5W idle green computer 1Ghz x86 CPU

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electrodacus
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5W idle green computer 1Ghz x86 CPU

Post by electrodacus » Mon May 31, 2010 11:29 am

I finally found a low power x86 computer. I know I can have a ARM Beagle Board or similar with 2W power consumption but I prefer to stay with x86 CPU.
I just receive today a Wyse C30LE thin client that I will use as a normal PC with any Linux OS.
This is the same as C00LE , C50LE or C90LE the difference is just Flash size and OS. The price is about 300$ US and include a PS2 keyboard and optical mouse AC adapter and DVI to VGA converter.

Spec:
VIA C7-M ULV 1GHz (3.5W TDP)
VIA VX855 integrated VIA Chrome9 HCM DX9 3D video (2.3W TDP) also support 1080p HW decode of H.264
VT6122 Gigabyte LAN
DVI-I (support dual monitor)
4x USB 2.0
44pin IDE (included 128MB flash with win CE 6.0 but will be deleted)
original 512Mb ram upgraded to 1GB max is 2GB.
Detailed Spec
BIOS password was Fireport.

System Power consumption measured at 12VDC input is 4.7W idle and max 7.8W CPU stress. This is way better than my mini ITX board with mobile atom N270 and 945GSE that uses 13.8W idle and about 17W load. Atom board soon to be on sale if you need contact me. Just need to do some benchmark to compare the Atom with C7-M before.
Now the performance is not important to me but the Atom N270 1.6Ghz is much faster probably 2x or more on some testes.

I only did one Linux test using hardinfo CPU Fibonacci and this is single thread application on multi-thread Atom will be better than this.
Lower is better results in seconds.

C7-M ULV 1GHz _____ 14 sec.
Atom N270 1.6Ghz ___ 9 sec
Q8400 2Ghz ________ 3.8 sec


PassMark Performance test 7.0

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ZOOM see also detail result LINK

You can see here that C7-M 1GHz ULV CPU score is 206 comparing this with the Atom N270 1.6GHz that usually scores about 300 you will say that clock for clock the C7-M and Atom are similar but is not true since Atom N270 have the advantage of HT and is faster at the same clock then C7-M so the PassMark is not a good benchmark see CrystalMark that is much closer to realty.


CrystalMark

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The above one is for C7-M 1Ghz + VX855 see also detailed results LINK

And for comparison you can see this next one
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The above is for comparison and is from an Atom N270 1.6Ghz + 945GSE

CPU: As you can see the C7-M CPU is slow as expected since it has no HT and runs at 1Ghz compared to Atom N270 that has HT and runs at 1.6Ghz
MEM: Also the memory is quite slow on the VX855 + C7-M compared to Atom N270 + 945GSE is strange that for VX855 the memory read is about 300MB/s and write is double at 600MB/s I do not relay understand why.
GPU: Here the VX855 is superior to 945GSE the performance increase is not that much over the 945GSE but the VX855 TDP is only 2.3W compare to 6W TDP on the 945GSE (There is also the US15W from Intel with 2.3W but the graphic performance is about 3x lower than VX855) Also the VX855 have 1080p HD video acceleration that is missing on the 945GSE.
I tested in windows XP the video acceleration with the MPC Home Cinema that uses the DXVA and it works great for h.264 1080p videos with only 15 to 25% CPU utilization.


If you want to use DOS (FreeDOS or MS-DOS) then VIA is much better.

See DOS (DIAG Version V4.61) benchmark result:
Atom N270 1.6Ghz ? not sure if the CPU is working at 800Mhz or 1600Mhz in DOS mode.
VIA C7-M ULV 1Ghz


I open the box and did some photos:

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Last edited by electrodacus on Wed Jun 16, 2010 1:04 pm, edited 8 times in total.

psiu
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Post by psiu » Mon May 31, 2010 12:58 pm

Nice. I had a chance to grab 3 of the wyse WinCE models with the AMD Geode processors for free but passed on them. Sounded like too much of a hassle and I have enough stuff around the house I don't use :P

Glad someone could put one of these type of things to use.

maalitehdas
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Post by maalitehdas » Mon May 31, 2010 1:52 pm

Great numbers for power consuption! How's the performance, could you run some tests?

electrodacus
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Post by electrodacus » Mon May 31, 2010 2:51 pm

psiu wrote:Nice. I had a chance to grab 3 of the wyse WinCE models with the AMD Geode processors for free but passed on them. Sounded like too much of a hassle and I have enough stuff around the house I don't use :P
Glad someone could put one of these type of things to use.
Yes this thin clients are computers nothing is missing they have video sound LAN ..... just that they do not have the performance of a full PC. AMD Geode is about the same performance / Mhz as this one just at lower clock Geode is from 266 to 600Mhz

maalitehdas wrote:Great numbers for power consuption! How's the performance, could you run some tests?
Yes power consumption. I can not install windows since I do not have a 2.5" IDE cable and windows will not install on USB drive.
I added some benchmark results on first post.
But the VIA platform is much more efficient since is using only two chip the C7-M ULV CPU that is 3.5W TDP and this is made using 90nm SOI technology so quite old compare to Atom N270 that uses the 45nm and is 2.5W TDP.
The problem is that N270 needs 945GSE with 6W TDP and it also needs the ICH7M that is another 3.3W TDP so total is 2.5+6+3.3 = 11.8 TDP.
VIA only needs the C7-M 1Ghz 3.5W TDP and one chipset VX855 that is 2.3W TDP so total is only 5.8W TDP this is less than half the Intel platform and using older manufacturing technology.
Now the 3D performance of the VX855 is about the same with 945GSE but the VX855 uses a 1080p hardware decoder for H.264 and uses 3x less power than 945GSE not to mention that VX855 includes also the south bridge so even less.
Now is true that Intel also have the Zxxx CPUS that uses the the US15W that is also 2.3W but is harder to find and usually includes some other components that reduce the efficiency of the complete system.

PS: This was posted using Wyse C30LE and Ubuntu 8.04 :)

electrodacus
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Post by electrodacus » Thu Jun 03, 2010 2:13 pm

The Atom board is for sale now on SPCR for 89$ see Link SOLD

electrodacus
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Post by electrodacus » Wed Jun 16, 2010 12:57 pm

I added more benchmarks on first post.
One strange observation on CrystalMark is that with the VX855 + C7-M on memory test I get 600MB/s write and only 300MB/s read. I do not relay understand why.

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