Note: PC Engines - End of Life

Review

A full review can be found on the IPFire planet: http://planet.ipfire.org/post/pc-engines-apu1c-a-review

Specifications

Processor AMD G-T40E Processor, Dual Core @ 1 GHz clock speed
Processor features 64-bit, PAE and AMD-V capable
Memory 2GB

Benchmarks

Network

The maximum full-duplex throughput of a single network interface is about 450 MBit/s in each direction under 100% CPU load.

IPsec

Cipher Suite Bandwidth
ChaCha20-Poly1305 178 MBit/s
AES-256-GCM 112 MBit/s
AES-256-CBC/SHA512 112 MBit/s
AES-256-CBC/SHA256 100 MBit/s
CAMELLIA-256-CBC/SHA512 110 MBit/s
AES-128-GCM 143 MBit/s
AES-128-CBC/SHA512 120 MBit/s
AES-128-CBC/SHA256 113 MBit/s
CAMELLIA-128-CBC/SHA256 110 MBit/s

Storage

The system has been installed with a SuperSSpeed S238G 16GB SSD. There is an SD card slot available as well as the system is able to boot from USB.

Benchmark

[root@ipfire ~]# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1492 MB in  2.00 seconds = 746.86 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 520 MB in  3.00 seconds = 173.27 MB/sec

Networking

The system comes with three Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06) chips (PCI ID: 10ec:8168).

The network performance is very poor as the system is not able to utilise the network adapters at full speed.

iperf

During this test, the CPU load of one core is at 100% (sys), the other core at about 40% (sys) and the entire system almost unresponsive. When other processes are using the CPU the max. speed at one interface goes down to only 330 Mbits/s (unidirectional).

[root@ipfire ~]# iperf -c 192.168.180.214 -t 60
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.180.214, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 77.8 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  5] local 192.168.180.207 port 48391 connected with 192.168.180.214 port 5001
Waiting for server threads to complete. Interrupt again to force quit.
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  5]  0.0-60.0 sec  4.72 GBytes   676 Mbits/sec

Temperature

The system provides a K10 temperature sensor that measures the temperature of the CPU. The SSD that is used in this system also provides its temperature via SMART.

In contrast to its predecessor, the ALIX, the APU system gets hot. With the default aluminium case come two heat pads and a big block of aluminium that had to be placed between the CPU, chipset and case. Therefore, it heats the bottom of the case, which has to be taken care of when the system is installed.

When the system is idle, the temperature is about 55°C and goes up to over 70°C when under full load (20°C room temperature). The temperature of the SSD is 36°C at average.

Power Consumption

The system comes with a 12V, 2A external power supply and consumes 8 watts when idle and about 12 watts when operating with some load.

Installing cpufrequtils will decrease the clock speed of the CPU to 800 MHz, but that does not save any energy.

Cryptography

The system does not provide a Hardware Random Number Generator nor any instructions that speed up encryption and decryption.

openssl Performance

[root@ipfire ~]# openssl speed -elapsed -evp aes-256-cbc
You have chosen to measure elapsed time instead of user CPU time.
Doing aes-256-cbc for 3s on 16 size blocks: 509401 aes-256-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-256-cbc for 3s on 64 size blocks: 413263 aes-256-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-256-cbc for 3s on 256 size blocks: 235771 aes-256-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-256-cbc for 3s on 1024 size blocks: 87271 aes-256-cbc's in 3.00s
Doing aes-256-cbc for 3s on 8192 size blocks: 12526 aes-256-cbc's in 3.00s
OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
built on: Sat Mar  8 14:34:18 GMT 2014
options:bn(64,32) md2(int) rc4(idx,int) des(ptr,risc1,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB_SHARED -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DSSL_FORBID_ENULL -DHAVE_CRYPTODEV -DUSE_CRYPTODEV_DIGEST -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -Wall -O2 -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fPIC -fstack-protector-all --param=ssp-buffer-size=4  -march=i586 -fomit-frame-pointer -DPURIFY
The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes   8192 bytes
aes-256-cbc       2716.81k     8816.28k    20119.13k    29788.50k    34204.33k