Jasper Lake Fanless Showdown: ECS LIVA Z3 and ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano UCFF PCs Review
by Ganesh T S on July 8, 2022 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- ZOTAC
- Fanless
- ECS
- Passive Cooling
- UCFF
- Mini-PC
- Jasper Lake
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.
The ZOTAC CI331 nano, with its PL1 limit set to 7W, while the LIVA Z3 / JSLM-MINI have it at 6W. Coupled with the thermal throttling in the LIVA Z3, it is no surprise that the CI331 nano comes out on top in the single-threaded case despite its lower advertised clocks. The JSLM-MINI leaves the Z3 behind due to the thermal throttling issue. With multiple threads in the picture, the actively cooled June Canyon NUC with its higher power budget takes the crown.
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.
The factors influencing the software transcoding rate are power budget and core count. While the latter is the same for all systems (four cores with one thread per core), the power budget for the June Canyon and its active cooling (allowing it to maintain 10W throughout) help it in coming out on top. The ZBOX suffers slightly in this sustained loading test. As we shall see in a later section, the system is not up to the task of sustaining 7W over extended durations.
Hardware-accelerated transcoding rates are a function of GPU clock rates and power budget. The actively-cooled Gemini Lake system with its higher iGPU power budget leads the pack. The close numbers for LIVA Z2 and JSLM-MINI for AVC encoding show that the QuickSync engine itself doesn't have performance improvements in going from Gemini Lake to Jasper Lake. The Z3 and the CI331 nano both appear to be throttled in the HEVC transcoding test.
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.
Power budget matters for the relatively short-running 7-Zip benchmark. Ignoring the actively-cooled June Canyon, we see the 7W PL1 limit of the CI331 nano helping it to lead the pack among the passively-cooled systems.
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.
The microarchitectural improvements in Jasper Lake come to the fore in these benchmarks. Despite the higher power budget and active cooling, the June Canyon NUC with a 10W Gemini Lake processor is left well behind by all the passively-cooled Jasper Lake systems. WebXPRT4, in particular, is long-running and reflective of typical web browser usage. The fact that the fanless systems still come out with better scores despite any thermal throttling reflects well on the improvements in Tremont over Goldmont Plus.
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. The thread count for all processors are the same in the considered systems. Since it boils down to fast cores, the power budget and the ability to sustain it helps. As we shall see in a later section, the JSLM-MINI is the least susceptible to thermal throttling, and that works in its favor.
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mode_13h - Saturday, July 9, 2022 - link
> tldr both benches would have been a wash one way of the other.Huh? If old Skylake is 50% faster, and Jasper Lake is 3.5x as fast as Pi 4 Model B (which seems rather generous), then it wouldn't be "a wash", which is defined as:
13. an action or situation in which the gains and losses are
equal, or closely compensate each other.
(source: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=g... )
or
8: any enterprise in which losses and gains cancel out; "at the
end of the year the accounting department showed that it was
a wash"
(source: http://dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=w... )
Since both comparisons are projected to be substantially lopsided, I think what you meant to call it is a "washout"?
abufrejoval - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
I have a PI4 with 8GB of RAM in a metal case that supports a 2GHz overclock without active cooling: pretty much the best PI you can have these days.I also have an Nvidia Tegra based Jetson Nano with 4GB of RAM.
At 2GHz the PI reaches 272/648 on Geekbench 4, the Tegra has to make do with 206/718 at 1.4GHz. The N6005 Jasper Lake reaches 781/2540 very similar to a Sandy Bridge i7-2600 at 3.8GHz Turbo.
The Jetson Nano actually does reasonably well on my 43" 4k desktop for basic 2D work, because it has a GPU with 128 Maxwell cores. Of course its CPU power is at the level of a Snapdragon 800 mobile phone.
The PI struggles badly at 4k, because the GPU has much less muscle. The slightly faster CPU is hard to notice.
Actually it was when Tom's hardware did a report on a PI compute cluster, that I wanted to retort just how stupid that project was, because you could get a single Jasper Lake Atoms for much less money, that would run rings around that cluster and could in fact simulate it all in software via VMs.
And that's when I found that finally a Jasper Lake NUC was available for purchase at €200 (including VAT) and immediately ordered one of the first and last ever sold here.
And yes, it runs rings around both with roughly 4x the CPU power, 64GB of RAM expandability and quite a reasonable GPU performance on a 4k display.
My favorite usability test is to use the "3D Globe View" on Google Maps under a Chrome based browser on Windows and to then tilt and turn a city landscape there. It's about the most efficient 3D graphics pipeline I've ever seen (puts Flight Simulator to total shame!) and performs quite reasonable on such a Jasper Lake NUC. With Firefox it's much worse on these low power devices, but with a beefy PC you'd never notice.
After quite a bit of tweaking I managed to get it to work on both the PI and the Tegra at 1920x1080 and the Tegra even gave a bit of interactivity thanks to its much stronger GPU. But on the PI that was about one frame a minute.
The PI and Nano are toys and ok for the €100 I spent on each.
A Jasper Lake NUC is quite a reasonable desktop machine and even an interesting micro server for some real workloads.
At €200 (without RAM or storage) the price/performance ratio is very hard to beat, but evidently none of the vendors really want you to know or buy that. I think it's the major reason you never could.
mode_13h - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
> At 2GHz the PI reaches 272/648 on Geekbench 4, the Tegra ... 206/718 at 1.4GHz.Keep in mind that Jetson Nano has ostensibly 2x the memory bandwidth of the Pi v4. That surely helps offset the difference in raw CPU performance, as well as with 4k display performance.
Oh, and if that test was with the machines driving a 4k display, then merely refreshing your monitor will have been using a non-insignificant amount of the Pi's memory bandwidth (about 1 GB/s).
> N6005 Jasper Lake reaches 781/2540
Wow! Dual-channel memory configuration, I presume?
> on the PI that was about one frame a minute.
Uh... that sure sounds like you were using a software rendering path. The Pi's GPU is trash, but that's simply atrocious!
> evidently none of the vendors really want you to know or buy that.
> I think it's the major reason you never could.
I'm reasonably confident it's actually just supply chain-related. Intel has been steering its limited fab capacity towards more profitable models and probably steering its limited supply of Jasper Lakes to chromebooks, where they're probably desperate not to lose market share.
timecop1818 - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
There are Chinese mini PCs withIntel Celeron N5100 that are like 250$ with 16G ram and 256gb sata SSD.
https://www.lazada.com.my/products/walkfish-m6-11t...
there's like 5 different "brands" selling same thing on AliExpress etc. it runs win 10 just fine and is enough for 1080p Minecraft and basic office computing. great deal. most models have Intel 2.5G Ethernet too.
Jorgp2 - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
I just want a Jasper lake motherboard with plenty of sata and a PCI-E slotmode_13h - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
You could get SATA, but not PCIe. According to this, Jasper Lake and Elkhart Lake have only x8 PCIe 3.0 and x2 SATA ports.Most boards are probably going to give you a x4 NVMe slot. Then, they could use a 3rd Party SATA controller to give you 4 more ports. Then, if they compromise on the bandwidth to that SATA controller, you can have a second Ethernet port and then a x1 PCIe slot that just might be open-ended (but probably not), to support a graphics card.
Sorry, but they really kneecapped this platform relative to what it could've been. You might do better with some equivalent Atom-branded CPUs. Atom C-series (Parker Ridge) has 16 integrated SATA ports, x32 PCIe 3.0 lanes, and up to 8 cores. P-series (Snow Ridge) has the same, but up to 24 cores.
* https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
* https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
mode_13h - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Oops, forgot the link for Jasper Lake. For good measure, here's Elkhart Lake, as well.* https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
* https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/produc...
Thala - Friday, July 8, 2022 - link
Interestingly my 3 years old Surface Pro X scores higher than any of the tested devices in Cinebench R23 under x64 emulation!mode_13h - Saturday, July 9, 2022 - link
The Surface Pro X from 2019 has a Microsoft SQ1 SoC, which is basically a Snapdragon 8cx and consists of 4x Kryo 495 Gold @ 3 GHz+ 4x Kryo 495 Silver @ 1.80 GHz (manufactured on TSMC 7 nm). According to wikichip, these are tweaked A76 and A55 cores. So, that seems credible, if not exactly an outcome I'd have presumed.Something to keep in mind is that Jasper Lake is meant cheap chromebooks. Like, sub-$200 cheap, whereas Snapdragon 8cx is a premium part.
nandnandnand - Saturday, July 9, 2022 - link
They wanted it to be thought of as premium, it's more of an expensive joke. Like Lakefield but with no excuses.https://semiaccurate.com/2021/12/01/qualcomm-8cx-g...
https://www.gizchina.com/2022/01/04/qualcomm-blame...
Snapdragon 7c (Gen 1?) should be more comparable in price to Jasper Lake. I think I've seen that as low as $170-200. Also, the Apcsilmic Dot 1 and ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 mini PCs recently launched with the 7c starting at around $219.
If the leaks about Alder Lake-N are true, it will shake things up, if the price is right.