[User 280158]

Hello everyone,

First of all let me say that this is a wonderful community with loads of nice people, so great job all of you!

About my question;

N3000 vs N3150 vs 3205U vs 2955U.

What's the main difference between above CPU's and with Broadwell and Braswell if put into Kodi / Video performance?

All of those NUC's / ChromeBoxes which Iv been looking costs about 200 Euros + SSD + RAM Ofc (Expect ChromeBox).

Which one of those would be best for Kodi? (I will test both, Windows & OpenElec).
Currently I have Raspberry Pi + NAS.

Thanks!

~HomeDope

[oWarchild]

Hi @HomeDope, welcome to the forum!

I suggest you read Intel Braswell boxes compilation and ASRock Beebox (Braswell) (both cover N3000 and N3150, and also discuss differences against 2955U), and Asus Chromebox CN62 (Broadwell) (covers 3205U).

TL;DR: from all those processors the Braswell is the only one that supports HEVC (8-bit) hardware decoding (not in Kodi yet, though). 3205U is not worth the price difference vs 2955U. Kodi wise, 2955U is the more mature option with great overall support. N3000 vs N3150: N3150 is a quad core while N3000 is dual core, given these CPU cores are not very powerful, definitely the N3150 over the N3000.

[trsqr]

I'd say out of those options N3150 has the best GPU for Kodi, but it's very new so support is not that mature. HEVC decoding is the elephant in the room here. N3150 can do that in hardware, whereas the 2955U cannot.

[noggin]

I'd say out of those options N3150 has the best GPU for Kodi, but it's very new so support is not that mature. HEVC decoding is the elephant in the room here. N3150 can do that in hardware, whereas the 2955U cannot.

Question is how significant the 8-bit limitation for hardware HEVC decode on Braswell is? My gut feeling is 'not that significant' - as almost all HEVC stuff is re-encodes of existing 4:2:0 8-bit H264 or VC-1 content (with a bit of MPEG2 TV?) I don't think there is much origination in 4:2:0 10 bit HEVC yet.

However if the Hi10 Anime re-encoders get into HEVC - then those are likely to be 10 bit - and that will require software decoding on Braswell?

[oWarchild]

Question is how significant the 8-bit limitation for hardware HEVC decode on Braswell is? My gut feeling is 'not that significant' - as almost all HEVC stuff is re-encodes of existing 4:2:0 8-bit H264 or VC-1 content (with a bit of MPEG2 TV?) I don't think there is much origination in 4:2:0 10 bit HEVC yet.

For stuff already produced and being re-encoded to HEVC I would say 8-bit is not a limitation. But for future stuff being released in the new 4K Blu Ray spec it's likely that will be encoded in 10-bit, right?

However if the Hi10 Anime re-encoders get into HEVC - then those are likely to be 10 bit - and that will require software decoding on Braswell?

Yeap it will. From what I read in anime threads HVEC main10 is being looked at as the replacement of H264 Hi10P. The current problem is that x265 10-bit is not very mature and it still takes forever to encode anything due to lack of hardware encode support. So it will take some time for the shift to happen.

[noggin]

Question is how significant the 8-bit limitation for hardware HEVC decode on Braswell is? My gut feeling is 'not that significant' - as almost all HEVC stuff is re-encodes of existing 4:2:0 8-bit H264 or VC-1 content (with a bit of MPEG2 TV?) I don't think there is much origination in 4:2:0 10 bit HEVC yet.

For stuff already produced and being re-encoded to HEVC I would say 8-bit is not a limitation. But for future stuff being released in the new 4K Blu Ray spec it's likely that will be encoded in 10-bit, right?

Or possibly even 12 bit if HDR happens...

[oWarchild]

Not sure about the 12-bit... Even though Rec. 2020 supports it (so potentially it can happen in UHD TV broadcasts?) all announcements I've read regarding 4K Blu Ray only mention 10-bit:

• arstechnica: Ultra HD Blu-ray spec confirmed: 4K at high frame rates, 10-bit colour
  
• anandtech: Blu-ray Disc Association Completes Ultra HD Blu-ray Specification
  
• RedShark: Massive upgrade to Blu Ray: 4K, HDR, 10 bit, Rec 2020 colour space
  

Actually Anandtech goes a bit further and suggests Blu Ray is sticking with 10-bit due to space/hardware considerations:

Ultra HD Blu-ray supports 10bit per channel color depth for content that uses Rec. 2020 for its color encoding. This moves the number of possible colors that can be displayed from approximately 16.7 million to 1.07 billion. I think it would have been better to use 10bit color for sRGB content and 12bit color for Rec. 2020 content, as current 8bit sRGB content can already experience noticeable color banding, but it looks like the additional space and hardware support required have not been deemed worth it.

[User 280158]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

From what I've read now, I think the main options at the moment (for my price range) are 2955U and N3150.

Do you think that N3150 will gain same maturity as 2955U? And I'm not sure how 2955U and N3150 CPU's stack against each other?

Thanks.

~HomeDope

[noggin]

Thanks everyone for the responses.

From what I've read now, I think the main options at the moment (for my price range) are 2955U and N3150.

Do you think that N3150 will gain same maturity as 2955U? And I'm not sure how 2955U and N3150 CPU's stack against each other?

Thanks.

~HomeDope

They don't tell the whole story but the Passmark scores are :
N3150 @ 1.6GHz = 1352 total, 374 single thread
2955U @ 1.4GHz = 1480 total, 794 single thread

The N3150 is a quad core, the 2955U is a dual core. The cores in the 2955U Haswell architecture are much more powerful, so for single threaded applications the 2955U will perform much better (The single threaded score for the 2955U is double that of the N3150). For fully multi-threaded applications (and fully efficient multithreading is quite rare) the 2955U is still ahead, but not by much.

However the GPU/VPU combo in the N3150 is powerful, and supports HEVC 8-bit hardware decode, which the 2955U doesn't. In other GPU/VPU areas - MCDI and Lanczos3 scaling they appear similar?

[Roby77]

So if i'm not wrong

N2955 is better for

- scraping
- heavy skin
- load time
- encoding ?
- lan speed transfer

[oWarchild]

GeekBench benchmark results are also similar to Passmark: 2955U and N3150.

Also, even though this is not a definitive test, both the 2955U and N3150 were able to decode an anime 1080p H264 Hi10P sample with around 50% CPU usage overall and no skipped/dropped frames. This is something that most android boxes struggle with, excepting the NVIDIA Shield Android TV.

lan speed transfer? I doubt that the Braswell CPU would be a bottleneck for network transfers...

CPU wise I would say N3150 is slightly inferior to the 2955U but GPU wise it benefits from 2 additional EUs (12 instead of 10) and has hardware HEVC 8-bit decoding, so slightly better in terms of future-proofing. Also the N3150 consumes less power than the 2955U. I guess the more relevant question is if HEVC 8-bit decoding is worth the price difference between the two.

[trsqr]

From what I've read now, I think the main options at the moment (for my price range) are 2955U and N3150.

Do you think that N3150 will gain same maturity as 2955U? And I'm not sure how 2955U and N3150 CPU's stack against each other?

I expect Braswell family (which the N3150 belongs to as well) to become one of the most popular HTPC architectures for the next 12 months or so. Thus I'd expect significant development on that front as well.

I've got both myself, and the 2955U is my 24/7 microserver and the Braswell is a HTPC.

[noggin]

Yep - the N3150 looks like a very interesting HTPC CPU/GPU combo indeed.

[Gussie]

Yep - the N3150 looks like a very interesting HTPC CPU/GPU combo indeed.

Only until Skylake comes along in Q3

[oWarchild]

Yep - the N3150 looks like a very interesting HTPC CPU/GPU combo indeed.

Only until Skylake comes along in Q3

Skylake also has its cons though, it will consume more power than the Braswell (Braswell is based on the Atom micro architecture and so it's cheaper and easier to cool) and Skylake won't support HW 10-bit HVEC which is what will be used in 4K TV/Blu-Ray/Netflix. In other words neither Braswell or Skylake are future-proof.

On the pro side, with the right combination of motherboard Skylake will support HDMI 2.0, HDCP 2.2 and 4K@60Hz.