Intel Atlas Canyon (NUC11ATKPE) and GEEKOM MiniAir 11 UCFF PCs Review: Desktop Jasper Lake Impresses
by Ganesh T S on July 14, 2022 8:00 AM ESTGPU Performance
In moving from Gemini Lake to Jasper Lake, the integrated GPU didn't get as much attention as the CPU did. While retaining the same microarchitecture, the shift to 10nm allowed for integrating more execution units and slight improvements in the maximum clocks. The systems we are looking at today come with different variants of the same GPU microarchitecture:
- Intel June Canyon (Gemini Lake): 18EU @ 750 MHz
- ECS JSLM-MINI (Jasper Lake): 32EU @ 850 MHz
- ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano (Jasper Lake): 24EU @ 850 MHz
- GEEKOM MiniAir 11 (Jasper Lake): 16EU @ 750 MHz
- Intel Atlas Canyon (Jasper Lake): 32EU @ 900 MHz
Based on these specifications alone, we expect the Atlas Canyon NUC to handily best the other systems in GPU performance. The weak GPU in the MiniAir 11 means that it could potentially perform worse than the June Canyon NUC of the previous generation. However, caveats related to power budgets and memory configuration apply. Therefore, the GPU performance has to be evaluated in the context of each workload. We put the systems through some standard 3D workloads to get an idea of what they have to offer for GPU-intensive tasks.
GFXBench
The DirectX 12-based GFXBench tests from Kishonti are cross-platform, and available all the way down to smartphones. As such, they are not very taxing for discrete GPUs and modern integrated GPUs. We processed the offscreen versions of the 'Aztec Ruins' benchmark.
The maximum EU count, coupled with the maximum operating frequency mean that Atlas Canyon NUC comes out on top by a huge margin. On the other hand, the lowest EU count in the MiniAir 11 can't be compensated with the higher power budget - the system comes in at the rear end of the pack.
UL 3DMark
Four different workload sets were processed in 3DMark - Fire Strike, Time Spy, Night Raid, and Wild Life.
3DMark Fire Strike
The Fire Strike benchmark has three workloads. The base version is meant for high-performance gaming PCs. It uses DirectX 11 (feature level 11) to render frames at 1920 x 1080. The Extreme version targets 1440p gaming requirements, while the Ultra version targets 4K gaming system, and renders at 3840 x 2160. The graph below presents the overall score for the Fire Strike Extreme and Fire Strike Ultra benchmark across all the systems that are being compared.
| UL 3DMark - Fire Strike Workloads | |||
The EU count / operating frequency effect strikes here too. With 32EUs, the Atlas Canyon is on top, and with 16EUs, the MiniAir 11 comes in at the very end.
3DMark Time Spy
The Time Spy workload has two levels with different complexities. Both use DirectX 12 (feature level 11). However, the plain version targets high-performance gaming PCs with a 2560 x 1440 render resolution, while the Extreme version renders at 3840 x 2160 resolution. The graphs below present both numbers for all the systems that are being compared in this review.
| UL 3DMark - Time Spy Workloads | |||
Time Spy Performance sees the same EU count / operating frequency configuration play out again. However, Extreme finally sees the ZBOX CI331 nano making an appearance (it was unable to complete the other 3DMark components in our evaluation process) behind the MiniAir 11.
3DMark Wild Life
The Wild Life workload was initially introduced as a cross-platform GPU benchmark in 2020. It renders at a 2560 x 1440 resolution using Vulkan 1.1 APIs on Windows. It is a relatively short-running test, reflective of mobile GPU usage. In mid-2021, UL released the Wild Life Extreme workload that was a more demanding version that renders at 3840 x 2160 and runs for a much longer duration reflective of typical desktop gaming usage.
| UL 3DMark - Wild Life Workloads | |||
-The observations made for Time Spy hold true for the Wild Life workload also.
3DMark Night Raid
The Night Raid workload is a DirectX 12 benchmark test. It is less demanding than Time Spy, and is optimized for integrated graphics. The graph below presents the overall score in this workload for different system configurations.
Finally, we have a 3D workload that scales with power budget instead of EU count. Thanks to the much higher power budget, the GPU can operate with more power at its disposal in the MiniAir 11 compared to other mini-PCs. This allows the MiniAir 11 to perform just about as good as the June Canyon NUC with Gemini Lake (that operates at lower GPU base clock). So, Atlas Canyon and MiniAir 11 make up the top two spots.
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flgt - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
Nice article. I don’t like how so much performance is driven by relatively hidden PL1/PL2 settings. Have regular NUC12’s been released yet?AdrianBc - Friday, July 15, 2022 - link
Intel has developed a "Wall Street Canyon" NUC with Alder Lake P, as a replacement for the NUC 11 Pro with Tiger Lake, and which has about the same interfaces but with a much faster CPU.Photos of working prototypes have been leaked, but the launch of the product has been delayed for unknown causes, maybe component shortages. Nevertheless, I do not believed that it will be canceled, but maybe it will be launched later this year.
A very similar NUC-like barebone is already available from ASRock Industrial, as "NUC BOX-12xxP", e.g. "NUC BOX-1260xP", which, compared to Intel, has dual 2.5G Ethernet instead of single 2.5G Ethernet, and 3 DisplayPort (2 on TB) + 1 HDMI instead of 2 DisplayPort (both on TB) + 2 HDMI.
AdrianBc - Friday, July 15, 2022 - link
Sorry, I have pressed "Submit" without rereading and there are a couple of typos.The names for the ASRockInd alternatives are "NUC BOX-1260P", "NUC BOX-1240P", etc.
mode_13h - Friday, July 15, 2022 - link
OMG. I thought "Wall Street Canyon" NUC was a joke. Still funny, though.Sivar - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
Some means to compare these values vs. a full desktop CPU would be helpful. In isolation, I can see that the Pentium Silver N6005 is much faster than the J5005, but I have no idea if it is 90% the performance of a desktop CPU, or 60%, or 4%, etc.Perhaps a link to a reasonably comparable desktop CPU review.
mode_13h - Friday, July 15, 2022 - link
> Some means to compare these values vs. a full desktop CPU would be helpful.100% agree. We do have a few data points, however. Using data from https://www.anandtech.com/show/17231/the-intel-cor... we can see:
CineBench R23: Single-threaded
-----------------
NUC11ATKPE: 716
Ryzen 3 5300G: 1338
Ryzen 5 5600G: 1434
i3-12300: 1705
CineBench R23: Mulitthreaded
-----------------
NUC11ATKPE: 2521
Ryzen 3 5300G: 6770
Ryzen 5 5600G: 10601
i3-12300: 8598
Obviously, software rendering is not the kind of workload Tremont is optimized for.
Next, there's Handbrake, but the i3-12300 article used version 1.3.2 and this uses 1.5.1. Without at least a benchmark of the same hardware on both versions, we can't know how much variation is introduced by the new software version.
7-zip might have a similar version difference (earlier article references "1900", while this one uses 21.7), and it's not clear if the test cases are even the same.
And that's basically all the overlap I found. That's less than I thought or hoped for. It's disappointing how much the software versions and format of the results changed, such that I can't even tell whether a given test is using the same workload between the articles.
Hresna - Tuesday, July 19, 2022 - link
Funny, I was just thinking this yesterday. It’s widely impractical I know but perhaps a single chart showing the numbers in context of “modern desktop computing” would add to the general consumption-ability for us casual readers.For so many reviews I end up side-channel trying to look up/remember “ok, what’s my firestrike number again?”.
t.s - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
"a 2022 consumer-focused NUC without a single Type-C port is strange to see" LOL. Hello. This is Intel we're talking about, bro.abufrejoval - Thursday, July 14, 2022 - link
Well, you certainly did a much better job than I did with my Atlas Canyon NUC and caught me with quite a few mistakes, too. E.g. I had mis-identified the front panel header hidden under the rubber cap as a USB2 port.I also hadn’t really noticed that PL1/2 had gone to 15/25 in the max performance settings, I guess I was still relying far too much on my Gemini Lake observations.
I’ve never actually observed 25 Watts with HWinfo, the iGPU never goes beyond 5 Watts and the CPU will stay shy of 15 resulting in a 20 Watt total.
For the NUC’s WIFI the most important aspect is that it’s socketed, unlike e.g. on the Tiger Lake NUC11. I had bought a bunch of AX200 cards some time back, because at just €20 they were twice the price of shipping and I replaced the WIFI before I even booted the system.
I got a whole box of below-acceptable WIFI cards, that’s just electronic waste from the factory, because quite a few high-range notebooks also come with such crippling kit.
Likewise, I have another box of RealTek based USB3 2.5 Gbit/s Ethernet adapters, to bring a bit of balance to these systems, which I tend to use with GlusterFS.
I also didn’t have DDR4-2933 SO-DIMMs lying around and was ever so glad the 2x 32GB DDR4-3200 I borrowed from my Tiger Lake NUC11 worked, even if they took quite a bit of time at the initial boot to be configured properly.
DDR4-2400 SO-DIMMS will work just as well and honestly there is very little real difference in performance. The memory bandwidth on Geekbench 4 will change from 16.9/GBs to 17.3GB/s for single core and from 22.2GB/s to 25.6GB/s on multi core. The same DDR4-3200 SO-DIMMs deliver 35.6GB/s single core memory bandwidth with the Tiger Lake’s i7-1165G7 and 39.7GB/s on the multi-core variant, which would almost seem to indicate, that the latest Atom continues to be a single-channel design, like the J5005, N3700 and J1900 predecessors, where the 2nd module never delivered more than a 10% bandwidth increase.
Jasper lake drops to 12.8GB/s with a single module on both the single and the multi core variants of the Geekbench 4 memory bandwidth benchmark and I’m sure the impact on the iGPU would be rather significant, even if I didn’t measure to confirm.
Next I dropped PL1/PL2 to 10/12 Watts (the BIOS won’t allow 10/10) and TAU to 1 second, just to see differentiate properly between the generational improvements of Jasper Lake vs. Goldmont Plus and the additional TDP budget: it barely made a difference on Geekbench 5, whilst HWinfo did confirm that the lower TDP limits were indeed observed.
It takes Prime95 to confirm, that the TDP budget difference has an impact on the clocks, Geekbench is just too light a workload. And in combination with Furmark, you can also nicely observe that the iGPU TDP share is fixed at 5 Watts, while the CPU core have to manage with what’s left at 25 or 15 Watts after TAU.
I do believe the Atlas Canyon NUC11 is a rather good deal for the €200 price, if you can get one. I’ve found a niche dealer here in Germany (minipc.de), that still has dozens in stock but that seems a rare exception. There are still some N6005 based firewall appliances available from China, even fully passive but at closer to €500 before taxes.
Ian started to ruminate on how he’d be able to measure the generational improvements of Grace Mont over Jasper Lake by using Lasso to control CPU core assignments on an Alder Lake base. Too bad he then never got around testing that, because it could have helped to gauge a hypothetical all-E-core chip.
Jasper Lake does rather well against say a Broadwell based Xeon D-1541 at 2.7GHz so it’s easy to see why they are not to keen on seeing these low-end devices compete in the mini-server market. Elkhart Lake Atoms variants which support inline ECC would certainly create an issue, if they sold for a similar price than Jasper Lake (I heavily suspect they are the same silicon). But a SuperMicro mainboard with zero other distinguishing features (e.g. only Gbit Ethernet) is listed at €800, way beyond what I’d want to pay for ECC alone.
mode_13h - Friday, July 15, 2022 - link
> DDR4-2400 SO-DIMMS will work just as well and honestly there is very little real difference in> performance. The memory bandwidth on Geekbench 4 will change from 16.9/GBs to 17.3GB/s
> for single core and from 22.2GB/s to 25.6GB/s on multi core.
> ... the latest Atom continues to be a single-channel design
> Jasper lake drops to 12.8GB/s with a single module on both the single and the multi core
That's a 35% benefit for single-core and a 100% boost for multi-core. Whatever is going on there, I think it's simplistic to say the SoC is simply designed for single-channel.
It's weird that they hampered it, because they're just leaving performance on the table. I wonder if maybe the memory controller is more optimized for LPDDR4 and the regular DDR4 performance is more of an afterthought.
BTW, thanks for your TDP testing, also.