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.
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.
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.
With 4 threads, it’s the same story although the N100 catches up with the E3-1245 V2.
With the maximum amount of threads, the E3 1630 V3 manages to pull ahead but at what (power) price!
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.