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

The Atom E3825 "Bay Trail" performance comes in line with expectations. As mentioned I'll also try to get some power consumption / performance-per-Watt results out soon, but for reference, the E1-2100 1.0GHz part has a 9 Watt TDP while the E3825 1.33GHz Bay Trail SoC has a 6 Watt TDP.

Overall the AAEON EMB-BT1 is an interesting, Linux-friendly board with a nice low-power Intel x86_64 SoC. I see this mini-ITX board being appealing to a lot of readers for the decent low-power Atom "Bay Trail", having mSATA plus multiple Serial ATA connections for nice storage capabilities, and dual Gigabit Ethernet rounds out the offering to make it great for a small home file server and other tasks. The build quality is great and being from AAEON it's designed to run for many years to come.

The AAEON EMB-BT1 ran fine with Ubuntu Linux and with being Bay Trail hardware, the newer the kernel and the other graphics packages (Mesa, X.Org, etc), the better. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS overall is in great shape for Bay Trail, just with the only modification needed should be installing the Intel VA-API driver if you're concerned about video acceleration.

For end-users looking to buy AAEON boards in single quantities, it can be a bit tough to find them from major Internet retailers, but for anyone looking for this EMB-BT1 board can contact me and I can put you in touch with an AAEON sales representative that should be able to arrange such purchases.

Again, if you want to see how your own Linux system(s) perform against the EMB-BT1 with Atom E3825, it is as easy as installing the Phoronix Test Suite and then simply running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1404076-KH-LINUX739129 to run all the same tests in the same configuration, fully-automated, and to render the results side-by-side against all the data shown within this article.