Low-Power War, round 2: AM1 vs. Cherry Trail

[Dirk Broer]

The first round of the low-power war seems to have gone to AMD. The AMD SOCs had more features, CPU-wise, and their boards had more features too -as I described in the previous Low-Power posting. Idle power consumption was on a par with Bay Trail and only under stress did the Intel SOCs have a lower power consumption.
Most motherboard vendors did not even bother bringing out a board with Intel's flagship Bay Trail SOC, the so-called 'Pentium' J2900 (but really an Intel Atom under another name), no doubt because for less than the price of a J2900 board you can buy a AM1 board, an Athlon 5350 plus 4 GB of RAM. Over here I can only get J2900 boards from Asrock, and searching for J2900 boards by ASUS, MSI or Gigabyte drew a blank.

But Moore's Law wasn't formulated by an Intel founder just for fun. Them at Santa Clara might as well be honorary members of motorcycle gang 'No Surrender': they just won't give up. So now we are at round two, and Intel has a new contender series. Gone is the Silvermont-based Bay Trail-D and in is the Airmont-based Braswell (sounds like Haswell), with an even lower TDP -though the value of that metric can be questioned- and a better IGP.

The waiting now is for AMD's new AM1 SOCs, based upon Mullins/Beema.

[Dirk Broer]

As Asrock had their best AM1 and J2900 boards as iTX, I like to show these compared to their new N3700 iTX board. Note that Asrock seems to have circumvented the supposed 8GB memory limit that the J2900 and N3700 have, according to Intel themselves.

	AM1H-ITX	Q2900-ITX	N3700-ITX
Photo: (click to enlarge)
RAM	2x Single Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 32GB*	2x Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L SO-DIMM 1066/1333 Max: 16GB	2x Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L SO-DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 16GB
PS/2 Ports	1 combo	2	1 combo
USB 2.0 ext.	2	2	2
USB 3.0 ext.	2	2	4
USB 2.0 int.	4	2	4
USB 3.0 int.	2	2	2
Storage	4x SATA 6Gb/s 1x Mini PCI-e	2x SATA 6Gb/s 2x SATA 3Gb/s 1x Mini PCI-e	4x SATA 6Gb/s 1x Mini PCI-e
Audio	ALC892	ALC892	ALC892
LPT Port	No	No	No
COM Port	Yes (header)	Yes (header)	Yes (header)
Expansion / Connectivity	1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode) 1x Mini PCI-e	1x PCIe 2.0 x1 1x Mini PCI-e	1x PCIe 2.0 x1 1x Mini PCI-e
dSub (VGA)	Yes	Yes	No
DVI-D	Yes	Yes	Yes
HDMI	Yes	Yes	Yes
Display Port	Yes (1.2)	No	Yes (1.1a)
Fan Ports	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis 1x3pin Power	1x3pin CPU 1x3pin Chassis	1x3pin CPU 1x3pin Chassis
LAN	RTL8111GR 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111GR 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111GR 10/100/1000 Mb/s
Overclockable?	No	No	No
WiFi?	Optional (separate bracket included)	No	Optional (separate bracket included)
19V DC in option?	Yes	No	No

*=Yet-to-be 16 GB modules required...

[Dirk Broer]

In the case of ASUS in this category it is hard to decide whether the iTX board is better than the mATX board or vice-versa.
This holds true for both their AM1 and their Bay Trail offerings, so I show you their two best J1900 boards along their two AM1 boards
(ASUS has no J2900 boards and as yet no N3700 boards either. Looks like ASUS has decided that AMD has the best offering in this segment and that the extra cost of the better Intel products is too much for the consumer, compared to other ASUS products. So: see AMD shine in this ASUS presentation...).

	AM1I-A	AM1M-A	J1900I-C	J1900M-A
Photo: (click to enlarge)
RAM	2x Single Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 32GB*	2x Single Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 32GB*	2x Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L SO-DIMM 1066/1333 Max: 8GB	2x Dual Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333 Max: 16GB
PS/2 Ports	2	1 combo	1 combo	2
USB 2.0 ext.	4	4	4	2
USB 3.0 ext.	2	2	1	1
USB 2.0 int.	4	4	2	4
USB 3.0 int.	0	2	0	0
Storage	2x SATA 6Gb/s	2x SATA 6Gb/s	2x SATA 3Gb/s 1x Mini PCI-e	2x SATA 3Gb/s
Audio	ALC887	ALC887	ALC887	ALC887
LPT Port	Yes (header)	Yes (header)	Yes (header)	Yes
COM Port	Yes (port+header)	Yes (header)	Yes (port+header)	Yes (header)
Expansion / Connectivity	1x PCIe 2.0 x4	1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode) 2x PCIe 2.0 x1	1x PCIe 2.0 x1 1x Mini PCI-e	1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x1 mode) 2x PCIe 2.0 x1
dSub (VGA)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DVI-D	Yes	Yes	No	No
HDMI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Display Port	No	No	No	No
Fan Ports	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis
LAN	RTL8111GR 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111GR 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111G 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111H 10/100/1000 Mb/s
Overclockable?	Yes	Yes	No	No
WiFi?	No	No	No	No
19V DC in option?	No	No	No	No

*=Yet-to-be 16 GB modules required...
P.S.: The ASUS AM1I-A supports ECC RAM (as in makes use of the features of it)

[Dirk Broer]

Though MSI has -like ASUS- no J2900 board they do have a new N3700 board for us. I wil compare both their iTX J1900 and N3700 with their AM1 offerings.

	AM1I	AM1M	J1900I	N3700I-ECO
Photo:
RAM	2x Single Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 32GB*	2x Single Channel DDR3 DIMM 1066/1333/1600 Max: 32GB*	2x Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L SO-DIMM 1066/1333 Max: 16GB	2x Dual Channel DDR3/DDR3L SO-DIMM 1333/1600 Max: 8GB
PS/2 Ports	2	1 combo	2	2
USB 2.0 ext.	2	4	2	2
USB 3.0 ext.	2	2	1	2
USB 2.0 int.	4	4	2	2
USB 3.0 int.	0	2	0	2
Storage	2x SATA 6Gb/s 1x Mini-PCIe	2x SATA 6Gb/s	2x SATA 3Gb/s	2x SATA 6Gb/s
Audio	ALC887	ALC887	ALC887	ALC887
LPT Port	No	No	No	No
COM Port	Yes (header)	Yes (header)	No	Yes (port+header)
Expansion / Connectivity	1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode) 1x Mini-PCIe	1x PCIe 2.0 x16 (x4 mode) 2x PCIe 2.0 x1	1x PCIe 2.0 x1	1x PCIe 2.0 x1
dSub (VGA)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DVI-D	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
HDMI	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Display Port	No	No	No	No
Fan Ports	1x3pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x3pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis	1x4pin CPU 1x4pin Chassis
LAN	RTL8111G 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111G 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111G 10/100/1000 Mb/s	RTL8111G 10/100/1000 Mb/s
Overclockable?	No	No	No	No
WiFi?	No	No	No	No
19V DC in option?	No	No	No	No

*=Yet-to-be 16 GB modules required...

[Dirk Broer]

It will probably not be related to this posting, but they've pulled back all Pentium J2900 boards over here....you can only buy OEM systems with them now (some for less than 200 Euro's actually).
ANd as N3700 boards are still as scarce as hen's teeth over here, it is the Celeron J1800 and J1900 against AMD's AM1 SOCs now in the low-power niche!
There's even some extra AMD A4-5000 boards now, at only 15 Watt TDP -Socket BGA769, also known as Socket FT3- that have their SOC soldered-on, like with Intel's Bay Trail-D SOCs.

My own AM1 system is currently running -fine- Windows 10, which I find better at this stage than Windows 8 -and far better than Windows 8.1.
Integer MIPS values under BOINC are only half of those under Linux though....no doubt an Intel compiler or Intel-biased library related artefact.