Intel NUC11TNBi5 and Akasa Newton TN Fanless Case Review: Silencing the Tiger

System Performance: Miscellaneous Workloads

Standardized benchmarks such as UL's PCMark 10 and BAPCo's SYSmark 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 PC configurations in both supported modes provided us the following results.

In the single-threaded case, Tiger Lake's Core i7 with a 38W PL1 takes the lead, as expected. The Core i5 NUC configurations come right behind, hobbled a bit by their 28W PL1 setting. In the multi-threaded case, the sheer number of cores help the octa-core Renoir mini-PCs emerge on top, followed by the 35W Comet Lake-equipped OnLogic HX500 well behind. Again, the important takeaway here is that the relative difference between the active and passively-cooled builds is minuscule.

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.

Software transcoding rates heavily depend on the number of cores, followed by the performance potential of each core. The high-end Renoir-based systems with eight cores have a significant lead that the quad-core TGL-U systems are unable to match up to.

While the Renoir systems support VCE, we are not including results from those transcodes because the end results are not the same - and it wouldn't be an apples-to-apples comparison. The rate here is a function of the speed of the GPU clock feeding into the QuickSync block. All TGL-U systems end up with approximately the same numbers.

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.

7-Zip is again a multi-threaded workload where Renoir's octa-core SKUs grab the top spots, and Tiger Lake's single-threaded performance advantage is not quite relevant.

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.

Browsers enjoy multiple cores, but it is single-threaded performance that ends up as a performance limiter. Here, Tiger Lake shines across the board - particularly in the real-world Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 workload.

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. This combination works out well for Tiger Lake, and we see the four TGL-U systems take up the top spots.