LabVIEW
Windows PC recommendations for Runtime application
Solved!
@JohnatanBravo wrote:
@GerdW wrote:
Hi Bravo,
Talk with your IT department about your requirements!
You will write down your requirements, the IT department will write its own (Win11…) and together you can search for the cheapest/smallest possible solution…
Thanks, I will definitely get them involved at some stage, as they will need to set up this PC to be able to run on company's network. Their only requirement is Win11, other than that we usually spec our own PCs. I'm just wondering if that Intel N100 CPU would be up to the task.
It's a 12th gen Intel Alder Lake, 4 core CPU, which used to be a pretty nice mobile CPU a few years ago. The integrated Intel® UHD Graphics controller won't make you happy if you try to install a high end 3D game on it, but for a LabVIEW user interface or two it is already serious overkill. The 500GB SSD should be more than enough to install the necessary NI drivers and LabVIEW runtime but would feel pretty small as development PC for a serious NI development platform.
So I do not see how that should be a problem in itself. More important is the quality of the used chipset, manufacturing, hardware component selection and support for firmware and OS drivers. And that is where things can go wrong. Personally, these things would seem cheap enough to me, to jump the trigger and order one and do a test setup where you intensively test everything. And I mean intensively, not just trying to install stuff and conclude that if there are no errors that all is fine.
Aside from possible quality issues of the product itself or selected components (cheap SSD for instance are a reality that can be rather annoying for a production type system that is often powered on 24/7), I would not expect this to be unsuitable to run even more demanding LabVIEW applications than what you describe.
As an example, at the former employer we were always buying Dell Laptops. Pretty good machines overall that could take a bit of rough handling. Then suddenly we got a new model that very consistently started to crash randomly after only a few months of operations. Not just a single machine but every single machine of that model series. After a few such incidents someone opened the machines to find that Dell had used some no-name SSD drives in there. Turned out that Dell had had difficulties to source the usual brand SSDs they were normally installing and had resolved to install some cheap no-names instead, in order to fulfill their shipment promises. After replacing those SSDs with the real deal, in our case we simply got the Pro line of Samsung drives, those machines all performed perfectly again without any crashes whatsoever anymore.
I agree that an N100 would be plenty. I have benchmarked some of my LabVIEW programs even on a 2009 vintage Atom N450 processor and the N100 is probably 20x faster. (here are all my benchmarks)
The nice thing is that the N100 only uses about 6W, making thermal management trivial, even in very small form factors.
Today, even the slowest processor you can buy will run circles around anything from 10 years ago. My first LabVIEW program from the mid nineties was running for almost 20 years on a 100Mhz Pentium 1 with 64MB or RAM and a 1 or 2GB HD, controlling an EPR spectrometer using AI (no, not that one!), AO, GPIB, and serial all at once, and allowing to analyze/print/compare other data while acquisition was running in parallel. (Yes, that CPU only had one core!)
Compared to gaming, image/video editing or even rendering complicated web pages, simple instrument control is peanuts. You'll probably use less that 5% of the processor.
On an interesting side note, we just got a new Laptop for under $600 and it came with a Ryzen 7 8845HS. This is the first Laptop in my list that beat my $6000+ Intel Xeon workhorse from yesteryear (two 8 core CPUs., Xeon E5-2687W) while consuming 15% of the power (45W vs 300W). 😄
From your requirements and wish for a small device some form of NUC sounds like it should work. Something like this maybe: ASUS NUC 14 Essential N150 Barebone (90AR00M2-M000F0) | Dustin.se
