CompuLab Fitlet 2 Is A Mighty Fine, Low-Power PC Preloaded With Linux Mint

First up was one of the more demanding tests of timing the Linux kernel build process... Not that you would normally be compiling code on a compact PC designed for digital signate and other IoT/industrial use-cases. But it does show this quad-core Apollo Lake chip to perform substantially better than the older Bay Trail and Braswell Celerons found in the older NUCs. The performance of this Celeron J3455 at 10 Watts was roughly in line with the old Core i3 370M Arrandale processor that was dual-core + HT at 2.4GHz and with a 35 Watt TDP.

Even though the Intel NUCs had active cooling as well as the old Arrandale era ASRock nettops, the CompuLab Fitlet2 had the lowest minimum temperature during this timed kernel build process and the average and peak temperatures were also modest compared to the other tested systems. During this demanding build process that kept all of the CPU cores busy, the Fitlet2 had an average temperature of just 52 degrees and a peak of 61.

The Fitlet2 while compiling the Linux kernel had an average AC power draw of just 11 Watts with a peak of 12.4 Watts.

For a more modest workload of some GIMP image manipulation benchmarks, the Fitlet2 was doing well and again in line with the older Arrandale Core i3 CPUs in raw performance and well ahead of the Braswell/BayTrail Celerons:

Understandably, the CompuLab IPC3 is running the fastest with its much more powerful components while still being passively cooled and built to meet industrial design requirements.