Low-Power War: AM1 vs Bay Trail

[Dirk Broer]

For the cost conscious cruncher there seems to be a pot of gold at the horizon: both Intel and AMD claim a very cheap platform, and they claim that to be both on purchase and running costs.

While neither AM1, nor Bay Trail CPUs are on sale yet (and you can wait till hell freezes over for the latter, as they are soldered onto the motherboard), there are at least specs out for the motherboards and the Celeron version of Bay Trail can even be bought already. Should you do that?

Let's compare the features of the two platforms with each other:



AM1
Feature
Bay Trail



http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/AM1B-M(s).jpg

Mini-ITX or μATX

Motherboard Form Factor

Mostly Mini-ITX, but at least one μATX: look to the right!

http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/Q1900M(s).jpg


http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u69/am1i_a.jpg

Upgradable Socket

SOC placement

Soldered on

http://www.techpowerup.com/img/14-03-04/8c.jpg


http://www.biostar.com.tw/upload/Motherboard/m20140317_4.jpg

Athlon: 4
Sempron: 2 - 4

Cores

Pentium: 4
Celeron: 2 - 4

http://www.biostar.com.tw/upload/Motherboard/m20131225_8.jpg


http://media.bestofmicro.com/ecs-kabini-kbn-i,Z-2-390062-13.jpg

25 Watt

TDP

10 Watt

http://www.ecs.com.cn/ECSWebSite/images/Products/large_430/BAT-I_V1_Intel_CPU_Onboard_3.jpg


http://www.gigabyte.com/fileupload/product/2/4937/9745_m.jpg

16-32 GB 1600 MHz (Mostly DIMM, sometimes SODIMM)

Max RAM

4-8 GB 1333 MHz (Mostly SODIMM, sometimes DIMM)

http://www.gigabyte.com/fileupload/product/2/4918/9724_m.jpg


http://s2.techspy.com/media/14/news/1465000/1467150_0.jpg

2x SATA 6Gb/s

Storage Interface

2x SATA 3Gb/s

http://media.msi.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=105059&g2_serialNumber=2




Athlon: AMD Radeon® HD 8400
Sempron: AMD Radeon® HD 8280
or AMD Radeon® HD 8240

IGP

Intel® HD Graphics





Yes, most of the times

PCIe2.0 x16 slot possible?

Yes, sometimes




Based upon these specs I declare the AM1 platform to be the winner of the Low-Power War...

[Dirk Broer]

http://www.userlogos.org/files/logos/triffids/tomshardware2.jpg
Tom's Hardware agrees with my conclusion! read more... (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/athlon-5350-am1-platform-review,3801.html)

AnandTech has decided to take a very serious approach:
Part one of their Kabini review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7933/the-desktop-kabini-review-part-1-athlon-5350-am1/4)
Part two of their review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/8067/amd-am1-kabini-part-2-athlon-53505150-and-sempron-38502650-tested)

[Dirk Broer]

http://hexus.net/media/img/hexus_web_shadow_trans.png?402516240412
Pentium G3220 bites the dust against Athlon 5350 (http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/68797-intel-pentium-g3220-22nm-haswell/)
The G3220 is, together with the Celeron G1820 of the same TDP (53 Watt) Intel's only 1150 socketed CPU that competes against AMD's AM1 platform (25 Watt).
While marginally faster in some benchmarks, they lose heavily in power consumption against their AMD counterparts.

[Dirk Broer]

http://www.anandtech.com/Content/portal-amd/logo2.png
AnandTech's Ian Cutress has analysed nine AM1 boards and discusses pro's and con's. (http://www.anandtech.com/show/7945/the-am1-kabini-motherboard-preview-asus-asrock-gigabyte-msi-biostar)
http://www.userlogos.org/files/logos/triffids/tomshardware2.jpg
Thomas Soderstrom of Tom's Hardware did the same with a selection of three motherboards. (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/am1-motherboard-socket-fs1b-athlon-5350,review-32986.html)

Based upon specs only my own choice is the Asrock AM1B-M (http://www.asrock.nl/mb/AMD/AM1B-M/index.nl.asp?cat=Specifications) for μATX format and the ASUS AM1I-A (http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AM1IA/specifications/) for the iTX format.
I like the three fan headers and the four USB 2.0 headers on the Asrock board and my only misgiving is the sole PS/2 port (I use a PS/2 based KVM switch). The ASUS board wins for me thanks to its two PS/2 ports and the four USB headers. And the ASUS board -over here- is just as expensive as any other given AM1 board save the Asrock AM1H-iTX.
Expensive is a bit of a misnomer here: almost any 2nd hand AM3+, FM2 or Socket 1155 mobo is bound to be twice as expensive as a new AM1 mobo!

[Dirk Broer]

Based upon these specs I declare the AM1 platform to be the winner of the Low-Power War...

Found some back-up for my statement on a Japanese site where the Celeron J1900 is compared side-by-side with a AM1 Athlon 5350 (http://wlog.flatlib.jp/item/1698)
The AM1 platform has the better CPU and the better GPU as compared to Intel's Bay Trail. The AM1 motherboards offer more features too...

And for those who think a 5350 does not perform I'd like to point out the Gflop/Watt -whether tdp or actual power consumption- ratio of the AM1 platform.
For the same tdp of running one 125 Watt FX CPU you can run five AM1 SOCs, that's twenty(!) cores...

[vaughan]

I bought a little Intel i3 Haswell based NUC D34010WYKH to connect to a powered hub for Cobblestone mining (Bitcoin Utopia :) ) with my ASICs sticks. It reminds me of a Mac mini.
Intel marketing has improved to near Apple levels with the packaging having a neat and unexpected Intel sound bite when you open the box. Very cool.

[Dirk Broer]

Funny, the i3-4010U in question here is hardly more powerful than the Celeron J1900 (http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i3-4010U-vs-Intel-Celeron-J1900) and just an itsy tiny bit better than the Athlon 5350 (http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i3-4010U-vs-AMD-Athlon-5350).
To it's advantage however are its lower tdp (15 Watt) than the 5350 and the extra USB3.0 ports.
I'll bet it has a pico PSU too in its NUC format, helping to keep power requirements lower than a ATX power supply would (http://www.pcper.com/news/Editorial/AMD-AM1-Retested-60-Watt-Power-Supply).

If you were to make an AMD alternative to the NUC you could buy an Asrock AM1H-ITX (http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AM1H-ITX/) -the most expensive AM1 mobo, but with 19V DC support-, an Antec ISK 110 (http://www.antec.com/product.php?id=704934&pid=91) casing, and an Athlon 5350.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/photo/AM1H-ITX(s).jpghttp://images.anandtech.com/doci/5696/Small%20(1%20of%208).jpghttp://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ProductImageCompressAll300/19-113-364-02.jpg
This combo also has four USB3.0 ports (two on the back, two in front -if you can connect two front USB ports to a USB 3.0 header), but plus an additional four USB2.0 ports (two on the back, two in front -perhaps even four).
In theory it could be fitted with up to 32GB of normal RAM -provided you have 16GB sticks. It has D-Sub (VGA), DisplayPort, DVI-D, HDMI and 4x SATA-600, so the feature set is better than the NUC, while being cheaper too. Mobo, SOC and case together cost about 170 Euro's here. The NUC is 249 Euro's here -but our local official Intel reseller asks more than twice that-, but it is not clear if that includes memory and, if so, how much. The local reseller that asks 569 Euros for the NUC gives it with 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 SoDIMM RAM.

And let's not forget the power adapter needed: The NUC has it included in its price -comes in the NUCbox-, for the AM1 system you have to pay an additional 40 Euros when you haven't got a adapter from a previous piece of hardware -e.g. a laptop- lying around.
http://store.antec.com/upload/product_features/ISK110_VESA/3.png
Edit: the Antec ISK 110 comes with its own 90Watt external PSU! So no 40 extra Euros and a broad choice of mobos, all cheaper than the AM1H-ITX....

[Jason1478963]

I like low power use. You have me thinking about building a media pc with one of these now if the free laptop doesn't work out well

[Dirk Broer]

Want to build a low power, 16 core, AMD server? Take four AM1 iTX mobo's (cost: around $125), four Athlon 5350's (cost: around $200) and one Morex ITX Chassis No. M-8188 (http://www.morex.com.tw/products/productdetail.php?fd_id=137)
But....How will it look?
http://ascii.jp/elem/000/000/630/630363/ol5_240x.jpg
I bet you can even replace the 150 Watt PSUs with 90 Watt ones for AM1 (or even Bay Trail, or a mix of both)...

[Dirk Broer]

To boldly go where no one has gone before: I contacted Morex and asked whether they can send one to their agent in the Netherlands, and how much that would cost....
They haven't been as bold as me: no reply (yet). Managed to find a dealer in Poland that asks 1440 Zloty's for it (phew: around 350 Euro's...).