Obsession with Handheld Computers
Preserving the handheld heritage of the computer revolution.
For the past couple of years I’ve been using 7-inch handhelds from One-Netbook as my main workstation.
The devices do their job pretty well. And from an aesthetic point of view, I find these devices quite pleasing. The only thing that bothered me was a bit boring lid with no marks what so ever. Therefore I decided to put my custom logo using a laser engraving technique. The lady in the engraving is Themis (quite unusual, without a sword and with open eyes).
"An ultra-mobile PC (ultra-mobile personal computer or UMPC) is a miniature version of a pen computer, a class of laptop whose specifications were launched by Microsoft and Intel in spring 2006." (c) Wikipedia. That was the dawn of the first UMPC epoch. This epoch did not last too long, because in the early 2010s major UMPC manufacturers ended its product lines. Few years later new manufacturers emerged and recreated UMPC market. The major one was the Chinese company GPD. GPD started the second UMPC epoch by releasing gaming handheld GPD Win in 2016 and the general purpose device GPD Pocket in 2017. Since then a whole bunch of UMPC devices were released. In this article we will compare performance of various UMPC devices from the second epoch: including the very first GPD Win and the most powerful UMPC up do the date – One-Netbook OneGx1 Pro.
Disclaimer. This article is not a comprehensive performance analysis of the 2-nd era UMPCs. All the test items are taken from my collection. Therefore the number of test items is quite limited. In case I add any new corresponding items to my collection, this benchmark survey might be extended as well.
The following programs were used to test CPU, Memory, Disk performance:
The following programs were used to test 3D performance:
3DMark with default settings. Version details:
Unigine Heaven Benchmark at the resolution of 1280×720; version 4.0.
Processor: Intel Atom x7-Z8750
BIOS version: AMI 5.11 8/7/2017
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363
Intel HD Graphics 405 driver version: 20.19.15.4444
Processor: Intel Atom x7-Z8750
BIOS version: AMI 5.11, 25.05.2017
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.18363 Build 18363
Intel HD Graphics 405 driver version: 20.19.15.4549
CPU: Intel Celeron N4100
BIOS version: AMI 02.07.2019
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.17763 Build 17763
Intel UHD Graphics 600 driver version: 26.20.100.7584
TDP: 10W
Processor: Intel Core m3-8100Y
BIOS version: AMI 5.12 12.09.2020
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel UHD Graphics 615 driver version: 27.20.100.8681
Processor: Intel Core m3-8100Y
BIOS version: AMI 5.12 04.03.2019
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel UHD Graphics 600 driver version: 26.20.100.7584
Processor: Intel N100
BIOS version: 5.25 MH-ADL81 1.08 x64
OS: Windows 10 Pro Version 22H2 Build 19045.5131
Intel UHD Graphics driver version: 32.0.101.6129
Processor: Intel Core i7-1160G7
BIOS version: AMI 5.19 17.12.2020
OS: Windows 10 Professional Version 10.0.19042 Build 19042
Intel Iris Xe Graphics driver version: 27.20.100.8680
Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 7 8840U @28W
RAM: 32Gb 7500Mhz
BIOS version: MiniEDP 1.66 x64
OS: Windows 11 Home 23H2 Build 22631.4602
AMD GPU driver version: 24.12.1
Processor performance in multithreaded mode has at least doubled from 2021 to 2024. At the same time, the performance of a single core is barely noticeable and is growing at a much less significant rate.
The read and write speeds of solid-state drives have also almost doubled and reached incredible values of about 3 GB/sec.
Few notes:
Since the GPD Win (released in 2017) performance of UMPCs for 2024 has changed as follows:
