There 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

There 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?