AAEON EMB-BT1: A Linux-Friendly, Mini-ITX, Atom "Bay Trail" Board

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 8 April 2014 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 19 Comments.

For those after a low-cost mini-ITX board for use within an HTPC, SOHO file server, or other low-power situations, AAEON has out an interesting board called the EMB-BT1, or more formally the AAEON EMB-BT1-A10-3825. This mini-ITX motherboard has onboard an Intel Atom E3825 "Bay Trail" SoC for delivering decent performance out of the six Watt SoC and having open-source-friendly graphics under Linux.

AAEON is a name that's likely not known to many Phoronix readers. In fact, up until recently I wasn't even familiar with AAEON until approached by their midwest sales manager. AAEON is a company specializing in single-board computers and other embedded platforms, particularly for industrial and military applications. AAEON was founded in 1992 and was acquired by ASUS in 2011. AAEON sells a wide-range of single-board x86 computers in a variety of designs and form factors, along with doing a lot of custom products for its wide-range of customers from railroad companies to the military and industrial automation.

AAEON is seeing a growing number of customers running Linux, particularly Ubuntu and CentOS/RHEL, so we're beginning to review their products at Phoronix.com and carrying out our well known Linux benchmarks. The first board we were supplied with by AAEON was the EMB-BT1-A10-3825.

The EMB-BT1 motherboard is being offered by AAEON in a few designs, up to and including the Atom E3845 quad-core Bay Trail processor. The review sample we were provided with had the E3825 dual-core processor. The E3825 dual-core CPU runs at 1.33GHz, has 1MB cache, 6 Watt TDP, supports up to 4GB of DDR3L-1067MHz memory, and has Intel HD Graphics (Ivy Bridge era for Bay Trail / Valley View) with its core running at 533MHz. Up to two displays can be driven simultaneously by this Atom SoC.


Related Articles