ECS KBN-I + AMD E1-2100 "Kabini" APU
The KBN-I/2100 has the standard UEFI/BIOS interface we are used to seeing out of EliteGroup Computer Systems. While there are more thermal results and benchmarks to come later on Phoronix, the E1-2100 at boot was running around 35 Celsius with its passive cooling solution and after a while would heat up to around 50 Celsius.
When it comes to Linux support for the KBN-I/2100, when booting Ubuntu 13.10 the X.Org Server failed to start... The Radeon HD 8210 graphics ended up causing a segmentation fault in the xorg-server due to GLAMOR. When trying to boot Ubuntu (and Xubuntu) 13.10 with "nomodeset" to force the Radeon DRM support from being loaded, we ended up with a black-screen. We ended up turning to Xubuntu 14.04 for carrying out this dual-core 1.0GHz Kabini APU testing. The Xubuntu 14.04 install ended up working fine after having to switch DDR3 DIMM modules due to the first set of RAM causing I/O errors upon the Xubuntu installation; the ECS KBN-I/2100 might be a bit finicky with its RAM support as these sticks work fine in numerous other systems. With Ubuntu 14.04 at least the Kabini graphics worked without troubles (Linux 3.13 + Mesa 10.0.1).
The ECS KBN-I/2100 is a very interesting motherboard that has a dual-core APU with Radeon HD 8210 Graphics, it's especially interesting if you're able to obtain it for below $50 (ideally $33 USD). For setting some performance expectations, in this article are some preview benchmarks against the other low-power, low-cost systems:
- CompuLab Utilite
with Freescale i.MX6 SoC sporting a quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor.
- CompuLab Fit-PC2 with
Intel Atom Z530.
- CompuLab Trim-Slice
with NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core Cortex-A9 SoC.
- ASRock NetTop with Intel
Core i3 330M CPU.
- Intel Bay Trail NUC Kit
with Celeron N2820 Bay Trail.
These results were carried over from the recent Intel Bay Trail NUC Linux Performance Preview. There are some OS/kernel differences due to starting off with the ARM benchmarking (a few weeks ago with the interesting CompuLab Utilite) where it's hard to find an upstream match for x86 comparison purposes, plus adding in some other extra system benchmarks over time, but overall you should be able to get a cursory idea for the performance of the E1-2100 "Kabini" dual-core APU under Ubuntu Linux.