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Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison
- magicalhippo 2y agoUnfortunate that an actively cooled N100 was not in the mix, would have been interesting to see how much cooling affects performance. Also, echo the comments on the site, what is up with that naming scheme for these CPUs?
- cromka 2y agoWhy do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!
- johnklos 2y agoTrue. I've wondered the same thing, and always come back to inexpensive Ryzens on ASRock motherboards that I simply underclock.
- benoau 2y agoWe're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.
- shiroiushi 2y agoHow exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
- benoau 2y agoECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).
- sirn 2y agoECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569 Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost. It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.
- justinclift 2y agoThe very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model. The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered. But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
- shiroiushi 2y agoThe problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of terabytes of movies using RAID to protect against drive failures, and run Jellyfin or Plex on it. Plus you can use the box for other regular NAS tasks too, as well as many other convenient applications. Intel chips are virtually required here since AMD chips are useless for transcoding, and require external GPU cards which destroy the system's power efficiency which was one of the main points of getting one of these low-power Intel chips in the first place.
- Teever 2y agoDoesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?
- shiroiushi 2y agoFrom what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.
- adrian_b 2y agoWhile Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application. There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) CPUs.
- shiroiushi 2y agoGood to know!
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- gorgoiler 2y agoI saw this $390 Ryzen NAS enclosure yesterday but it’s never clear with these configurations if the motherboard supports ECC, even if the CPU does: https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-version-of-the-wtr-pro-4-bay-nas/ https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-vers...
- MBCook 2y agoIntel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.
- cromka 2y agoAMD does it in their embedded low-voltage CPUs, which are not easy to be found in regular applications. V2000 and V3000 series have 10W TDP versions. Any ATX solutions are super expensive: https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/592904196/HoneyComb+AMD+V3000+mini+ITX+Quick+Start+Guide#SFP-Modules https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/5...
- cromka 2y agoIntel actually did add ECC in their Atoms, see C3000 for example: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/atom/c-series/c3000-family-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...
- cam_l 2y agoI wonder how ibecc compares with real ecc, now that it's supported for these lower spec chips. Will it help at all or is it a waste of time?
- adrian_b 2y agoIt reduces the memory capacity and the memory performance, in comparison with real ECC. Nevertheless, this will rarely matter for the kind of applications typically run on small computers with Atom CPUs, which are rarely more demanding than a router/firewall or a network-attached storage server. You can see examples of performance decrease with IBECC here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie... For most applications the performance decrease should be less than 10%. The Intel IBECC controller includes a special cache memory, to decrease the number of additional memory accesses required by IBECC. Otherwise the memory performance would have been halved.
- sirn 2y agoSome N100 do have In-Band ECC (which uses the same data lane as regular memory channel, so less usable memory space/effective memory bandwidth), such as the Beelink S12 Pro box (DDR4) and is recognized by EDAC subsystem on Linux. [ 8.485808] [ T703] caller igen6_probe+0x138/0x780 [igen6_edac] mapping multiple BARs [ 8.487601] [ T703] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#0: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT) [ 8.487625] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: HANDLING IBECC MEMORY ERROR [ 8.487626] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: ADDR 0x7fffffffe0 [ 8.487664] [ T703] EDAC igen6: v2.5.1
- cromka 2y agoDDR5 has in-band ECC by default on all platforms, though.
- sirn 2y agoDDR5 doesn't have an In-Band ECC. What they have is On-Die ECC, and is not visible to the memory controller (i.e. error information won't be reported by EDAC), and only corrects 1-bit when they're stored/retrieved, where Side-Band ECC (regular ECC) and In-Band ECC can correct 1-bit and detect 2-bits, and can also correct/detect memory corruption during transit.
- cromka 2y agoOhhh right, right, I had them mixed up! Thanks for the clarification.
- znpy 2y agoI'd rather start seeing ipmi-like controllers rather than ecc memory on high-end/prosumer hardware.
- adrian_b 2y agoThe Alder Lake N CPUs have in-band ECC memory controllers, because they are also sold as Atom CPUs for industrial applications. I do not know if the IBECC controller is functional in all models, but it is usable at least in the models that are marked by Intel (in Intel Ark) as suitable for embedded use, like N97 and i3-N305. The IBECC controller requires BIOS support. Among the computers known to have BIOS support for IBECC is ODROID H4/H4+/H4 Ultra (the 3 models differ in the CPU model or the number of Ethernet ports and SATA support). IBECC works with non-ECC DDR5 or LPDDR5 memories, but it reduces the available memory capacity and performance in comparison with traditional ECC. Because no memory vendor offers LPDDR memory with ECC, IBECC is the only way to implement ECC in the CPUs like Alder Lake N or Amston Lake, which are intended to be used with LPDDR5 memory.
- johnklos 2y agoThere are lots of people out there saying to get one of these low(er) power Intel systems instead of, say, an Orange Pi 5 or some other ARM machine, but I think some of the information from the comments tells us a little more about their suitability for certain applications: "In fact ‘whole systems’ were benchmarked and not just Intel CPUs (under identical environmental conditions) since as we know in the meantime on Alder Lake-N Intel chose to throttle down the memory controller above a certain thermal treshold (sic) which affects all those benchmarks needing high RAM bandwidth or low RAM latency." I thought the idea of having a CPU that runs at crazy speeds for the first minute or two, only to thermally throttle to something more realistic, was something that only applied to the marketed-to-gamers, high end CPUs, but apparently not. Low power CPUs should be simple to cool and should only ever thermally throttle in extreme cases (like running in a hot attic or car or something similar). When I consider that an Intel N100 takes twice the power yet doesn't deliver even close to twice the performance of an Orange Pi 5, I can't help but lose interest. Even comparing the N100 with my long time favorite low power x86, the AMD Athlon 5350 from ten years ago, I can't help but feel like Intel really hasn't innovated much here. I'd love to do some benchmarks, but I think the N100 isn't even twice the IPC of those decade old CPUs, yet those ran four cores at 2 GHz using so little power that their tiny little fans don't even turn on much of the time, even when all the cores at 100%. Where's your version of that CPU, Intel?
- nullindividual 2y agoN100 and fans? What fans? https://www.servethehome.com/fanless-intel-n100-firewall-and-virtualization-appliance-review/ https://www.servethehome.com/fanless-intel-n100-firewall-and... The advantage over Arm is that it is x86-64.
- johnklos 2y agoSome of us don't download and run binaries. For some of us, the advantage of ARM is exactly that it isn't x86.
- mikae1 2y agoI had hopes for Radxa X4 but https://youtube.com/watch?v=b--l3yU4f00 https://youtube.com/watch?v=b--l3yU4f00 was an eye opener for me. There will compromises at this size for x86.