Low-Power War: AM1 vs Bay Trail-D

[Alez]

I'd never thought I would do this:

..... so it begins, your journey to the dark side of the force

[Dirk Broer]

I'd never thought I would do this:

..... so it begins, your journey to the dark side of the force

I can always throw the board in the nearest volcano, provided i can find enough hobbits to travel with...I'll be my own Gandalf (grey hair is turning white)

Now for a snappy Star Trek reply, then we've offended three groups of fans

[Alez]

Now for a snappy Star Trek reply, then we've offended three groups of fans

Obviously you've given in to the fact that

The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the one

or simply go full Microsoft / Borg

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

[Dirk Broer]

Now for a snappy Star Trek reply, then we've offended three groups of fans

Obviously you've given in to the fact that

The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the one

or simply go full Microsoft / Borg

"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

Never had only Intel and never will I have have either. There has always been at least one AMD running in my farm -and nowadays there's ARM (and Power PC from my collection!)
If I win the lottery I may buy an Intel Xeon -once I have exhausted my AMD must-haves.

AMD must-haves:
Raven Ridge Ryzen 3 2200G - 1st upgrade to my present Asrock A320M Pro4 Bristol Ridge AM4 system. Bristol Ridge will go to a Asrock A320-iTX bord, replacing another FM1 system
Raven Ridge Ryzen 3 2400G - 2nd upgrade, to be placed in a Asrock AB350M Pro4 -yet another FM1 system in strategic reserve
Pinnacle Ridge Ryzen 5 2600 - 3rd upgrade, to be placed in a Asrock B450M Pro4
etc, all the way up to a 32-core Threadripper 2

[Dirk Broer]

My first RMA mobo: the Asrock J5005-iTX is on its long way back to the manufacturer. The shop has ordered a new one and once it is in they send my old board (plus SATA cables, driver DVD, I/O shield, quick intallation guide and M.2 screw) to Asrock via the importer.

I could not get any video, it did not post. If I pushed the power button, the system fan began to turn -that's all. After a minute or so the fan came to a halt even.
Both VGA and HDMI claimed 'no signal'. Without RAM a continuous series of three long beeps and a short break in between, with RAM (either one or two) a sublime version of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence". Boy am I disturbed....and I am not even the only one
[youtube][/youtube]

[Dirk Broer]

Second mobo, same problems. Turns out that the Kingston HX424S14IBK2/8 HyperX CAS14 DDR4 SODIMM modules are incompatible with the Intel J5005 (both for mobo's and Intel NUCs)....
The computer store is very helpful: when I ordered G.Skill RAM that is compatible in exchange with the KIngston sticks, they offered to test it on the 1st mobo -which they still have in store.
If all works out well with the new RAM I may buy the 1st board again, to test Win 10 against Linux on this platform.
The G.Skill RAM works, Windows 8 is busy with update 87 of 131 (first series of updates). I hope it rolls all the way to Windows 10...but no: One of the updates is rotten. To be continued.

Win10 up and running. System performs markedly superior to the DDR2-fed Pentium dual-core that it replaces. Might be tempted to install BOINC on the system Rumour has it that it is as powerful as a quad-core Intel Q6600. I have visited the store and asked for the 1st board again, as they had tested it with the G.Skill RAM and it worked. 'Out' (read: in strategic reserve) goes a quad-core 100 Watt TDP AMD FM1 system (A8-3850).
Let's compare the J5005 against the A8-3850 and the Q6600:

[Dirk Broer]

I received the DDR4 SoDIMMs (2 sticks for a total of 16 GB) for the other board today and managed to run BOINC just a little later (I played dirty: I connected a Linux Mint 19 disk)
Unbelievable MIPS values, which I will share with you as soon as the Win10 board will have a running BOINC client/manager configuration.
For the time being I will state that a fresh Win10 install and BOINC don't mix. Merely allowing every BOINC *.exe through the firewall is not enough....
I am faced with a manager that has no projects to choose from, no settings to change and an unavailable BOINC log under a fresh Win10.

For the Linux client the big let-down is that, just as with AMD GPUs, the Intel GPU is not recognized in Mint 19 (or any other recent Linux distro that uses the Open Source video drivers)...

[Dirk Broer]

The latest kernel-update for Linux Mint 19 made the Intel IGP in my J5005 recognized by BOINC!
The Win10 J5005 still won't download WUs from any project....

[Hal Bregg]

It's been a while, Dirk, since your last update. Any luck?

[Dirk Broer]

I can state that Linux support for Intel IGPs is dawning -at the level of Linux AMD support, so infuriating low. OpenCL 2.0 support for the beignet driver though.
WU's start, but get postponed. No error messages, but they keep getting postponed.

The Win10 J5005 still will not download from any project -in fact I had the biggest of problems getting the projects to show up in the BOINC manager at all.

[Dirk Broer]

We can safely say that the days of both AM1 and Bay Trail-D are left behind us. Nowadays it is Goldmont Plus/Gemini Lake as far Intel is concerned and they have a new iron in the fire: the Pentium J5040. AMD meanwhile..... keeps awfully quiet.
What can the J5040 do? Everyting that the J5005 could, but faster. The J5040 has a base frequency of 2000MHz (J5005 1500MHz), and a turbo speed of 3200MHz on one core, and 2800MHz on all (J5005 2800MHz on one core, and 2700MHz on all). Quiet surprisingly, the number of Execution Units (EUs) of the Intel UHD Graphics 605 IGP has been lowered to 12 (J5005 had 18).

What could AMD offer to e.g. Asrock, the total and utter kings of iTX onboard boards? They can counter the Onboard Celeron offerings with their AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G and/or R1606G (both having a 15 Watt TDP and Vega 3 graphics -the same as the desktop Athlons. Both are dual-cores with hyper-threading, so offering a total of 4 threads (something only the deluxe Celerons can), but they also have 3rd level cache and support much more instructions than the Goldmont Plus generation. Codec-wise h264 Decode/Encode; JPEG Decode/Encode; h265 8bit Decode/Encode; h265 10bit Decode/Encode; VP8 Decode/Encode; VP9 Decode/Encode; VC-1 Decode; AVC Decode, so a huge improvement to the AM1 platform -which had none of these goodies, making it a bad choice for a multi-media center.
The new Intel Pentium J5040 could face another Ryzen however: the Ryzen V1605B. This has a same base frequency as the J5040, but a turbo of 3600MHz. The TDP is 15 Watt and the graphics are Vega 8 -the same as the Ryzen 5 2200G and 3200G. It has four cores with hyper-threading and Codec-wise it is the same as the R-series, and it also has that 3rd level cache.

[jockmacmad2]

We can safely say that the days of both AM1 and Bay Trail-D are left behind us. Nowadays it is Goldmont Plus/Gemini Lake as far Intel is concerned and they have a new iron in the fire: the Pentium J5040. AMD meanwhile..... keeps awfully quiet.
What can the J5040 do? Everyting that the J5005 could, but faster. The J5040 has a base frequency of 2000MHz (J5005 1500MHz), and a turbo speed of 3200MHz on one core, and 2800MHz on all (J5005 2800MHz on one core, and 2700MHz on all). Quiet surprisingly, the number of Execution Units (EUs) of the Intel UHD Graphics 605 IGP has been lowered to 12 (J5005 had 18).

What could AMD offer to e.g. Asrock, the total and utter kings of iTX onboard boards? They can counter the Onboard Celeron offerings with their AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G and/or R1606G (both having a 15 Watt TDP and Vega 3 graphics -the same as the desktop Athlons. Both are dual-cores with hyper-threading, so offering a total of 4 threads (something only the deluxe Celerons can), but they also have 3rd level cache and support much more instructions than the Goldmont Plus generation. Codec-wise h264 Decode/Encode; JPEG Decode/Encode; h265 8bit Decode/Encode; h265 10bit Decode/Encode; VP8 Decode/Encode; VP9 Decode/Encode; VC-1 Decode; AVC Decode, so a huge improvement to the AM1 platform -which had none of these goodies, making it a bad choice for a multi-media center.
The new Intel Pentium J5040 could face another Ryzen however: the Ryzen V1605B. This has a same base frequency as the J5040, but a turbo of 3600MHz. The TDP is 15 Watt and the graphics are Vega 8 -the same as the Ryzen 5 2200G and 3200G. It has four cores with hyper-threading and Codec-wise it is the same as the R-series, and it also that 3rd level cache.

Also there are the new AMD Renoir 15W Parts incoming such as the RENOIR Ryzen 9 B12 15W FP6 and RENOIR NB RYZEN 9 PRO B12B 15W FP6 (still with their pre-release catchy names). Notebook chips so not from the embedded range but still a TDP of 15W.

[Dirk Broer]

Intel-wise there's a new king in low-powerland, with a 'fancy' name, too.
No numbers (e.g 80486DX4-133) or names (e.g. 'Pentium', 'Celeron', or 'Core'), the Intel Marketing department has completely outdone itself and has come up with the name 'Processor'.

Commercially the first offered to us is de Processor N100, let's cut the crap and compare them honestly:
CPU-Z (click to make bigger)

Never mind CPU-Z here on the N100, it's still new.

HWINFO64 (click to make bigger)


So: it runs even cheaper (6 Watt as compared to 10 Watt TDP), supports more (important) instructions, has a higher turbo speed and has a L3 cache.
I say Intel has a winner here. Codec-wise it offers also more than the J5005 and/or J5040, so replace those in your HTPC, moviebox or whatever.

ASRock offers the N100 in both iTX and MicroATX, ASUS also has a N100 board in the pipeline.
Keep your eyes out for N200 and/or (eight-core) N300 boards too though...Funny: the N305 seems to be worthy to carry the name 'Core i3'
Gigabyte GB-BNi3-N305 Brix Barebone

[Dirk Broer]

Today I finally ordered a new ASRock N100DC-ITX to replace my aging ASRock J5005-ITX.

I had tested/debugged why the J5005 and other CPUs of its generation came back with unknown errors in SRBase and found out they all missed the support for an instruction (FMA3) that was in the (new) SRBase code. Though Rebirther from SRBase claimed either bad RAM or overheating as the cause for the errors, I suspect the lack of support for the FMA3 instruction was causing the overheating problems, especially when he pointed me to earlier error reports of his new application where FMA3 was clearly mentioned as requisite for the Gerbicz check -which is where the Gemini Lake CPUs went south.

The missing FMA3, together with the inability to get the Intel IGP to crunch anything other than the now defunct Collatz, made me decide to do what I advised others earlier: Change your low-power Intel Pentium onboard-boards (Braswell, Apollo Lake or Gemini Lake) to the generation of Intel N100 Processor boards.

After I ordered I fell into the famous "Cognitive Dissonance Trap": I tried to justify my acquisition by looking at the Asrock site to check if there was an AMD board that had likewise specs. For years Asrock -total and utter kings of low-power x86 iTX boards- had nothing better to offer than A4-5000 based boards, but not today of course. I found out that they just announced a new FP6TM-ITX onboard range of boards to be powered by Ryzen Mobile 4000U, 5000U or 7000U CPUs. The boards are all Socket FP6, so new that I couldn't find them at resellers yet. But keep an eye out for them, they run cheaper than the AM1 platform (TDP -for what's it worth- as low as 15 watt compared to 25 Watt for AM1, so comparable to the A4-5000), but still consume much more power than N100. As their performance and their specs offer both more you can actually better compare them with the 15 Watt TDP 8-core Intel N305 boards, where the better AMD Barcelo-R offerings have the advantage of hyperthreading -16 threads at 15 Watt TDP sure isn't bad...