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+--- Thread: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) (/showthread.php?tid=227363)
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - Matt Devo - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:42)Robotica Wrote: True for now.
Main feature I like for those Braswells over the Haswell is blazing fast Kodi GUI thanks to a fast SSD. All in all, this would set me €120 back compared to that HP machine.
I'm not sure how the SSD is Braswell specific, and the Haswell Celeron CPU is actually a lot faster than Braswell, which is only marginally faster than BayTrail
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:27)oWarchild Wrote:(2015-07-15, 18:15)Matt Devo Wrote: It should also be noted though that Braswell support in Linux/OpenELEC is still preliminary, not as stable as existing platforms. It's still very early on, probably need another 3 months to see how things will shake out before buying, unless you are the early adopter type
Yeap, I've been following Fritsch's posts closely about his experiences with the N3150 ITX (and nagging him occasionally).
At similar prices, and assuming ffmpeg eventually supports Braswell HEVC decoding, one advantage Braswell has over the Chromebox is the ability to hardware decode HEVC 4K 8-bit @ 30Hz. This may not mean much if main10 becomes the preferred profile for 4K releases....
I do agree with you however, if someone is buying a box today and has access to one of those Haswell 2955U deals, that's their safest choice. Personally I'm playing the waiting game, holding on to my overclocked RPi 1 b+
We can do that ourselves - you can help and start implementing it. It's there in the driver, it works with gstreamer - so, step up and we get it done :-)
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - Robotica - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:45)Matt Devo Wrote:(2015-07-15, 18:42)Robotica Wrote: True for now.
Main feature I like for those Braswells over the Haswell is blazing fast Kodi GUI thanks to a fast SSD. All in all, this would set me €120 back compared to that HP machine.
I'm not sure how the SSD is Braswell specific, and the Haswell Celeron CPU is actually a lot faster than Braswell, which is only marginally faster than BayTrail
My HTPC experience is more than just the SoC in my HTPC. Disk I/O, connections, networking, form factor, noize, efficiency to name a few. And Braswell seems a clear winner on all those elements.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-15
Quote:I'm not sure how the SSD is Braswell specific, and the Haswell Celeron CPU is actually a lot faster than Braswell, which is only marginally faster than BayTrail
Are you sure? Where did you get those figures from?
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - oWarchild - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:45)fritsch Wrote: We can do that ourselves - you can help and start implementing it. It's there in the driver, it works with gstreamer - so, step up and we get it done :-)
If ffmpeg was coded in java, c#, javascript or python I would. I'm afraid my C days are long gone...
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - oWarchild - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:50)fritsch Wrote:(2015-07-15, 18:45)Matt Devo Wrote: I'm not sure how the SSD is Braswell specific, and the Haswell Celeron CPU is actually a lot faster than Braswell, which is only marginally faster than BayTrail
Are you sure? Where did you get those figures from?
I know this is not anywhere near a genuine comprehensive real benchmark but, software decoding the same 1080p H264 Hi10p sample resulted in both Haswell 2955U and Braswell N3150 using around 50% CPU overall. Haswell is definitely much more powerful per core, but in multithreaded operation it's not so clear...
Braswell N3150:
(2015-07-03, 19:28)fritsch Wrote: 720p: CPU Load: max: 88.5 / 400 % min: 75% / 400% (*) - no skips, no drops
1080p: CPU Load: max: 199,7 / 400% min: 128 / 400% - no skips, no drops.
*: 4 cores == 400%.
(2015-07-04, 17:38)Matt Devo Wrote: Haswell Celeron 2955U (ChromeBox, with dual channel memory), playing the above linked samples
720p - ~25% CPU per core, no drops/skips
1080p - ~50% CPU per core, no drops/skips
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - Robotica - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 18:57)oWarchild Wrote:(2015-07-15, 18:50)fritsch Wrote:Quote:I'm not sure how the SSD is Braswell specific, and the Haswell Celeron CPU is actually a lot faster than Braswell, which is only marginally faster than BayTrail
Are you sure? Where did you get those figures from?
I know this not a genuine comprehensive real benchmark but, software decoding the same 1080p H264 Hi10p sample resulted in both Haswell 2955U and Braswell N3150 using around 50% CPU overall. Haswell is definitely more powerful per core, but overall it's not so clear...
So they both easily manage with video playback for the masses. Try opening a folder with 100 10MB JPEG's and see the difference between opening those listings in GUI would show the multicore Braswell Kodi performance benefits over Haswell. Providing on-the-fly decoding, I think this is a great test scenario for Kodi 60 fps GUI performance.
Video playback is one thing, GUI performance is also very important for Kodi day to day usage.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-15
Ah! CPU ... I misread it. Yes perfectly fine. Thought it was GPU :-)
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - Matt Devo - 2015-07-15
(2015-07-15, 19:01)Robotica Wrote: So they both easily manage with video playback for the masses. Try opening a folder with 100 10MB JPEG's and see the difference between opening those listings in GUI would show the Braswell Kodi performance benefits over Haswell better. Providing on-the-fly decoding, I think this is a great test scenario for Kodi 60 fps GUI performance.
Video playback is one thing, GUI performance is also very important for Kodi day to day usage.
where are you getting this info that Braswell outperforms Haswell in CPU, in Kodi or otherwise? I'm not seeing/hearing that from anyone who actually has/tested both (eg, fritsch, online reviews) , and it makes no sense given the architecture differences
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-15
Braswell is _not_ faster CPU wise, not at all. Also it's not faster GUI wise ...
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - oWarchild - 2015-07-15
Anyway... the thing that currently is holding me the most regarding a new acquisition is 1080p HVEC 10-bit support (hardware or software). My current flat has a small living room so I'm sure I'm not buying a 4K TV in the next few years but it's likely I'll find HEVC encodes in the meantime. Currently I'm not sure if Braswell or the Chromebox can handle this... nVIDIA SHIELD TV can and is tempting... but not really what I need
EDIT (posted before reading the last 2 comments): Based on what I've read I also believe Haswell 2955U CPU beats the N3150 CPU but in multithreaded operation I'm not sure if the difference is big.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-15
I can only suggest: Don't buy hw at all today - that should have 1080p HVEC 10-bit support ... buy it in ~ 1 year :-) and buy the cheapest thing that does the other jobs right now.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - oWarchild - 2015-07-15
That's a thought, but then I would have to buy 2 appliances in one year's interval. I would rather buy one and chill out for a few years...
BTW, regarding Haswell vs Braswell CPU wars, I found an online benchmark DB and compared Braswell N3150 vs Haswell 2955U vs Broadwell 3205U: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2546&cmp[]=2073&cmp[]=2509. It's nothing definitive (I'm not even sure how this translates to Kodi performance):
Per core the difference is more than twice but in a multithreaded scenario the difference is not huge.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - fritsch - 2015-07-16
2 Threads does not mean 2 times the performance in real world cases :-)
In fact it's damn hard to write a non academic code, that scales 100% linearly with the cpu cores. So there is always some loss.
RE: ASRock Beebox (Braswell) - noggin - 2015-07-16
Yes - if it's a choice between two CPUs with the same benchmarks, but with one hitting that with half the number of cores, I'd go for the one with fewer cores, as it is more likely to deliver snappier real world performance.