Intel Processor N100 With 4 E-Cores Performs On Par With 65W Core i5-7400 At Just 6 Watts

Intel's Alder Lake-N CPUs have been out for a while and benchmarks of the Processor N100 show performance similar to older Core i5 chips at sub-10W.

The Intel Processor N100 is one of the four Alder Lake-N chips that are available for low-power platforms. The chips are based on the same Intel 7 process node as the rest of the Alder Lake & Raptor Lake chips but the main difference is that instead of using a hybrid P-Core & E-Core combo, these chips rely solely on the Gracemont E-Cores. This takes away their SMT capabilities since the E-Core design lacks them.

In terms of specifications, the Intel Processor N100 CPU offers 4 cores, 4 threads, a 6 MB Smart cache, and a maximum frequency of 3.40 GHz. The N200 is the fastest of the two and offers the same specs but with a 3.70 GHz clock speed. The chip has a TDP of 6W and supports DDR4, DDR5, and up to LPDDR5 memory in single-channel.

Based on some of the recent Geekbench 6 entries, we get a taste of what the sub-10W CPU has to offer. In terms of single-core performance, the chip yields a performance score of 1300 points and in multi-threaded tests, this score extends to 3450 points. For comparison, we can use scores from the Core i5-7400 and Core i3-9100, both of which are 4 core and 4 thread offerings too. The single-core tests for these chips are rated at an average of 1139/1343 points in single-core and 3133/3598 points in multi-threaded tests.

So we can see that the Intel Alder Lake-N "Processor N100" competes on par with these chips but the most important thing is that these older 14nm chips had a base TDP rating of 65W & they ran close to 80-90W in actual workloads. Meanwhile, the Processor N100 has a TDP of just 6W and this goes off to show how E-Cores can deliver good multi-threading performance while keeping chips efficient. Intel has now been using E-Cores on two generations, Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, and will continue doing so in the future while AMD also plans to adopt a similar approach for its future CPU lineups.

News Source: ITHome