Gigabyte MA10-ST0 Performance

A lot has changed since our Intel Atom C3958 16-Core Top End Embedded QAT Linux Benchmarks and Review. One of the most notable market changes is the introduction of the Intel Xeon D-2100 series. We put together a few charts using the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 as the Intel Atom C3958 representative to show just how fast the 16 core Atom is in several of our popular workloads. We now have data from the Xeon D-2100 series as well to help guide your decision.

A benchmark we typically use for this is our Linux kernel compile benchmark. This touches a decent amount of the total system performance factors and is something many Linux admins and developers have the first-hand experience with.

As you can see, the 16 core Intel Atom C3958 SoC on the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 outpaces the 8 thread Xeon D-2123IT even with the Xeon D using quite a bit more power and having essentially twice the available memory bandwidth.

Here is a good example of non-QAT accelerated OpenSSL Verify tests on the same set of CPUs:

Here the performance of the onboard Intel Atom C3958 does not match Xeon D in terms of raw performance, but when it comes to efficiency, we are going to see a different picture.

Gigabyte MA10-ST0 Power Consumption

In terms of power consumption, we wanted to give a view that shows the idle and maximum observed power consumption of the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 with the onboard Intel Atom C3958 compared to other embedded solutions at 4 core and 16 core levels.

Here the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 is the set of bars represented by the Atom C3958. We are seeing maximum power consumption below that of the idle power consumption of our Intel Xeon D-2123IT test bed. That shows how the Atom series can provide a lot of value, especially in power constrained scenarios.

Final Words

The Gigabyte MA10-ST0 is an exciting platform for the storage industry. With onboard eMMC one can save all 16 SATA III ports for storage without requiring an additional controller. With both 1GbE and 10GbE networking, the platform can be used to virtualize functions and dedicate NICs or provide link aggregation to multiple network endpoints. Using the Intel Atom C3958 means that this platform has a powerful 16 core processor with Intel QAT onboard. This is exactly the type of storage platform many of our readers have been waiting for.