Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC Bay Trail-T Compute Stick Review
by Ganesh T S on April 22, 2015 11:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Bay Trail
- HDMI Stick
Performance Metrics
The Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC ships with Windows 8.1 x86 because the driver support for the Atom SKUs belonging to Bay Trail-T is restricted to Windows 8.1 x 32 bit, and Android x 64 bit. This meant that many of the benchmarks in our standard test suite for low power desktops / industrial PCs could not be processed on the Compute Stick.
Futuremark PCMark 8
PCMark 8 provides various usage scenarios (home, creative and work) and offers ways to benchmark both baseline (CPU-only) as well as OpenCL accelerated (CPU + GPU) performance. We benchmarked select PCs for the OpenCL accelerated performance in all three usage scenarios. Larger-sized systems that beat the Compute Stick in the benchmarks below usually have desktop or notebook-class Bay Trail SoCs. They are clocked higher and also have better thermal solutions.
Miscellaneous Futuremark Benchmarks
In the other Futuremark benchmarks evaluating 3D performance, we find the Compute Stick coming in last - this was to be expected, given that the GPU is clocked low at 311 MHz and also happens to operate mostly in the thermal limits put in place for a tablet platform.
We now move on to look at the benchmark modes in programs used on a day-to-day basis, i.e, application performance and not synthetic workloads.
x264 Benchmark
First off, we have some video encoding benchmarks courtesy of x264 HD Benchmark v5.0. This is simply a test of CPU performance. The Compute Stick manages to score better than the ECS LIVA in most of these tests thanks to the four cores (compared to the two in the latter).
7-Zip
7-Zip is a very effective and efficient compression program, often beating out OpenCL accelerated commercial programs in benchmarks even while using just the CPU power. 7-Zip has a benchmarking program that provides tons of details regarding the underlying CPU's efficiency. In this subsection, we are interested in the compression and decompression MIPS ratings when utilizing all the available threads. Again, the advantages of a quad-core SoC come through.
TrueCrypt
As businesses (and even home consumers) become more security conscious, the importance of encryption can't be overstated. CPUs supporting the AES-NI instruction for accelerating the encryption and decryption processes have, till now, been the higher end SKUs. However, with Bay Trail, even the lowly Atom series has gained support for AES-NI. It is quite unlikely that any usage scenario for the Compute Stick is going to involve extensive encryption capabilities. However, the presence of AES-NI support in the Compute Stick's SoC piqued our interest.
TrueCrypt, a popular open-source disk encryption program can take advantage of AES-NI. Its internal benchmark provides some interesting cryptography-related numbers to ponder. In the graph below, we can get an idea of how fast a TrueCrypt volume would behave in the Intel PPSTCK1A32WFC and how it would compare with other select PCs. This is a purely CPU feature / clock speed based test. Interestingly, the Atom Z3735F is the only Bay Trail SoC in the graph below to have AES-NI capabilities.
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ToTTenTranz - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
IMO, lack of Ethernet and terrible WiFi performance kills the product from the start.This is obviously intended to turn a TV into a media host device with the added functionality of running Windows, but if a very slow WiFi connection is the only way to get connected, then the product is rather useless.
With a decent WiFi AC receiver, this would be the ideal Steam Home Streaming client.
Krysto - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Slow and expensive for what it offers - I'd say that defines Intel pretty well these days.Krysto - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Oh and don't forget this is the kind of "Celerons" and "Pentiums" we're going to see from now on - for $100-$160 a chip.Drumsticks - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Not really sure why you're ignoring the $50 Celeron G1820 which is a 2.7Ghz Haswell chip, but hell if it makes you feel better go ahead.Drumsticks - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Edit: And if you're referring to mobile bay/cherry trail parts, it's not like consumers can personally buy those anyways.Refuge - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Thats right, because Microsoft lets Intel use Windows for FREE.Forgot that deal.
v1001 - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Wait a minute so every single one of these is going to crap out when people go to add the windows updates?? How is that acceptable? They can't seriously expect everyone who buys this to find a work around do they? Is Windows 10 smaller? Any luck there with upgrading to that in July? I want to buy a few of these for some TV's. But I'm not going to cut it that close on the updates, I mean what happens on the next windows update and that's it, you went over and can't do a single thing after that...Marc GP - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
Looks like you'd be much better served with something like the HP Stream Mini.Uplink10 - Thursday, April 23, 2015 - link
Stop advertising HP Stream Mini, Zotac miniPC or Gygabite BRIX barebones are better and you can even put in youtr desired HDD and RAM and they only cost around 120$. See my post above.dtgoodwin - Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - link
I'm surprised that they had issues with updates. I'm running a Winbook 7" with only 1GB of ram and 16 GB on board storage. I've added a microSD 64-gig card, but windows updates will only stage/install on the c: partition. I've got less than 1 GB free, but all the updates have applied - I just got this two weeks ago, so I'd consider it a fairly comparable situation. I did run disk cleanup including system updates, but I never ran into an error. It is too bad that there's no way to extend the drive space of c: using a microSD, or to have Windows seamlessly use it for temp files, or be able to move other files to it. It would also greatly help if they allowed you to move the "recovery" partition to a USB stick and be able to recover by placing that back in the device. Recovering 5 GB of space would be really helpful. Of course, my tablet only cost $40.00. It also plays NetFlix and Youtube output to HDMI acceptably, and even my medium bitrate Blu-Ray rips.