Can my pc run labview

[MaximPrincen]

Hi everyone,

lately i have been very busy with looking for mini-pc's that can run LabView. I think i have found one : http://www.kangaroo.cc/kangaroo.php

This pc is a kangaroo and has a Intel Atom™ x5-Z8500 Processor (2M Cache, up to 2.24 GHz). Should this pc be able to run LabView without problems?

Does the graphics card need to be good for LabView? i don't have any ideas.

Thanks for your help.
Maxim

[Sam_Sharp]

Are you talking about a PC to develop LabVIEW on, or a PC to run an application built in LabVIEW?

While I think the specs of that PC will run LabVIEW - I don't think it will be a great experience due to the slow CPU / small amount of RAM. Remember also that only newer versions of LabVIEW are supported by Windows 10. If the Hard Drive isn't very big or very fast it can make LabVIEW take a long time to load (I don't know how eMMC compares to an SSD). Certain toolkits, like the FPGA toolkit, take up lots of memory - the installation is something like 15-20GB.

You don't need a powerful graphics card to run LabVIEW - but we have seen issues in the past where updating/drawing graphs can be quite slow if using an integrated (i.e. the one on the CPU) graphics card. Especially when part of your limited RAM is being shared to the graphics.

In short - Yes, I think it will run - but I wouldn't want to use it for any serious development / applications - I'd probably want to look at something like at least an i5 processor and 4GB RAM.

What sort of hardware would you be using with it? You don't have ethernet and only 2 USB ports which would easily be taken up with a Keyboard/Mouse. USB devices sometimes don't play well with USB hubs so if you wanted to connect USB DAQ/USB to Serial converters you might have problems there.

[crossrulz]

Are you looking to run the full LabVIEW environment or just an executable that you made?  That harddrive is pretty small (32GB).  I doubt you could get the full developer suite on there.  And only 2GB of RAM will hurt you as well (especially since it is shared with the graphics).

If you are looking for a computer to run the LabVIEW IDE, get a good gaming computer.  You will want the at least decent graphics card and plenty of RAM.

If you are looking for a computer to run the LabVIEW Run Time Engine and an application you compiled to an executable, this might just work for you, obviously depending on what the application does.

[Nghtcrwlr]

I once used a Mini PC Intel ATOM J1900 2Ghz & 32GB for an Image Processing application and it worked. But the computer freezed a few times and the application crashed many times during running the application.

[billko]

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@Nghtcrwlr wrote:

I once used a Mini PC Intel ATOM J1900 2Ghz & 32GB for an Image Processing application and it worked. But the computer freezed a few times and the application crashed many times during running the application.

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LOL, I wouldn't exactly call that "working".  😄

[altenbach]

I have a LabVIEW professional development system runing on an old netbook (Atom N450, 0.5MB cache, 1.66GHz, 1GB ram) and it worked OK. We recently upgraded to 2GB (the max supported). This is basically a standalone system to control an instrument, but I did most of the development right there. I did not encounter any problems. Of course the built-in 800x600 screen was unusable for development, so I hooked up an external monitor.

It is not great for number crunching and it is way at the bottom of my benchmark collection, but editing LabVIEW code was no problem.

Your chip seems much more capable with 4 cores and embedded graphics. the 14nm lithography certainly helps for the 2W tdp. mine consumes 2.5x more! 😄

However, I don't see SSE mentioned on the intel datasheet and a web search gives conflicting results. You NEED SSEx to develop. Accdording to this page, it is present, so I don't know why intel does not list it. Even Wikipedia says that cherry trail prcessors support all mayor extensions. Who is right????

(If you ever get such a device, it would be great if you could submit a benchmark result so I can add it to my list)

[altenbach]

OK, I actually bought a kangaroo for my AV system and ran my standard benchmarks. This is a big step up from the old atom (Atom N450) and quite an impressive little machine.

The single-core performance of the Kangaroo (Atom x5-Z8500) is slightly above an old 3GHz P4 and almost 4x the speed of the N450. Running on all four cores brrings it in the middle of the field, and above some of the older Core 2 duo machines (e.g. above the T7600).

Have a look at all my benchmarks and sort by the "parallel" column to get a good prespective. This thing is impressive for a 2W tdp(incl graphics!) fanless little box based on 14nm process for <$100.

In any case, everything runs well and windows 10 is very responsive on it. It good enough for my purpose, but for more serious develoment work I would probably go for the just released 4GB/64GB "pro" version, but that definitely cost more and does not even come with an OS.