LattePanda Mu Intel N100 SoM and carrier board review – Part 2: Ubuntu 24.04

We’ve already checked out the hardware for LattePanda Mu and tested it on Windows 11 using both the Lite Carrier Board and Full-Function Evaluation in the first part of the review. We’ve now had time to test the LattePanda Mu Intel N100 board with Ubuntu 24.04 to see how it performs in Linux with the following tests:

• Initial system information
• Benchmarks for CPU, disks, peripherals, and networking (GbE and WiFi)
• Web and multimedia usage
• Power consumption

Since LattePanda Mu is an x86 machine, we can create a boot disk from the Ubuntu 24.04 ISO as we would on a PC.

LattePanda Mu – Ubuntu 24.04 system information

The installation went smoothly, and upon completion, we checked basic system information.

Ubuntu 24.04 was installed on the 64MB eMMC flash, and only 933MB of the 8GB RAM was used by the system.

The inxi command allows us to check other devices in the system:

LattePanda Mu benchmarks on Ubuntu 24.04

Let’s start benchmarks with Thomas Kaiser’s sbc-bench.sh script and the LattePanda Mu fitted with its active cooler:

The CPU temperature goes up 84°C with the 7-zip multi-core benchmark, and the CPU frequency gradually drops to around 2,900 MHz at 75°C, while it was 3,100 MHz at 60°C and gradually decreases to 2,900 MHz when the temperature is over 75°C showing active cooler is sufficient to cool the system, but power limits come into play. The test room was at an ambient temperature of approximately 29°C and the fan was working all the time during the test.

The results for memory bandwidth, 7-zip, and OpenSSD for the LattePanda Mu are as expected compared to other Alder Lake-N systems we’ve reviewed in Linux.

Storage (eMMC, NVMe SSD) performance testing

We’ll use iozone3 to test the eMMC flash performance with parameters to disable caching:

The 64GB eMMC flash achieved around 301 MB/s for reads, and around 104 MB/s for writes within the stated speeds of eMMC 5.1 flash.

We repeated the test with the same WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD as used in Windows:

The WD_BLACK SN770 NVMe SSD supports PCIe Gen 4.0 x4 with a sequential read speed of up to 4,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 2,000 MB/s. However, since the LattePanda Mu board only supports PCIe 3.0 x4 due to the Intel N100 SoC’s limitation, and the measured read speed is around 2.994 GB/s and the write speed is 1.742 GB/s, very similar to the results we got with CrystalDiskMark benchmarks on Windows 11.

Web browsing performance

We’ll use Speedometer 2.0 to check the performance of each web browser. On Ubuntu 24.04, only Firefox comes pre-installed by default, and so we installed Chromium ourselves.

181 runs per minute on Chromium is about 12% higher than the score on Firefox (160 runs per minute)

The Firefox score is about 3 times higher than the Raspberry Pi 5 board which scored 56 points (in November 2023).

Graphics testing

glmark2-es2-wayland

We tested with the board with the glmark2-es2-wayland command to test the performance. The glmark2-es-wayland score is 3,220 points higher than the Raspberry Pi 5 (2,036 points), but lower than the RK3588-based NanoPi R6S SBC which scored as high as 4,500 points.

Note that glmark2-es2-wayland can be useful to compare Arm and x86 boards, but considering GPUs on x86 usually support OpenGL (instead of just OpenGL ES), it may not be relevant when comparing with other x86 platforms or overall graphics performance.

WebGL Aquarium

So let’s switch to the WebGL aquarium demo on Chromium where the LattePanda Mu achieved 37 fps with 30,000 fish. This compares to 31 fps with 5,000 fish on the NanoPi R6S SBC.

Video playback with YouTube and local file

A 4K 30 FPS video could play in Chromium without any frames dropped.

Switching to a 4K 60 FPS video played with some minimal stuttering barely noticeable to the eye, and the “Stats for Nerds” overlay reported about 4.5% of frames dropped.

We then played an H.264 1920 x 1080 video with VLC, it can be played well with very few dropped frames.

Note that the fan runs at full speed as soon as we start playing a video, in this case, a “Big Bug Bunny” sample. The audio worked fine as well through HDMI.

A 4Kp30 H.265 file played without any lag and very few dropped frames were reported in the Statistics tab of the Media Information window.

Networking performance

We used the iperf3 utility to test gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking using the iperf3 program. Note the Full-Function Evaluation board supports 2.5Gbps Ethernet, but we only had a gigabit Ethernet switch for this review, so it was only tested at 1Gbps. A Xiaomi Router AX3200 router was used for testing.

WiFi 5 (5 GHz) was also tested with iperf3:

Note the LattePanda Mu does not come with built-in WiFi, we used an M.2 RTL8822CE (Wi-Fi 5) module for testing.

Checking out the GPIO in Linux

DFRobot provides very little information from LattePanda Mu’s GPIO, UART, I2C, and SPI. We just know the board offers the following interfaces:

• 4x UART
• 4x I2C
• Up to 64x GPIO

What’s missing is a document that clearly explains how to use those. All we have is the Dev Status page that shows some interfaces are not supported yet (including GPIO!), but I2C, SPI, and UART can already be used. We’ll try our best to test it out I2C, by first checking whether I2C devices are listed:

We then installed the i2c-tools utility to check the I2C information for several I2C devices of the LattePanda Mu, and I2C-5 and I2C-7 show some connected devices.

We tried to connect an I2C proximity sensor to the board, but it was not detected. We need to wait for more information from DFRobot for further testing, and we did not test the UART and GPIO sections.

LattePanda Mu’s power consumption with Ubuntu 24.04

The LattePanda Mu’s power consumption in Linux (Ubuntu 24.04) was measured with a USB power meter.

• Power off – 0.33 Watt
• Booting – 9.9 Watts
• Idle – 5.6 Watts (connected to HDMI, WiFi, Ethernet only)
• YouTube 4K 60FPS in Chromium (fullscreen) –  20 Watts on average
• 7-Zip Benchmark (multi-core)  – 22 Watts on average

Conclusion

The Intel N100-powered Lattepanda Mu SBC works well with Ubuntu 24.04.  It supported all peripherals we tried since all necessary drivers are available. The Ubuntu 24.04 performance test results were close to those on Windows 11.

There were a few downsides too. First, we failed to install the board in a mini-ITX case because the Full Carrier board is in the mini-ITX form factor, but the layout of the ports did not meet the motherboard standards, so it could not be assembled in the specific case we tried. Then GPIO support and related documentation are close to inexistent, so we could not test it properly. We may update the review once additional details are provided by DFRobot/LattePanda.

The LattePanda Mu Compute Module can be especially useful to companies designing custom products, as they only need to design a custom carrier board with a 260-pin SO-DIMM connector for the CPU module and route signals such as USB, PCIe, and GPIOs.

We’d like to thank DFRobot for sending the LattePanda Mu module, carrier boards, and accessories for review. The LattePanda Mu x86 Compute Module can be purchased for $139 on DFRobot, but most people will first purchase a complete kit that can be customized, and for instance, a kit with the LattePanda Mu SoM, Full-Function carrier board, heatsink, and 19W/90A power supply can be had for $274.90. Alternatively, you’ll find a $199 kit on Amazon with the SoM, Lite carrier board, and active cooler.

CNXSoft: This review is a translation – with a few additional insights – of the original article on CNX Software Thailand by Arnon ThongTem, edited by Suthinee Kerdkaew.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress