Review LattePanda Mu Review: Faster than Raspberry Pi 5, But Much More Expensive

[Admin]

The new LattePanda Mu is powered by an Alder Lake N100 CPU and its claims of being twice as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 5 are not without merit.

LattePanda Mu Review: Faster than Raspberry Pi 5, But Much More Expensive : Read more

 

[SyCoREAPER]

Who cares if the Latte is more expensive. Pi 5 misses the point of its own existence, cheap but powerful. The balance for Pi is gone between cost and performance.
So with the Latte your just deciding to you want to spend a little more.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for the review, though it raises almost as many questions as it answers, for me.

If you want NVMe on the evaluation board, use

The paragraph literally ends there. Did you mean to say "... board, use the Lite Carrier"?

The LattePanda Mu uses 4.9W at idle and 15.8W under stress.

How was this measured? What was the stress test and did you measure at the wall?

I have to wonder whether you used a CPU-only stress test, because the iGPU on my N97 board can use even more power than the 4 CPU cores. For me to max the power consumption, I need to simultaneously stress both the CPU cores and the iGPU! Furthemore, I found that different GPU workloads use markedly different amounts of power, even when GPU utilization is nearly 100% in all cases.

The promotional materials for the LattePanda Mu claim that the board has a TDP of 35W, but even with our 19V, 90W LattePanda PSU and some unsubtle tweaks in the BIOS, we were unable to trigger power draws that high.

Did your tweaks possibly include raising the power limits of the SoC? I've had limited success by increasing PL1 and PL2. The main effect I've observed is simply that setting higher values prevents the CPU cores from throttling when there's a heavy GPU workload running at the same time.

Also, if the 35 W board power refers to the carrier board, then they must also be accounting for the maximum amount of power the peripherals use. On my N97 board, I've seen a CPU + GPU workload use up to 54 W at the wall, if I raise PL1/PL2 from their defaults. If I account for the PSU's supposed 89% efficiency, that translates into 48 W board power. Note that the N97 has a PL1 that's double that of the N100, although I think they both have a recommended PL2 of 25 W. Interestingly, my board has a default PL2 of 15 W, but then its heatsink really isn't very good.

Ubuntu 24.04, which we did try to install, but it crashed.

I installed Kubuntu 24.04 on my N97 board, mere days after it was released. The installation and subsequent usage has been flawless. Kubuntu is simply Ubuntu, but with KDE serving as the default desktop environment. They both use the same package repositories.

the extra power comes at a price. The $190 bundle of the Primer Carrier and Mu is the best option to get started with

I'd recommend people to consider the ODROID-H4. The base H4 includes the faster N97 CPU and sells for just $99. Unlike the LattePanda Mu, it lacks memory, but that's a plus because you can use a 32 GB or 48 GB SO-DIMM (as opposed to the Mu's meager 8 GB) and it accepts regular DDR5, which is lower-latency than the LPDDR5 used by the LattePanda Mu. Even if you add a $45 Crucial 16 GB DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM, you're still at just $144. Then, add a case and power supply for another $19.40, which brings you up to $163.40. Now, if you add a $37 Team Group MP33 M.2 2280 512GB PCIe 3.0 SSD, you have a fully-functional PC for just a hair over $200, and it also has double the RAM and is 200 MHz faster than the Mu!

ODROID-H4 – ODROID

www.hardkernel.com

If you need even more power, you can step up to the ODROID-H4 Ultra, for $220, and get 8 cores, a 33% bigger iGPU, and yet another 200 MHz single-core frequency limit (bringing us up to 3.8 GHz, or 400 MHz above the N100). Estimated system price: $320.

Note that while the ODROID-H4 boards aren't mini-ITX, you can buy a [url="https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/h4-mini-itx-kit/]mini-ITX adapter kit[/url] for only $15.

BTW, the N97 board I mentioned above isn't the H4, but rather a mini-ITX board made by a company called Jetway.

 

[bit_user]

Who cares if the Latte is more expensive. Pi 5 misses the point of its own existence, cheap but powerful. The balance for Pi is gone between cost and performance.

I think you are the one missing the point of the Pi's existence! Since the day the first Pi was released, they were never the fastest, nor the cheapest SBCs out there. What they had was enough performance, a very accessible price point, compact size, low power, lots of features, a large market for add-on products (i.e. hats, cases, peripherals), and a large user community. All of those things are still true, although the power consumption and base price have gotten a little bit away from them, though I see 4 GB Pi 5 boards currently in stock and selling for a mere $60.

Focusing in on price, for a lot of people and applications, that's one of the main limiting factors. You also shouldn't ignore size and power. For lots of embedded applications, small size and low power are the main factors and compute performance really isn't.

So with the Latte your just deciding to you want to spend a little more.

I certainly did, but I don't pretend it's the right decision for everyone.

 

[abufrejoval]

I've always wanted to have some first hand idea about the power of the Gracemont cores, but didn't want to buy a Nxxx board just to find out.

I got several Alder Lake systems, but unfortunately you can't just boot them with all P-cores disabled (the opposite is trivial) to simulate the various Nxxx variants.

So I pulled out Project Lasso and used that to dig a bit into P vs E vs combined vs. RP5/OP5+ on an i7-12700H.

And yeah, those 8 E-cores pack a punch and with an Alder Lake host, they might also benefit from a much beefier RAM controller and dual channels (2x 32GB DDR4-3200) vs a normal Nxxx system.

But it comes at the cost of power consumption, going all out with 8 E-cores that chip consumes 41 Watts, 35 of which HWinfo is told are pure CPU consumption (it's an Erying Mini-ITX running the mobile SoC set to 120/95 Watts for PL2/PL1).

That's quite a bit above the 12 Watts I see at the wall plug for both the RP5 and the OP5+ for a max load.

I believe Intel now, when they say that the E-cores are pretty near Skylake cores in terms of IPC and even clock ranges.

That is quite a performance improvement over the previous Atoms, where I have hardware for pretty near every generation.
But it's peak performance comes at significantly higher power consumptions vs. previous generations, too. Most of those stuck to 10 Watts TDP and only improved the effiency and iGPU capabilities per generation.

Using potentially extra Watts would be perfectly ok, even great, if you're given complete control and can trade energy consumption vs. compute power to match your use case.

And there a really interesting comparison would require running those Gracemont cores at around 10 Watts of PL2 and PL1 to see if they can compete with these ARM devices, which are using quite conservative process nodes, after all.

I do like the modularity of the Lattes a bit, but there is no way I'd buy one with less than 32GB of RAM. And I guess I'd prefer going for a classic Mini-ITX board or perhaps a NUC to have the flexibility where I need it.

That never included the GPIO, which might be the key differentiator for many... if they make it work.

 

[bit_user]

I believe Intel now, when they say that the E-cores are pretty near Skylake cores in terms of IPC and even clock ranges.

In ServeTheHome's testing, a N97 performs almost identically to a Skylake i5-6600T, which has a TDP of 35 W, in multiple benchmarks.

But it's peak performance comes at significantly higher power consumptions vs. previous generations, too. Most of those stuck to 10 Watts TDP and only improved the effiency and iGPU capabilities per generation.

When I set my PL1/PL2 high, my N97's all core-clocks on a vector FP workload max out at 2.9 GHz and package power is somewhere in the 13 - 14 W range. At the stock PL1 of 12 W, they settle at 2.83 W. At the 6 W equivalent to the N100, they drop to 2.1 GHz. Now that I think of it, I should test this for different power limits & workloads and post up some graphs.

I do like the modularity of the Lattes a bit, but there is no way I'd buy one with less than 32GB of RAM. And I guess I'd prefer going for a classic Mini-ITX board or perhaps a NUC to have the flexibility where I need it.

Consider an ODROID-H4 + mini-ITX adapter kit.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

I think you are the one missing the point of the Pi's existence! Since the day the first Pi was released, they were never the fastest, nor the cheapest SBCs out there. What they had was enough performance, a very accessible price point, compact size, low power, lots of features, a large market for add-on products (i.e. hats, cases, peripherals), and a large user community. All of those things are still true, although the power consumption and base price have gotten a little bit away from them, though I see 4 GB Pi 5 boards currently in stock and selling for a mere $60.

Focusing in on price, for a lot of people and applications, that's one of the main limiting factors. You also shouldn't ignore size and power. For lots of embedded applications, small size and low power are the main factors and compute performance really isn't.


I certainly did, but I don't pretend it's the right decision for everyone.

I'm not missing the point, I know the target audience. My point was one of the things that make it appealing were it's capabilities at the price point and that's purely what I'm looking at it from (compared to now other products). There was no completion when they first came out.

Today, that price is nearly doubled and IMO no longer a no brainer when there is competition at the same price or a bit more that crushes it.

The one thing they definitely have going for them over other SB's is support and user base being one of the most popular.

 

[bit_user]

There was no completion when they first came out.

Not true. ODROID beat them by several years, but SBCs in general are nothing new.

What made Raspberry Pi special was the attention they brought to the educational market, plus the fact that it ran a pretty much standard desktop Debian distro. I think the Pi's features & specs vs. price also made it a somewhat unique value.

Today, that price is nearly doubled and IMO no longer a no brainer when there is competition at the same price or a bit more that crushes it.

IMO, that competition has primarily been coming from Amlogic and Rockchip-based boards, not Intel ones. The price differential between Pi and Intel boards is still quite substantial.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

To each their own and their goals. What made it appealing to me was a literal computer for $35 that I could tinker with, do projects, etc..

Today people have gotten so creative with even smaller boards, I personally don't have a foreseeable use for them anymore, I'd spend the extra money for something more powerful and that extra money would cover 2-3 generations (potentially) of HP that each Pi revision afforded.

 

[bit_user]

To each their own and their goals. What made it appealing to me was a literal computer for $35 that I could tinker with, do projects, etc..

Yeah, I was used to running Ubuntu (also Debian-based) and blown away that a $35 Pi + SD card could run most of the same software packages as my PC!

Funny story: I once tried compiling some fairly simple C++ code on the original Pi. It took so long that I decided something must be broken and killed it. After trying it on a few other machines, I decided to give it another go. It took a whopping 20 seconds to compile a file that compiled in less than 2 seconds on the aged desktop I was using at the time.

Today people have gotten so creative with even smaller boards, I personally don't have a foreseeable use for them anymore, I'd spend the extra money for something more powerful and that extra money would cover 2-3 generations (potentially) of HP that each Pi revision afforded.

Pi does have their Compute Module & Zero line of SBCs, which are significantly cheaper, not to mention the Pico (which is mainly an Arduino competitor). I'm also very interested in see what they do with the cash infusion they get from the IPO. I think Broadcom has really been holding them back, so maybe they'll finally set sail for greener pastures (to mix metaphors).

 

[Eternalighty]

I find that Chinese products have great flexibility but their software is lacking. This product has so much I/O it's fantastic. I'm just mad that they used a lower end cpu and put the ram on the module. if it was a n97 and 16gb I'd snap it up.
I really like the OdroidH4 it's perfect from a cpu memory angle, but where is the I/O???
you have 4 pcie lanes, 1 m.2 slot. where is the wifi and or slot for 4G/5G. it's soo close to perfection.

 

[bit_user]

I find that Chinese products have great flexibility but their software is lacking. This product has so much I/O it's fantastic.

The SoC only has x9 PCIe 3.0 lanes, so it's not clear to me whether some of those features are mutually exclusive. You'd do well to check the owners manual before committing.

I'm just mad that they used a lower end cpu and put the ram on the module. if it was a n97 and 16gb I'd snap it up.

Oh, I have a board with the N97 and it's not that much better. I'm going to post up some graphs showing how much little additional performance you get for double the power. It's like 35% multi-threaded. Single-threaded, it's theoretically 5.9%, but I'm having trouble getting my N97 to boost to the specified 3.6 GHz under normal operation.

I really like the OdroidH4 it's perfect from a cpu memory angle, but where is the I/O???

They provide up to 4x SATA ports, NVMe M.2 at up to x4 (2280, PCIe 3.0), eMMC, pluggable DDR5 SO-DIMM supporting up to 48 GB, the same dual 2.5 Gigabit ethernet as the bigger Mu carrier, the option of passive cooling, and the option of using a mini-ITX case, if you don't want to use their proprietary cases/form factor. If I were buying something today, I'd opt for the ODROID-H4 Ultra.

you have 4 pcie lanes, 1 m.2 slot. where is the wifi and or slot for 4G/5G. it's soo close to perfection.

For wifi, the option they offer is USB. It has 2x USB 2.0 ports and 2x USB 3.0 ports. You could use something like this, in order to get Wifi 6:

https://www.newegg.com/wavlink-693x1-usb-3-0/p/0XM-00B5-00061
​

Don't tell me you had anything better planned for both USB 3 ports?