Intel Readies N250 Series "Twin Lake" Low-power Processors, Succeeds "Alder Lake-N"

[Lew Zealand]

What's an N200 then

Read the first sentence of this news item.

 

[tvshacker]

Any chance this N250 will have ARC iGPU? If not, how far are we to having something like that?

A bought a tablet with N100 processor. It is a joke. It overheats and throttles when running Windows Update.

Damn, that's a whole level of bad. I remember having some older android phones that would behave like that, when it was updating apps the phone slowed to a halt. Could it be throtling due to lack of active heat dissipation?
I recently discovered the Minisforum S100 and was a bit intrigued by the small form factor and the possibility of being able to be powered via PoE

 

[helf]

This is basically just the modern day version of Atom. Good for some edge cases but not general computing needs.

I beg to differ. These chips *excel* at general computing.

If you aren't wanting to game there is basically nothing they cant do reasonably well. I am typing this on an N200 miniPC with 48GB of DDR5 installed, 4TB NVMe SSD, and is passively cooled.

I am currently running 3x N305 boxes also with 48GB of DDR5 (sadly, the largest SODIMMs out) as a HA Proxmox VE cluster with 0 issues.

I recommended an Acer Aspire netbook some 9 years ago since they were only using a browser to store their photos and wanted something bigger than their phone to look at and make calendar, albums and such. It was so slow at loading the photo pages that she hated it. Intel Atom laptops on the low end love:00USD) were pretty bad for this general use case.

I have over 90 N95 machines that are passively cooled /in a factory/ happily humming away running line side production functions. I'd agree that Atoms tended to be janky and ill-suited for a lot of tasks. The N series chips are not Atoms.

I beg to differ. These chips *excel* at general computing.

If you aren't wanting to game there is basically nothing they cant do reasonably well. I am typing this on an N200 miniPC with 48GB of DDR5 installed, 4TB NVMe SSD, and is passively cooled.

I am currently running 3x N305 boxes also with 48GB of DDR5 (sadly, the largest SODIMMs out) as a HA Proxmox VE cluster with 0 issues.




I have over 90 N95 machines that are passively cooled /in a factory/ happily humming away running line side production functions. I'd agree that Atoms tended to be janky and ill-suited for a lot of tasks. The N series chips are not Atoms.

Just to reply to myself: I just upgrade my office PC to an N305 version of the same system by CWWK. Moved over my SSDs, the 48GB DDR5 SODIMM. Same Windows 10 install. I bought the models with the bifurcation board so I have 1*x4 nvme slot and then 4*x1 NVMe slots. popped an 8TB nvme drive in it for storage, my 4TB OS/program drive, my 118GB optane I am using as a read/write cache for the 4TB is on the x4 lane. System is screaming. The doubled core count over the N200 shows

But yeah, these chips are plenty for most uses if you aren't gaming or doing heavy video editing etc.

Currently powering an Eizo FlexScan EV2730Q (1920x1920 1:1 LCD) over DP and a QNIX 2560x1440 LCD over HDMI. I am watching a 4k BD on the 2K panel directly playing off an SMB share via VLC, have literally 400 tabs open across multiple Chrome windows. A Firefox instance running. Excel, bunch of random RDP and SSH sessions going and the system is sitting at 24% CPU utilization and humming along.

More than adequate hardware

 

[T550p]

Twin Lake/Alder Lake-N Refresh doesn't seem to be using Skymont cores, the product code seems to indicate Gracemont cores. Hell, it's not even Crestmont too. Maybe it's just a process node upgrade? Could be using Intel's '7 Ultra' node for all I know.

This Korean site spotted them on Mouser ages ago, and they don't feature anything new apart from a 100 MHz or 200 MHz clock frequency improvement. Shame.

FJ8071505947210 SRPNR Intel Processor N150 @ 3.6 GHz
FJ8071505947211 SRPNS Intel Processor N250 @ 3.8 GHz
FJ8071505973702 SRPNU Intel Core 3 N350 Processor @ 3.9 GHz, Geekbench report
FJ8071505947303 SRPNT Intel Core 3 N355 Processor @ 3.9 GHz