The main advantage of the Alder Lake N CPUs, like N100, N97 etc. is that they are very cheap, cheaper than the Arm CPUs of comparable speed, so they have made t

The main advantage of the Alder Lake N CPUs, like N100, N97 etc. is that they are very cheap, cheaper than the Arm CPUs of comparable speed, so they have made the latter not competitive in most cases, because they are both slower and more expensive and only their somewhat lower idle power consumption can make them preferable in certain cases (a properly configured Alder Lake N computer should have an idle power under 5 W, but going much lower than that is unlikely). A few months ago Intel has launched a refresh of Alder Lake N, with the code name Amston Lake, which are branded as belonging to the Atom x7000 series and Radxa said that there will be future variants of Radxa X4 that will use Amston Lake. An alternative to Radxa X4 for the cases when its minimum size and its minimum price are not essential is Odroid H4 ($100 without memory) or Odroid H4+ ($140 without memory). That has the Nano-ITX size (5" by 5") and a big heatsink that can work even passively, fanless. The Alder Lake N/Amston Lake CPUs have the advantage of peripherals with higher speed than any competing Arm CPUs. Radxa X4 has 3 independent 10 Gb/s USB ports plus 2.5 Gb/s Ethernet plus 32 Gb/s M.2 PCIe socket. The best competing Arm-based computers, with RK3588 or with MediaTek Genio 1200 have at most 3 independent 5 Gb/s USB ports. All the Arm-based boards that appear to have many USB ports incorporate an USB hub, so those ports are not independent and their aggregate throughput is limited to 5 Gb/s. Another great advantage is that the Intel GPU is not only much faster than the Arm GPUs, but it has public documentation and it has much better software support.