GEEKOM Mini IT13 Review: Core i9-13900H in a 4x4 Package

System Performance: Multi-Tasking

One of the key drivers of advancements in computing systems is multi-tasking. On mobile devices, this is quite lightweight - cases such as background email checks while the user is playing a mobile game are quite common. Towards optimizing user experience in those types of scenarios, mobile SoC manufacturers started integrating heterogenous CPU cores - some with high performance for demanding workloads, while others were frugal in terms of both power consumption / die area and performance. This trend is now slowly making its way into the desktop PC space.

Multi-tasking in typical PC usage is much more demanding compared to phones and tablets. Desktop OSes allow users to launch and utilize a large number of demanding programs simultaneously. Responsiveness is dictated largely by the OS scheduler allowing different tasks to move to the background. The processor is required to work closely with the OS thread scheduler to optimize performance in these cases. Keeping these aspects in mind, the evaluation of multi-tasking performance is an interesting subject to tackle.

We have augmented our systems benchmarking suite to quantitatively analyze the multi-tasking performance of various platforms. The evaluation involves triggering a ffmpeg transcoding task to transform 1716 3840x1714 frames encoded as a 24fps AVC video (Blender Project's 'Tears of Steel' 4K version) into a 1080p HEVC version in a loop. The transcoding rate is monitored continuously. One complete transcoding pass is allowed to complete before starting the first multi-tasking workload - the PCMark 10 Extended bench suite. A comparative view of the PCMark 10 scores for various scenarios is presented in the graphs below. Also available for concurrent viewing are scores in the normal case where the benchmark was processed without any concurrent load, and a graph presenting the loss in performance.

Addition of concurrent loading obviously reduces the PCMark 10 scores. The 4P + 8e configurations appear to handle concurrent loading better than the 6P + 8e configuration in the GEEKOM Mini IT13. This results in the systems based on the Core i7-1360P / Core i7-1260P getting ahead of the Mini IT13 when the concurrent loading is active.

Following the completion of the PCMark 10 benchmark, a short delay is introduced prior to the processing of Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 on MS Edge. Similar to the PCMark 10 results presentation, the graph below show the scores recorded with the transcoding load active. Available for comparison are the dedicated CPU power scores and a measure of the performance loss.

The GEEKOM Mini IT13 had the best WebXPRT4 scores in the traditional benchmarking routine. However, with the addition of the concurrent loading, the performance drop is precipitous. The system barely manages to avoid scraping the bottom of the barrel, with most of the power budget getting devoted to the transcoding task.

The final workload tested as part of the multitasking evaluation routine is CINEBENCH R23.

The single-threaded rendering case is negatively affected in a manner similar to that of WebXPRT4. The Mini IT13 ends up in the bottom half of the pack. However, the multi-threaded case sees better behavior and the relative ordering of the systems between the load on / off scenarios is similar.

After the completion of all the workloads, we let the transcoding routine run to completion. The monitored transcoding rate throughout the above evaluation routine (in terms of frames per second) is graphed below.

On the positive side, the drop in transcoding frame rate for the GEEKOM Mini IT13 is not as heavy as what was seen for the AMD-based systems. The 'thread director' scheme appears to work better for the 4P + 8e systems compared to the 6P + 8e configuration in the Mini IT13, but this aspect seems important only in the case of systems with limited power budgets. We see that the Beelink GTR7 with its 65W Ryzen 7 7840HS has a much lower delta in the graphs above.