Supermicro E102-13R-H Review: A Raptor Lake-P 3.5-inch SBC System for Embedded Applications

System Performance: Application-Specific Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's CrossMark take a holistic view of the system and process a wide range of workloads to arrive at a single score. Some systems are required to excel at specific tasks - so it is often helpful to see how a computer performs in specific scenarios such as rendering, transcoding, JavaScript execution (web browsing), etc. This section presents focused benchmark numbers for specific application scenarios.

3D Rendering - CINEBENCH R23

We use CINEBENCH R23 for 3D rendering evaluation. R23 provides two benchmark modes - single threaded and multi-threaded. Evaluation of different system configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.

The scores in the single-threaded case reflect the sustained PL1 power budget of the processors in different systems. The multi-threaded case sees systems equipped with larger number of high-performance cores and higher power budget scoring well.

Transcoding: Handbrake 1.5.1

Handbrake is one of the most user-friendly open source transcoding front-ends in the market. It allows users to opt for either software-based higher quality processing or hardware-based fast processing in their transcoding jobs. Our new test suite uses the 'Tears of Steel' 4K AVC video as input and transcodes it with a quality setting of 19 to create a 720p AVC stream and a 1080p HEVC stream.

Systems with larger number of high-performance cores and higher power budget tend to perform better in software transcoding scenarios, and we see that getting played out in the FPS numbers in the above two graphs.

QuickSync transcoding rates are a function of the GPU clock rate. The higher the power budget, the faster the GPU can clock (in most cases). This is reflected in the relative ordering of different systems in the above two graphs.

Archiving: 7-Zip 21.7

The 7-Zip benchmark is carried over from our previous test suite with an update to the latest version of the open source compression / decompression software.

The program is able to make good use of multiple cores and the available power budget. Again, we see higher PL1 processors and those with larger number of high-performance cores faring better in the benchmarks.

Web Browsing: JetStream, Speedometer, and Principled Technologies WebXPRT4

Web browser-based workloads have emerged as a major component of the typical home and business PC usage scenarios. For headless systems, many applications based on JavaScript are becoming relevant too. In order to evaluate systems for their JavaScript execution efficiency, we are carrying over the browser-focused benchmarks from the WebKit developers used in our notebook reviews. Hosted at BrowserBench, JetStream 2.0 benchmarks JavaScript and WebAssembly performance, while Speedometer measures web application responsiveness.

From a real-life workload perspective, we also process WebXPRT4 from Principled Technologies. WebXPRT4 benchmarks the performance of some popular JavaScript libraries that are widely used in websites.

For a given power budget, the Intel-based systems in each generation easily outperforms the corresponding AMD-based systems. The SYS-E102-13R-H makes its mark in the upper half of the pack in different browser benchmarks, with the sustained power budget of 28W proving to be the limiting factor.

Application Startup: GIMP 2.10.30

A new addition to our systems test suite is AppTimer - a benchmark that loads up a program and determines how long it takes for it to accept user inputs. We use GIMP 2.10.30 with a 50MB multi-layered xcf file as input. What we test here is the first run as well as the cached run - normally on the first time a user loads the GIMP package from a fresh install, the system has to configure a few dozen files that remain optimized on subsequent opening. For our test we delete those configured optimized files in order to force a 'fresh load' every second time the software is run.

As it turns out, GIMP does optimizations for every CPU thread in the system, which requires that higher thread-count processors take a lot longer to run. So the test runs quick on systems with fewer threads, however fast cores are also needed. Eventually, the PL1 limits end up placing the SYS-E102-13R-H in the middle of the pack for application loading times.

Cryptography Benchmarks

Cryptography has become an indispensable part of our interaction with computing systems. Almost all modern systems have some sort of hardware-acceleration for making cryptographic operations faster and more power efficient. In the case of IoT servers, many applications - including web server functionality and VPN - need cryptography acceleration.

BitLocker is a Windows features that encrypts entire disk volumes. While drives that offer encryption capabilities are dealt with using that feature, most legacy systems and external drives have to use the host system implementation. Windows has no direct benchmark for BitLocker. However, we cooked up a BitLocker operation sequence to determine the adeptness of the system at handling BitLocker operations. We start off with a 4.5GB RAM drive in which a 4GB VHD (virtual hard disk) is created. This VHD is then mounted, and BitLocker is enabled on the volume. Once the BitLocker encryption process gets done, BitLocker is disabled. This triggers a decryption process. The times taken to complete the encryption and decryption are recorded. This process is repeated 25 times, and the average of the last 20 iterations is graphed below.

Hardware acceleration is available for the operations in all of the systems. The time taken for processing is directly dependent on the available power budget. AMD's solution consistently outperforms the Intel implementation, likely due to larger number of faster cryptography engines (which are on a per-core basis). With the slightly lower power budget compared to the NUCs, the SYS-E102-13R-H makes its appearance in the lower half of the pack.