Intel Bay Trail NUC Linux Performance Preview

Last week on Phoronix I shared my initial impressions of the Intel "Bay Trail" NUC Kit when running Ubuntu Linux. I've been impressed by the size, features, and price of this barebones Intel system sporting a low-power SoC with built-in HD Graphics capabilities that work well under Linux. Here's some early CPU benchmarks for those trying to gauge the Intel Celeron N2820 performance under Ubuntu.

A full and proper comparison of the NUC DN2820FYK performance under Linux is forthcoming that will closely examine all areas of performance from Ubuntu 14.04 with the Linux 3.13~3.14 kernel. There will also be many other interesting Bay Trail Linux tests. Those results though are not done today and due to many Phoronix readers asking for some Bay Trail results, I quickly ran some tests this week against the CompuLab Utilite review numbers from the recent review of that nice ARM Linux PC.

The hardware being compared to the DN2820FYK Bay Trail NUC Kit with Celeron N2820 processor was the:

- CompuLab Utilite with Freescale i.MX6 quad-core ARM Cortex-A9/

- CompuLab FIt-PC2 with Atom Z530.

- CompuLab Trim-Slice with Tegra 2 dual-core Cortex-A9.

- CompuLab Intense-PC with Intel Core i7 3517UE.

- ASRock 3D Vision NetTop with Intel Core i3 370M.

- ASRock NetTop with Intel Core i3 330M.

It's quite a diverse range of low-power Intel x86 and ARM systems running Ubuntu Linux. The Ubuntu releases and kernels varied due to building upon the results done for the Utilite review and due to the ARM systems being restricted by their supported kernels and software. Again though the closer Bay Trail NUC Linux results that also look at the OpenGL graphics performance on the Intel Mesa driver will have matching software stacks on the x86 side. Just look at today's results as a performance preview of the Celeron N2820 processor performance under Linux.

All benchmarking was handled in a fully automated manner using the Phoronix Test Suite. To see how your own Linux system performs against this Intel low-power, low-cost NUC Kit, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1402118-PL-COMPARISO79 to have a fully reproduced side-by-side comparison against all of the specific benchmarks used in this article and rendered next to the results you're about to see in this article. It's that easy with out enterprise-grade open-source benchmarking software!