Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC Bay Trail-T Compute Stick Review
by Ganesh T S on April 22, 2015 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Bay Trail
- HDMI Stick
Performance Metrics
The Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC ships with Windows 8.1 x86 because the driver support for the Atom SKUs belonging to Bay Trail-T is restricted to Windows 8.1 x 32 bit, and Android x 64 bit. This meant that many of the benchmarks in our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs could not be processed on the Compute Stick.
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. Larger-sized systems that beat the Compute Stick in the benchmarks below usually have desktop or notebook-class Bay Trail SoCs. They are clocked higher and also have better thermal solutions.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
In the other Futuremark benchmarks evaluating 3D performance, we find the Compute Stick coming in last - this was to be expected, given that the GPU is clocked low at 311 MHz and also happens to operate mostly in the thermal limits put in place for a tablet platform.
We now move on to look at the 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. The Compute Stick manages to score better than the ECS LIVA in most of these tests thanks to the four cores (compared to the two in the latter).
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. Again, the advantages of a quad-core SoC come through.
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. It is quite unlikely that any usage scenario for the Compute Stick is going to involve extensive encryption capabilities. However, the presence of AES-NI support in the Compute Stick's SoC piqued our interest.
TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of AES-NI. Its 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 Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC and how it would compare with other select PCs. This is a purely CPU feature / clock speed based test. Interestingly, the Atom Z3735F is the only Bay Trail SoC in the graph below to have AES-NI capabilities.
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Refuge - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
There are other reviews, that have not ran into any such problems installing the updates to the stick.So no, that isn't the case.
ganeshts - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Did they even mention whether they tried to do the update ? In any case, after the 'Refresh', I installed 1.3+ GB of updates all over again, and the second time went without a hitch. I think it depends on a lot of factors - eMMC behavior etc. , but, in general, it would be preferable to have plenty of free space on the primary drive for OSes such as Windows.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Great review as always, but the Compute Stick isn't quite enough and it really doesn't have much to do with the CPU, but storage. The 32GB of storage problem has really been the biggest turn off of these kinds of small computing platforms. It'd work fine for most Linux distros, but Windows needs a good 16-32GB more, I think, before the device becomes flexible enough to use for things beyond very basic content consumption. I'd had hopes about Cherry Trail systems sticking around the same price point while offering a generational improvement in storage capacity, but with Intel's pricing, I have doubts that there'll be a sub-$150 device that ships with 2GB of RAM and 64GB solid state storage in the near term.Mr Perfect - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
PPSTCK1A32WFC? Uhm, how much do you want to bet that people start calling it the peepee stick. I wonder if this was the marketing guys having a laugh, or if they honestly didn't think the name was questionable. It should be standard practice to run marketing material past a fifth-grader to see if they laugh(or me, apparently).BMNify - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Intel Compute Stick is the name of the product, looks pretty simple and self-explanatory to me, the detailed product code number is not marketed by anyone.biofishfreak - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Ganesh, do you know/ can you test if you can add this Compute Stick to a Windows domain?ganeshts - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
It is running Win 8.1 with Bing - not Pro or Enterprise - as far as I can see, it is not possible to add this to a Windows domain.Kinemaxx - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
So, the question that runs through my mind in every single one of these types of reviews, yet never seems to be given consideration: How well can these units play back Hi10p encoded h264 video? (either 720p or 1080p) Hi10p can't be GPU accelerated, so can they play video like that back at all, or will it be like watching a slideshow (as was the case on a friend's very early netbook)? I know Kodi is capable of playing back 10-bit video, so since they used Kodi in the test, it should certainly be testable.zeo - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link
Bay Trail is a good step up from the older Netbook ATOMs... 2-3x the performance... Chippy, from UMPCPortal, has a video demonstrating Hi10p playback. X.264 10-bit encoded file on a Bay Trail based Intel NUC... if you want to see how well Bay Trail handles such videos...Basically, Bay Trail's can usually handle Hi10p encoded videos, though, they can struggle a bit with 1080p Hi10P w/ FLAC audio... but it's watchable in most cases, depending on what you're watching and whether anything else is going on that also adds CPU load...
However, the SoC in this PC stick is on the lower end of the scale... So it may struggle a bit more and may require lowering expectations to 720P for smooth playback...
Twingo - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Price seems steep. You can get a tablet like the HP Stream 7 for < 100 dollars. Not sure why this would cost > 50% more when there is no battery or screen to drive up cost. If this were priced in the 70-80 dollar range that would make much more sense.