Is the Intel N100 a better option than high-end ARM RK3588 boards at the moment?

The N100 is a really interesting CPU: Atom has sort of caught up. Basically you are looking at Skylake performance at a fraction of the power. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;compare&#x2F;5157vs3542&#x2F;Intel-N100-vs-Intel-i5-10210U" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;compare&#x2F;5157vs3542&#x2F;Intel-N100-v...</a> Of course this has as much to do with the long reign of Skylake as with Atom improvements, nonetheless you are looking at the performance of a three year old notebook. Even more interesting perhaps is the power performance ratio matching the Apple M1 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;power_performance.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cpubenchmark.net&#x2F;power_performance.html</a>

I run a N100 for my router&#x2F;firewall&#x2F;OPNSense that&#x27;s fanless and another cheaper N100 that has a fan for everything else. The N100 is a just great all around, relatively lower power consumption, fast and can handle everything I need. The benefit of this is that everything just works. No playing with drivers, or special built distros, it just works. The power draw for my fanless is around 15W but I have 4 Intels 2.5G NICs. My fanned one takes about 10W on average.

I wish there were better low power ECC options. I don&#x27;t think the N100 supports ECC RAM, and I can&#x27;t find any ARM ECC boards aside from industrial stuff. Small AMD boards are hit or miss with no guaranteed ECC comparability either.

I very much want to build a N100&#x2F;N200 cluster. The Asrock N100DC-ITX board is almost there, but they missed with only one on-board realtek NIC.<p>Perfect would be mini-itx N100&#x2F;200, two M.2 slots, two Intel 2.5 GbE NICs, 16&#x2F;32 GB RAM, a fanless heatsink and DC powered. Don&#x27;t care much about anything else on the board; 3x USB and whatever video is cheapest is all that&#x27;s needed.<p>The N100&#x2F;N200&#x2F;N305 parts only have 9 PCIe lanes, so one of the two M.2s would need to be cut back to 2x lanes (call that the boot device, whatever.)

Power usage aside, I&#x27;d take the simplicity of a mainline kernel and distro over the mystery-meat backported patch chaos of the faux-5.x RockChip kernel that&#x27;s really a Frankenstein 2.6 codebase. Yes, I know they&#x27;re &quot;working on&quot; mainline integration but I can&#x27;t ship promises. That&#x27;s why I&#x27;m still using Raspberry Pi boards, as well! Don&#x27;t fall for the Chinese SoC scam.

Yeah performance is better in most benchmarks but the power consumption is always double, and given we are in a home server context it&#x27;s a pretty important checkbox ( even if at this level it could be more emotional than anything else )<p>In the last few years more is demanded from these ARM boards, so is the price demanded from who makes them. Some x86 boards are right there in some of that territory..

the rockchip RK has a lot of nice AI opportunities, so the usage kinda matters.<p>If the machine was doing nothing but image inference then i&#x27;d go with the ARM. If it was a desktop replacement i&#x27;d go with the Intel.

I&#x27;ll always choose Intel architecture if I can because the software just works.

<p><pre><code> Once you’re above 512KB block sizes though, the 5B runs away with it, peaking at 2756MB&#x2F;s on the sequential write test. </code></pre> That doesn&#x27;t seem to be supported by what the tables above say though?<p>There&#x27;s no mention of 2000+MB&#x2F;s in them.

Some are saying they&#x27;d rather have an x86 for software compatibility reasons, but for those of us with ARM64 Macintosh systems that are building home labs, it&#x27;s nice to be able to use the same binaries as we use in VMs on our Macs.

Read the reviews on alibaba and it seems the n100 doesn’t have a power on after power loss option? (Edit: the bios not the cpu)<p>Would like to pick one up but need it to auto reboot after power loss. Anyone have one to check if this is true?

&gt; the T9 Plus has its own heatsink and fan for cooling as we’re not quite at ARM levels of power consumption and we do need it!<p>There are fanless N100 mini PCs, like the Asus PN42 and the Zotac CI343.

It&#x27;s twice the watts, half the cores, but the Intel option runs rings around the best reasonable priced ARM we can buy.<p>I wish AMD would play in this space! They are so up market, it feels like.

FWIW I recently upgraded my 10yr old NAS to use the ASRock-N100M. I was previously using an S1200 Intel server board and a Xeon E3-1220v3.<p>I&#x27;ve got 4 SATA HDDs using a flashed Dell Perc H310 and 2 SATA SSDs.<p>I was able to remove my Nvidia GPU because the N100 supports QuickSync.<p>Using a single 32gb stick of DDR4 but I do miss having ECC RAM, considering I am using ZFS.<p>Despite the above, I couldn&#x27;t be happier! My NAS is as close to silent as is reasonably possible.

Listing looks like hdmi 1.4, which sucks for 4k out i believe. Also, does the n100 have hardware decoding for h265 and av1? If so, this is interesting.

Hot take: VisionFive 2 is fast enough, reliable, and has low idle and peak power consumption.<p>It also is RISC-V, instead of legacy ISA.

Intel has been a one-trick pony for ages. Intel&#x27;s advantages come at the cost of power, the need for active cooling, and the fact that code for ages has been optimized for x86.<p>What people don&#x27;t often consider is how poorly Intel&#x27;s offerings age. Intel prioritizes speed over safety, so generation after generation has gotten slower and slower over time due to all the software-based mitigations that are needed, and Intel has shown zero indication that we could believe anything is different now.<p>Also, they intentionally cripple their products. It&#x27;s 2023, and pretty close to 2024, yet the N100 platform only supports up to 16 gigs? Seriously? I have a number of AMD Athlon AM1 systems from 2014 - almost a decade old - that support 32 gigs. Ever run a SearXNG instance? 16 gigs is fine, if you don&#x27;t plan to run much else.<p>Sorry, Intel, but you just aren&#x27;t relevant in the low power space. I&#x27;m more than happy with my Orange Pi 5 (which, incidentally, has a 32 gig version).

Until Intel can prove to me that all x86 security mitigations are done in hardware sufficiently, instead of cycle&#x2F;power&#x2F;time wasting microcode fixups, I don&#x27;t see Intel ever being on the list, no matter how cheap it is.<p>Your CPU doesn&#x27;t have to be perfect, just your solution shouldn&#x27;t be actively hostile.