I have just bought a mini PC based on Intel N100 CPU. Initially, I was going to buy another Raspberry PI or a used “TinyMiniMicro” PC, but I decided to have a look at the current mini PC offering. I am glad I did.

On a major Chinese reseller website, I saw a lot of similar products with the Intel N100 CPU so I had a look at reviews (here here) and boy, this thing is powerful (for its size). I’ll talk about the mini PC in an other post.

I own a few computers with diverse CPUs and I ran a few benchmarks on all of them to see where they all sit. I only used sysbench and 7zip.

Table of benchmarks for a few CPUs

If we look at the sysbench results with only 1 thread, the new N100 comes second, behind the 5900X but far away of everything else, while using far less power. That’s quite impressive! The poor Raspberry Pi 1 is so far away.

Graph of sysbench benchmark with 1 thread

Next, with the 7zip benchmark, it has almost the same performance as the venerable i5-4590T but it’s behind the even older Xeon E3-1245 V2. However, remember the N100 draws at most 15W. Again, the Raspberry Pi 1 is last.

Graph of 7zip benchmark with 1 thread

With 4 threads, it’s the same story although the N100 catches up with the E3-1245 V2.

Graph of sysbench benchmark with 4 threads

Graph of 7zip benchmark with 4 threads

With the maximum amount of threads, the E3 1630 V3 manages to pull ahead but at what (power) price!

Graph of sysbench benchmark with max threads

Graph of 7zip benchmark with max threads

I suspect there is something wrong with the EPYC 7282 VPS, it has really low performance for such a recent AMD CPU.

I am pleasantly surprised and amazed with the performance of this little N100 CPU. If it hadn’t a limit of 16 GB of RAM, it would make a wonderful CPU in dedicated servers. However, for “small” home labs, given the price of those mini PCs, I think it’s a great deal.