the Logic Supply LGX AG150, given the tasks it was designed to handle, is a successful product. It's designed to draw little power, run quiet and cool, and be as inexpensive to mass produce and sell as possible. While that price tag looks a little bit rough, Logic Supply appears to be willing to offer discounts on orders of multiples, so it's not a done deal. Commercial and industrial applications that just need a low-power x86 box with serial and network connectivity are probably going to find themselves very happy with the LGX AG150.
Where things start to fall apart is the driver situation with Intel's GMA 3650. This single issue is holding back Cedarview from even really reaching basic user experience parity with its predecessor. We're more than four months out from the last driver release from Intel for the GMA 3650, a driver release that doesn't even work anywhere near as well as it should. There's also only one driver for the GMA 3650, and that's for Windows 7 32-bit. This is the kind of box that Linux users should be able to get excited about, but Linux driver support is completely absent. It's at Intel's peril that they ignore that market, because while Joe Average consumers are largely disinterested in Linux, the kinds of users that would be looking at the LGX AG150 may not be.
Ultimately, the Cedar Trail Atom seems to have been unceremoniously dumped on the market while Intel focused the lion's share of their attention on getting Medfield ready to go in smartphones. This isn't a difficult mentality to understand; the smartphone market continues to grow while netbooks and nettops are gradually being eaten away by encroaching competition. What's more, for Windows drivers it's easy to see why Intel might be spending more effort on HD 4000 than GMA 3650. I'm honestly more offended by the fact that a broken product was released to the market, and that it's beginning to seem like Intel is deliberately limiting Atom's performance by refusing to make any changes to the core architecture.
Yes, Atom is slated to go down to 22nm next year and finally get a real update to the CPU architecture; will it be enough for Windows products? Heck, CULV on 22nm with some minor tweaks seems like a no-brainer compared to a rehash of Atom, but CULV even at 22nm wouldn't be fit for smartphone use. And that's the crux of the issue: originally, Atom wasn't integrated enough and small enough to actually make it into retail smartphones; now with Medfield it is, but at the same time that sort of design just isn't fast enough for Windows products.
Where does that leave Cedar Trail? Vendors can only produce kit based on the hardware that's available. The N2600 and N2800 processors are faster on the CPU side than their predecessors thanks to higher clock speeds, and they cost half as much per chip. At sub-768p resolutions it seems like they're not that bad. The problem is that we're at a point where it's not unreasonable to ask for basic functionality at 1080p in Windows 7 from an x86 product, and Intel has left vendors in a tight spot. Do you spend twice as much per chip for last generation kit, or do you release a product with problematic hardware?
If Intel can get the driver situation straightened out with GMA 3650, and I mean straightened out in a major way, then the Logic Supply LGX AG150 (and pretty much all Cedarview-based products) will benefit tremendously. As things stand the LGX AG150 is still a potentially excellent product for its niche uses, but you'll need to know what you're getting into beforehand.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
This is an industrial kiosk-style nettop, so it's not really intended for mainstream use. We were mostly interested in it to see how it would perform and handle Windows in practice, and it's been a disappointment for Dustin.I've got an ASUS 1025C netbook that's a bit better, but while local H.264 content seems to play back well enough, even at 1080p, the CPU is still a dog. MPC-HC can play a 1080p video fine...until you start trying to use the UI for something, at which point it becomes choppy. Internet video on the other hand is pretty much out: HD Netflix completely fails to keep A/V sync; Hulu is okay at SD resolutions, but the UI is still slow when used; and YouTube is pretty much dropping a few frames at 720p and dropping a lot of frames at 1080p, leaving only 480p or lower as "working properly".
Metaluna - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
For that I would take a look at Supermicro's Atom D525-based server board. Dual NICs and IPMI for around $220, IIRC. That's still kind of pricey, but coming in under $678 isn't too tough :). You do give up the nice form factor, but you can probably get close with some of the smaller mITX cases.rs2 - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
I agree 100%. I put together a similar Atom build (4 GB RAM, SSD, fanless) over a year ago for less than half of the "price as configured". Granted my case wasn't as small and fancy looking, but even allowing for that Logic Supply is charging a ridiculous markup, possibly approaching 100% of the actual build cost.A 20% markup would be more reasonable, and would see these devices selling in the $275 to $400 range. At that price point I might consider one. Otherwise forget it, it's more cost effective to just build a comparable machine myself.
name99 - Saturday, June 2, 2012 - link
It's worth pointing out that a Mac mini ($599 for low-end model) is also 13W idle power.Of course it uses more when it's actually working, but it also does more.
If your usage model has the machine mostly idle, it's probably competitive.
I'm not saying this as a "rah rah Apple" comment --- add in the cost of Windows, and the fact that Windows probably won't do as good a job conserving power, and you're not that competitive anymore.
My point was, rather, that this is just not that impressive. Crappy, supposedly low-power CPU, and industrial box vs computer with working graphics at much the same price and (for at least some usage models) much the same power usage.
I mean seriously --- as others have said --- ridiculously overpriced.
Alyx - Thursday, June 7, 2012 - link
I also dropped in here to see if this could be an upgrade to our current firewall. I think most of these things end up super expensive for some reason, but for their target market the price isn't too high really because its competing with desktops rather than netbooks.Sadly without multi-nic this unit isn't much use in pfsense. We have a number of these little guys and they are pretty rock solid and the 7 nics is rare for fan-less units like this (our company has multiple secured LANs).
http://store.netgate.com/Netgate-FW-7535-1U-P1695C...
Impulses - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
Intel entered the netbook market just to avoid ceding it to AMD/VIA, but they never wanted it to thrive. The whole ultrabook initiative was a way of driving costumers to spend more on the average system (admittedly for improved build quality at times). Atom cannibalized Intel's bottom offerings and they'd happily let it linger even longer if they could. They've clearly left a hole others should be able to exploit... Now, where's Trinity?JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
Right now? Trinity A10 is in $700+ laptops is all. I'm not sure if there's anything preventing someone from using mobile Trinity in a desktop/nettop, but I suspect it will be a couple months before we see anything.zeo - Wednesday, May 30, 2012 - link
Intel did not enter the market to avoid ceding anything to AMD or VIA. Besides, which only VIA was ever anywhere near doing so at the time.AMD didn't have anything to compete in that range until they came out with the Fusion series in the beginning of 2011, well after the netbook market had been established.
Netbooks were just a inevitable result of the desire for Mini-Laptops that goes back over thirty years now. While the OLPC project is primarily credited for accelerating this process and applying the actual pressure on Intel. Thus why Intel already had the ATOM ready for production when the netbook market established itself, but it wasn't their first try at making lower cost and more energy efficient processors.
The very first netbook in fact was released with a Intel Celeron M 353 ULV processor.
You are right that Intel didn't want the netbook market to spread, but it was because of the low profit margins of the netbook market and they accomplished that by setting restrictions and guidelines on netbook design. Though in large part many of those policies helped lower the cost of netbooks and made them even more affordable over time.
However, they relaxed those limitations over the years and Cedar Trail is actually the last of the old 5 year product cycle of the ATOM. So starting with the 22nm Silvermont update the ATOM will go on the same 2 year product cycle as the Intel Core i-Series.
Intel is even on record stating they will start developing the ATOM at faster than Moore's Law for at least the next two years to catch it up. Since Intel wants to seriously get into the mobile market and the ATOM is their best bet at doing so.
While they may have waited too long because ARM has finally reached the point that they can offer solutions to rival the ATOM and so Intel faces challenges in both making its way into the Mobile market and holding on to the low end PC market as well.
For AMD the focus is mainly on graphical performance, so that's where they shine in comparison to Intel's offerings, and they're sticking mainly to the traditional PC market. However, the rate of progress seems more or less lock step with Intel's and we shouldn't expect too much from either until next years updates.
Like for example AMD's Tamesh will probably be their first offering that can go fan-less and compete in the tablet market but it won't be out till next year.
While Trinity is basically just a update to Llano and more intended to compete with Intel's mid range offerings but should provide a alternative for Intel's Ultrabooks.
Mugur - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
... afterall. Judging by the 2 serial ports. For a pfSense router a second NIC would have been nice.No home use for this one.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 29, 2012 - link
Um, which part of the "industrial kiosk" target market did you not get? Such stations might very well need two COM ports. Granted, there are plenty of other markets that would not need this configuration (like pfSense routers, home users, etc.), but it's designed for a very specific niche. Now, is Cedar Trail a good fit for that niche -- better than say AMD's Brazos/Ontario? I guess Cedar Trail is lower power at 6.5W TDP, and it's totally fanless, but wow I have a hard time believing an extra 10W would matter that much for a kiosk location with a probably 50W display and various other lights and such that use another 100W+.