Khadas Mind Premium Review: Raptor Lake-P in a Modular Portable Workstation

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.

Raptor Lake-P currently holds the advantage over other processor families for single-threaded performance as it relates to CINEBENCH R23. The higher performance core counts in the Beelink GTR7 (and its 65W power budget) gives it a clear lead in the multi-threaded workload. Other systems get ordered according to their sustained power budget, with the 28W Mind Premium configurations falling behind the 40W and 35W configurations.

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 performance is primarily dependent on the number of available cores, assuming that the power budget is the same. Since the relative performance depends on a combination of these two factors, it is no surprise that the Beelink GTR7 with eight Zen 4 cores and a 65W power budget outperforms everything else. The Arena Canyon NUC with a 40W Core i7-1360P outperforms the 28W version in the Mind Premium configurations, with the latter ending up in bottom half of the pack.

The hardware transcoding performance is simply a function of the GPU clock rate and the power budget available to maintain the sustained clocks. Higher power budgets allow the GPU to remain turbo-clocked for a longer time, and this shows in the Arena Canyon NUC (40W Core i7-1360P) being perched at the top. The 28W version in the Mind Premium configurations pushes the systems towards the middle of the pack.

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.

Interestingly, there is not much separating the systems based on the latest generation processors in the compression benchmark. However, the Ryzen-based systems have the edge in decompression. Within the Intel-based set, the ordering is based on the power budget. This sees the 40W configurations surpassing the 28W one used in the Mind Premium systems.

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.

All the three workloads see the 28W Mind Premium systems making its mark in the middle of the graph - systems with higher power budgets are above it, while previous generation products appear below.

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. Most of the systems have similar number of cores, and the time taken for application startup is also quite similar in both scenarios - sub-4s in the cached case, and around 8s in the cold case.

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, as well as RAM speeds. The faster RAM in the 28W configuration results in a narrowed gap between the Mind Premium systems and the Arena Canyon NUC, with the latter enjoying a slight edge.