Hacker News Reader

Comment by williadc | Hacker News Reader

The processor in these board is about to celebrate its 4th anniversary, and its performance wasn't world-beating at the time of its release.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/93361/i...

View on HN

I think the fact that it will run mainline amd64 Linux [0] and is dirt cheap will make people overlook that.

Benchmarks are imperfect, but it seems to be in the same ballpark as the Raspberry Pi 4 [1] - slightly worse in single core, slightly better in multicore. So performance wise it's competitive with competing ARM boards (you get what you pay for) but the software experience should be great in comparison with most boards, even in comparison to the RPi 4.

[0]: And Windows. And FreeBSD. Perhaps even OpenBSD http://openbsd-archive.7691.n7.nabble.com/Fwd-Intel-Compute-... .

[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/compare/13701853?baseli...

[2]: Sidenote that the benchmark is skewed because of the AES benchmark. The Raspberry Pi 4 like the Atom has AES hardware acceleration when run in 64 bit mode, but this benchmark is run on 32-bit ARM. This is likely because the official RPi 4 distribution (Raspbian) is also still 32 bit. Software support affects benchmarks too.

RPi4's specific weak spot is heat production. It'll probably severely throttle during the benchmark if that $1 heat sink is missing. So I wonder what's the case in this benchmark? Did the test system have a heatsink or not? Low multicore results suggest not.

Another issue that can skew benchmarks is library optimization situation. On x86, most things are SSE/AVX optimized, but on ARM side NEON optimizations can be slow implementations or even completely missing.

AArch64 ISA has changes that eliminate some false dependency chains (more general purpose registers and NEON register layout changes). This blocks out-of-order engine from making optimal use of CPU resources. When you hit this issue, 64-bit ARM code can run quite a bit faster.

Raspberry Pi's weak spot has always been rather slow memory bandwidth. RPi4 improves this (DDR4 instead of DDR2), but it's still the weakest spot. Just 32-bits wide bus to SDRAM.

I mean yeah, you can split a lot of hairs there. But even so, even if you assume the RPi 4 can be optimized to be 20% faster than the Atom across the board, it's still the same ballpark. In that ballpark mainstream amd64 support is a big advantage.

NEON optimizations can have pretty large effect (up to ~4x), just like SSE. The benchmarks with the largest differences are suspect, especially SGEMM.

Also don't underestimate how much RPi4 throttles under multicore load. Even the cheapest $1 heatsink will make a big difference.

In general I agree, though. It'll still be in the same ballpark.

Well at least it is shipping with 64bit UEFI.

Lots of these cheap Intel chips like Z3740 found in many Wintel tablets only shipped with 32bit UEFI making them un-usable on FreeBSD.

Why is 32bit UEFI unusable on FreeBSD?

People buying these computers aren't looking for performance. They're focused on cost. There are lots of reasons why you might not need something fast.

I'd even add that being slow and constrained is a feature in multiple uses.

A lab desktop cluster doesn't need to be fast, but needs to replicate the environment you want to play with.

Cost plus availability. That is why a small percentage of RPis are now being used in industrial control applications where you still need the board available in 10+ years.

My client recently ordered the remaining stock from a large supplier (several hundred) as the recent design change of the RPi4 unfortunately gets too hot and will require an enclosure/pcb redesign

The BCM2835 was already a few years old when the Raspberry Pi first came out, and it's still part of the Pi Zero.

While this is a Atom x5-Z8300, I run a similar board (Atom x5-Z8350) and since it supports hardware encoding of H.264 video, it's a dream as a super-cheap home media server.

If performance is a concern, you probably don’t want to buy a $39 SBC. It doesn’t need the latest and greatest to be useful.

How is the performance compared to the ARM processors in similar boards (RPI et al.) ?

This is the important question. How well does it compare to the ARM based alternatives?

What about new notebooks on 5700? Yes, 5700 is still sold new to Chinese resellers

A 5700HQ is perfectly fine. That's a 14nm non-Atom part. Compared to a bleeding edge 9980HK, each core is only 25% slower. And you don't need more than four cores here.

More relevantly, a 5700HQ is five to six times as fast as this Atom.

People aren't exactly buying these boards (and boards like it, such as the Raspberry Pi) to fold proteins or something.

Oh, sure. My point's just that a 3-4 year old design isn't a big deal, and if you're concerned about performance it's absolutely not the age to worry about.

You'd want to do that on a GPU anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com