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 ESTMiscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks
Networking and storage are aspects that may be of vital importance in specific PC use-cases. The Intel NUC11ATKPE (Atlas Canyon) and the GEEKOM MiniAir 11 both come with a single LAN port backed by the Realtek RTL8111/8168 combination. The WLAN solution is a bit more interesting. While the NUC11ATKPE uses the more recent Wireless-AC 9462, the MiniAir 11 uses the Wireless-AC 7265. The former is a 1x1 solution with maximum theoretical rate of 433 Mbps, while the latter is a 2x2 solution (867 Mbps). However, the 9462 includes dynamic antenna diversity support, while the 7265 doesn't. So, in congested wireless network areas, the NUC11ATKPE may perform better, but the MiniAir 11 may win out in raw throughput terms. On the Bluetooth front, the 7265 supports BT 4.2, while the 9462 supports BT 5.1. BT 5.1 has an increased data rate of 2 Mbps (compared to 1 Mbps of BT 4.2), and comes with four times the range. BT 5.1 also has improvements in multi-client connectivity and energy efficiency over BT 4.2. On the wireless front, both systems have their pros and cons. That said, it is surprising that Intel didn't go in for a Wireless-AX card, given that Jasper Lake integrates a MAC for the same.
On the storage side, both systems include a M.2 2280 port capable of supporting both SATA and NVMe SSDs (the latter with a Gen 3.0 x2 electrical connection). While the GEEKOM MiniAir 11 came pre-configured with a SATA SSD, we opted for a NVMe SSD while configuring the Atlas Canyon NUC. From a benchmarking perspective, we provide results from the WPCstorage test of SPECworkstation 3.1. This benchmark replays access traces from various programs used in different verticals and compares the score against the one obtained with a 2017 SanDisk 512GB SATA SSD in the SPECworkstation 3.1 reference system.
| SPECworkstation 3.1.0 - WPCstorage SPEC Ratio Scores | |||
The graphs above present results for different verticals, as grouped by SPECworkstation 3.1. The storage workload consists of 60 subtests. Access traces from CFD solvers and programs such as Catia, Creo, and Soidworks come under 'Product Development'. Storage access traces from the NAMD and LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator are under the 'Life Sciences' category. 'General Operations' includes access traces from 7-Zip and Mozilla programs. The 'Energy' category replays traces from the energy-02 SPECviewperf workload. The 'Media and Entertainment' vertical includes Handbrake, Maya, and 3dsmax. From the viewpoint of the target market for the NUC11ATKPE and the GEEKOM MiniAir 11, the 'General Operations' and 'Media and Entertainment' workloads are most relevant. Given that the comparison is between both SATA and NVMe SSDs in the systems, the relative numbers for most workloads are not surprising. The SATA SSD used in the GEEKOM MiniAir 11 uses a DRAM-less controller - hence it is no surprise that it performs worse than the other SATA SSD-equipped system (ZOTAC ZBOX CI331 nano, using the SK hynix Gold S31) in the benchmarks. For 'General Operations' and 'Media and Entertainment', the SK hynix Gold P31 in the NUC11ATKPE and the Crucial P5 in the ECS JSLM-MINI trade blows with each other. When all workloads are considered, the Crucial P5 gets a slight edge.
Closing Thoughts
At the end of our review process for the Intel NUC11ATKPE (Atlas Canyon) and the GEEKOM MiniAir 11, we have insights into a couple of different aspects. On one hand, we have a clear idea of the advancements delivered over Gemini Lake and the price paid for it - a significant uplift in performance for a moderate increase in energy consumption. On the other hand, we also found vendors creating differentiated products at varying price points by taking advantage of the Jasper Lake platform's features.
There was a significant delay in the market introduction of Jasper Lake / Tremont, thanks to the 10nm manufacturing issues and the need to prioritize high-margin products in that node. Despite the delay, the slew of microarchitectural improvements has managed to deliver the promised improvements in CPU-centric workloads. However, the GPU is a completely different story. The improvements are only in EU count and clock speeds, and that gives us barely anything major to celebrate. In fact, some of the Jasper Lake SKUs (like the Celeron N5095 in the MiniAir 11) have a lower EU count sompared to some of the Gemini Lake SKUs. Thankfully for Intel, AMD never really got to this low-cost sub-$200 market segment with credible offerings. With recent Core series processors including the efficiency cores, it is highly likely that we will see a much faster update cadence from Intel in this area, and that is good news for the market. Our hope is that the successor to Jasper Lake will come with a vastly improved integrated GPU.
Coming back to the systems themselves - the Intel NUC11ATKPE is the flagship Jasper Lake NUC, and it has managed to bring out the advancements enabled by the Tremont microarchitecture well. By configuring the processor with PL1 and PL2 values well beyond the advertised TDP, the system manages to deliver unparalleled performance in its class - evidenced by all the benchmark numbers presented in this review. We would have liked Intel to adopt a mix of I/O ports (a 2022 consumer-focused NUC without a single Type-C port is strange to see), and more widespread availability of the NUC in the market with pricing in the sub-$200 range. Other than these two aspects, Intel has really hit it out of the park with the NUC11ATKPE when compared with the flagship Gemini Lake NUC.
The GEEKOM MiniAir 11 is hobbled by a few strange choices - the Celeron N5095 has a particularly weak integrated GPU, with just 16EUs. It has a rated TDP of 15W, but GEEKOM has configured it with a PL1 of 10W. Only one memory slot is occupied. These two aspects contribute to GEEKOM leaving out some performance on the table. While the memory issue can be resolved by the end customer, GEEKOM's team will need to look into the power limits and provide an updated BIOS for the platform to deliver its full potential. Yet another aspect of concern is that the DRAM and SSD are both sourced from Tier-3 manufacturers (thankfully, GEEKOM does have a 1-year warranty). The mini-DP to HDMI adapter cable supplied with the unit can claim to be HDMI 2.0, but it only supports YCbCr 4:2:0 for 4Kp60 (supported bandwidth is probably less than 10Gbps). Consumers are better off using a direct mini-DP to DP monitor, or use some other adapter if proper dual 4Kp60 is needed over HDMI. These cons are somewhat offset by a few factors. The MiniAir 11 is extremely quiet compared to the NUC11ATKPE. It is also very energy-efficient, as shown in the SYSmark 25 workloads. It has a comparatively wider variety of I/O ports - multiple Type-C, and even a SD card reader on the side panel. Most importantly, the system is widely available - on Amazon for $245 and directly on GEEKOM's site for $219. At these price points, the MiniAir 11 offers a compelling and attractive option, provided the user is aware of the limitations of the Celeron N5095.
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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
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NUC11ATKPE: 716
Ryzen 3 5300G: 1338
Ryzen 5 5600G: 1434
i3-12300: 1705
CineBench R23: Mulitthreaded
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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.