While testing various scenarios with Ink and Touch on the CL-900 I am reviewing I found several significant issues with the reliability and consistency of Ink on this tablet.  I reached out to Rob Bushway to discuss his experiences with this device and the digital pen.  He told me he was not experiencing any problems with Ink whatsoever, and in fact the CL-900 was turning him into an N-trig believer.  I documented the issues and discussed them with Motion.  After a few questions, they quickly agreed that there is a hardware problem with the digitizer, and are sending out a replacement unit so I may complete my review and analysis.

Because Ink is a significant part of the user experience on this device, Im deferring the usability review until I have a couple of days with the replacement.  In short, what would have been Part 3 now becomes Part 1.5.  Lets talk about performance.

(UPDATE: I received the replacement CL-900, and am in the process of installing the tools I need to finish the usability and user experience portion of the review.  Look for that coming in the next few days.)

 

We need to keep in mind the intent of this mobile computing device.  The CL-900 was created as a light weight device, with long battery life, and ample performance for appropriate tasks.  This is not a desktop replacement, but a powerful companion device that should support us through an entire day without worry.  This means email, documents, notes, but not necessarily heavy-duty analytics, graphics, or development.  With that context in mind, is the Motion Computing CL-900 up to the task?BatteryEach day Ive had the CL-900 I charged it on the docking station overnight, lifted it from that dock in the morning, and never plugged in again throughout the day.  This means the CL-900 was never plugged in from about 5:00am until 6:00pm.  Additionally, I disabled sleep mode, but left the display set to turn off after 10 minutes of inactivity.  During the days my tablet goes with me to meetings, and provides a secondary view of email and other information when Im either not near my primary desktop or it happens to be otherwise busy.  Roughly estimated the tablet is actively used three to four hours a day, and sitting idle (but notin sleep mode) the rest of the day.  In this scenario, the slate had 10 20% battery left at the end of the day.I then used Battery Eater, an application that used OpenGL rendering to put load on a portable device while tracking battery discharge.  It is a reasonable representation of light to medium use of a device, similar to the anecdotal test above.  I disconnected the CL-900 from A/C power in the morning, and left the test running, interacting very casually with the device throughout the day.  I terminated the test at 4:10 pm, 8 1/4 hours later.  The CL-900 still had 6.1% battery charge.  The very linear drop off seen in the graph to the right is indicative of the consistent load provided by OpenGL rendering.  Once I have the replacement unit in hand, I will run and idle discharge graph, and a heavy use discharge graph.The battery life in the CL-900 matches its advertising.  This is a full day device, presuming it isnt being used for watching eight hours of video.  If left with a typical power scheme, where 10 or 15 minutes of idle puts the slate to sleep, you will have computing power throughout the entire work or travel day with a CL-900.

Graphics

The CL-900 has an Intel© Graphics Media Accelerator 600 (PS3.0, VS3.0, PCI, 400 MHz).  This card uses shared system memory (760MB as tested).  The memory bandwidth of this card is a mere 4.2 GB/s.  In my transcoding tests, the CL-900 showed 43kB/s for HD profiles (1280720/30p AAC @ 192kbps).  The Windows Experience sub-score for the graphics card is 2.9.  What do all the numbers mean?  This is a good, not great, graphics sub-system.

The end-user experience arrives at the same conclusion.  For most activities, graphic processing is fine and doesnt interfere.  However, in a few cases such as scrolling a graphic intensive web page the CL-900 will stutter a bit, and not provide a smooth experience.  Its important to understand the impact of these power / performance trade-offs when putting mobile devices in context.

Processor / Memory

The CL-900 is equipped with the Intel© Atom™ Z670 CPU (Peak Processing Performance of 3 GFLOPS).  Running at 1.5 GHz, this CPU has a single core, and supports two threads per core (hyperthreading).  It has 24kb of synchronous, write-through, 6-way integrated data cache, and 512kb of L2 on board 8 way ATC cache.  (Cache memory is shared between the two threads.)  This is a 32 bit processor supporting one channel of DDR2-800 RAM (maximum of 2 GB).  It does not support any Intel virtualization technologies.

Benchmark Results Performance/Speed Processor Windows Experience Index 2.1 Aggregate Arithmetic Performance 3.38 GOPS 2.25 MOPS / MHz Dhrystone 3.62 GIPS 2.41 MIPS / MHz Whetstone iSSE3 3.15 GFLOPS 2.10 MFLOPS / MHz Multi-Media Integer x8 8 MPix / s 5.33 kPix / MHz Multi-Media Float x4 6.2 MPix / s 4.41 kPix / MHz Multi-Media Double x2 1.16 MPix / s 0.78 kPix / MHz

In the real world what all these numbers mean is this isnt a lightening fast, done before you finish clicking piece of hardware.  However, in practice the processor performance is perfectly acceptable.  Running Outlook, OneNote, and Word I seldom saw utilization numbers peaking over 45%.  Occasionally the UI would feel a bit sluggish, but those events tended to be short-lived.  Through four days of using this as my primary portable device I never felt constrained by the processing power.

Storage

Test Performance Buffered Read 171.79 MB/s Sequential Read 169.45 MB/s Random Read 153.00 MB/s Buffered Write 197.22 MB/s Sequential Write 46.1 MB/s Random Write 28.14 MB/s

The non-buffered write tests show considerably lower scores because write verify is turned on by default on this interface.  Once I have the new unit in hand I will disable and re-test.

In short, the IO performance to the disk sub-system goes a long way to bring the overall performance experience up.  This will be discussed in-depth in the next post about usability, including boot and shutdown timings.

Memory

Memory performance in the CL-900 is quite good.  Aggregate memory performance is 1.5 GB/s, providing a Windows Experience Index of 4.2.  The memory bus runs two channels at 400 MHz, for a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth of 4.69 GB/s.  Memory latency was tested at 280.0 ns on both threads of the CPU for random access.

Performance is somewhat limited by the chipset not allowing large memory pages, and the benchmarks show low-bandwidth efficiency.  I will investigate if this is caused by configuration / timing issues.  The real-world numbers are quite good, and contribute to the overall performance of the CL-900.

Summary

I will discuss the usability side of performance in the next post.  In summary, I have no qualms with the performance of the CL-900 when taken in context.  It kept up, and the brief pauses where not an irritant.  Yes, if it had a Core I5 and high-end mobile graphics it would be faster; but slates with specifications at that level run an average of 3 4 hours per charge.

The underlying specifications of the CL-900 tell the story of a device designed to provide full-day mobile computing, which is Motions intent with this device.  The trade-offs made in design, specifications, and ultimately performance all focus on this goal, providing real balance to the overall unit.

The most difficult of these considerations is certainly the video, eschewing power-hungry high-performance GPUs for a perfectly adequate but a bit under-powered video sub-system.  From the WEI scores, you would expect me to be complaining about the CPU, but in practice I seldom saw utilization numbers peak over 45%.  The majority of the time a user works with the CL-900 they will not notice either limitation.  Once in a while when scrolling a graphic-heavy web site or document and the screen stutters a bit, just remember you unplugged the CL-900 six hours ago, and have plenty of battery left.

 

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