Beelink GTR7 mini-PC Review: A Complete AMD Phoenix Package at 65W

System Performance: Multi-Tasking

One of the key drivers of advancements in computing systems is multi-tasking. On mobile devices, this is quite lightweight - cases such as background email checks while the user is playing a mobile game are quite common. Towards optimizing user experience in those types of scenarios, mobile SoC manufacturers started integrating heterogenous CPU cores - some with high performance for demanding workloads, while others were frugal in terms of both power consumption / die area and performance. This trend is now slowly making its way into the desktop PC space.

Multi-tasking in typical PC usage is much more demanding compared to phones and tablets. Desktop OSes allow users to launch and utilize a large number of demanding programs simultaneously. Responsiveness is dictated largely by the OS scheduler allowing different tasks to move to the background. The processor is required to work closely with the OS thread scheduler to optimize performance in these cases. Keeping these aspects in mind, the evaluation of multi-tasking performance is an interesting subject to tackle.

We have augmented our systems benchmarking suite to quantitatively analyze the multi-tasking performance of various platforms. The evaluation involves triggering a ffmpeg transcoding task to transform 1716 3840x1714 frames encoded as a 24fps AVC video (Blender Project's 'Tears of Steel' 4K version) into a 1080p HEVC version in a loop. The transcoding rate is monitored continuously. One complete transcoding pass is allowed to complete before starting the first multi-tasking workload - the PCMark 10 Extended bench suite. A comparative view of the PCMark 10 scores for various scenarios is presented in the graphs below. Also available for concurrent viewing are scores in the normal case where the benchmark was processed without any concurrent load, and a graph presenting the loss in performance.

Configuring the GTR7's Phoenix SoC at 65W gives it plenty of headroom to tackle multiple concurrent demanding workloads triggered by mainstream users (of the type benchmarked by PCMark 10). The GTR7 was already having leading performance in the absence of concurrent loading. Activation of such loads reduces the raw score, but the performance loss is less than the competition, and the GTR7 continues to remain on top.

Following the completion of the PCMark 10 benchmark, a short delay is introduced prior to the processing of Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 on MS Edge. Similar to the PCMark 10 results presentation, the graph below show the scores recorded with the transcoding load active. Available for comparison are the dedicated CPU power scores and a measure of the performance loss.

The observations made for the overall PCMark 10 scores continue to hold for WebXPRT 4 also. The GTR7 has the least performance loss, and that allows it to leapfrog the RPL-P systems in performance.

The final workload tested as part of the multitasking evaluation routine is CINEBENCH R23.

Intensive background tasks keep the efficiency cores busy, and take up some of the power budget. As a result, while the RPL-P systems came out on top in the absence of the background loads in single-threaded mode, the AMD-based systems manages to outwit them in raw scores after the introduction of the load. Multi-threaded performance continues to be a strongpoint of the GTR7, with the system coming out on top irrespective of the concurrent loading.

After the completion of all the workloads, we let the transcoding routine run to completion. The monitored transcoding rate throughout the above evaluation routine (in terms of frames per second) is graphed below.

The transcoding rate during different segments is also recorded below.

The comparison is against RPL-P systems such as the NUC BOX-1360P/D5. The GTR7 has a much lower delta in the transcoding rate between different task segments, but the power budget ensures that it doesn't translate to a lower primary workload score as seen in the graphs above. Overall, the RPL-P systems seem to prioritize foreground task better compared to AMD systems, but with the right power budget, the end user may not even notice the aspect.