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

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

bret.dk

103 pointssthlmb80 comments

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. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/5157vs3542/Intel-N100-v... 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 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html

No Chinese on-chip malware in the N100. Theoretically, N100 could have some extra surveillance bits added by Intel, but Intel is ultimately an American company, you can be at their HQ within 20 minutes of landing at SJC, and in America, we don't arrest people like Jimmy Lai and harvest kidneys. (DJI, a proven vendor to the religious concentration camps in China, can also go fuck themselves.) Enjoy your RockChip until a stray signal from a weather balloon or rouge UDP packet makes your day Bad.

I think you replied at the wrong place.

I run a N100 for my router/firewall/OPNSense that'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 have 4 Intels 2.5G NICs

I was looking at something like this for my router needs, and I'm currently running OPNSense (but I'd be OK with switching to Linux). I've read many comments about these being wonky, on HN and other forums. What's your experience with them, especially under high load?

I run a fanless CWWK one with OPNSense and it’s been rock solid. I have i-226 and I got pretty lucky because it got added to support a couple weeks before I tried it (I probably should have checked but I naively assumed it would worked since the i-225 works). I’ve been running for almost 8 months? And I haven’t touched it besides running an update for OPNsense and NGFW. I use an omada AP and I get around 800 Mbps internet on hardwire and 4-500 on wifi 6. I have like one device for 6E so I kept that feature off to save some electricity. I also only have one 2.5G Ethernet device so I never got to test the iperf for it. But with about 30ish devices on the network, I use at most 30% cpu and 12GB of RAM but most of it is the ZFS cache. I think OPNsense with NGFW is about 6GB)

What's the fanless model you use?

I have a CWWK one [1] but I bought mine from aliexpress since it has a better “guarantee”. I keep mine in my garage so the CPU temperature gets uncomfortably high (above 70C) when the garage is 80F+ during the summer so I put an AC infinity fan on top that takes like 2W. This keeps it cool for the whole summer. Haven’t had any issues since I have gotten it. They recently released a newer 6 NiC but haven’t used it.

[1] https://cwwk.net/collections/frontpage/products/12th-gen-int...

I wish there were better low power ECC options. I don't think the N100 supports ECC RAM, and I can't find any ARM ECC boards aside from industrial stuff. Small AMD boards are hit or miss with no guaranteed ECC comparability either.

For my Proxmox Homeserver I use a Fujitsu D3417 with a Xeon E3-1225 v5. Pretty "old" Hardware, but it is

9.3 Watts IDLE

with Samsung 980 Pro NVMe and 64GB ECC RAM after doing only small optimizations (powertop, etc.). I'm not sure why Intel / Fujitsu does not share these (or more modern hardware) for the "consumer market", but for my personal use case it is a pretty impressive system.

There is a forum user `m.gutt` using the Corsair RX550 with a Gigabyte C246M-WU2 Mainboard running (best case)

6.65W [1]

My Router is now a Banana Pi BPI-R3 with OpenWRT drawing 4.3 Watts idle (I only ordered it, because the GL.inet MT6000 was not available now) and I think the Intel System is on another level, although it cannot really be compared because of the network stuff...

[1] (german): https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/selbstbau-nas-im-1...

When did efficiency started to matter with home servers? It feels like chasing the high perfmance/w ratio is a recent thing that is becoming more popular, or maybe I'm just out of the loop. I'm not hating btw, just curious.

Electricity prices are rising in Europe for at least the last 10-15 years (which accelerated since 2022). The higher rates the more people care about power consumption.

Like the sibling comment said, electricity prices are going up. We're getting peaks of 40c/kWh here.

In addition summers are getting hotter and extra energy usage in hardware is translated directly to extra heat. I need to run my AC more in the summer because my tiny server rack is producing so much heat.

During winters it's kinda handy though =)

It is not only about efficiency, but also about these so called MiniPCs (N100, Raspberry, Rockchip, etc.) being sold for > 100 bucks these days and with a little effort you can build a REAL server with ECC and NVMe based on older used hardware for only a little more money with ECC RAM, similar efficiency, way more power, cool remote features like AMT / ILO and better OS / Software support due to x64 architecture.

I think the whole "Raspberry as a home server" discussion is pretty much overrated since the prices went up, because nowadays it always seems to be a compromise in terms of price / performance.

When electricity price went up 3 orders of magnitude.

Not quite as low-power, but the Ryzen embedded series support ECC. Synology uses them in some of their NAS products.

ECC should be mandated by law.

Non ECC? Straight to jail

Support ECC but didn’t advertise it? Believe it or not: jail.

Everybody makes big assumptions that cheap ECC support is functional ECC support.

I very much want to build a N100/N200 cluster. The Asrock N100DC-ITX board is almost there, but they missed with only one on-board realtek NIC.

Perfect would be mini-itx N100/200, two M.2 slots, two Intel 2.5 GbE NICs, 16/32 GB RAM, a fanless heatsink and DC powered. Don't care much about anything else on the board; 3x USB and whatever video is cheapest is all that's needed.

The N100/N200/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.)

The onboard NIC is barely needed, if there's an dedicated IPMI net port, I would rather go with dedicated NICs, like mellanox cx5 or cx6, you can find cheap 10/24/40/100G mlnx cards on AliExpress, with lots cluster specific featuress

I suppose. My intent is to avoid any add-on cards so I can stack these with standoffs and cool it all with a few quiet 140mm fans.

You could probably get away with some low-profile cards, which shouldn't be much taller than the board's heatsink.

Power usage aside, I'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's really a Frankenstein 2.6 codebase. Yes, I know they're "working on" mainline integration but I can't ship promises. That's why I'm still using Raspberry Pi boards, as well! Don'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's a pretty important checkbox ( even if at this level it could be more emotional than anything else )

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..

Doubling an idle power of 5 watts is 10 watts. Even at $0.25 kWh, that's the difference between ~$11 and ~$22 per year. That's not nothing but it's not really a big deal either if the advantages of being x86 apply to your situation.

I did not go to bar yesterday. I saved way more than $11.

If this is not something which would run on a solar panel back in the woods then additional +5W is nothing in the common household.

I'm saving infinite money by never going to the bar at all! I'm wealthy beyond dreams!

In reality, one 5W bump isn't going to move the needle, but you only have to make that concession a few times before you end up adding an appreciable amount to your power bill. I'm paying €0.39/kWh for power. When I added Starlink (57-75W constant draw, equating to at least €12/mo on the bill) I went looking for things to unplug to wash that increase out. Turns out my power consumption monitoring plugs were using about 15W on their own, and having too many wireless access points was adding another 45W. That's all been sorted out, and I'm more cautious of suffering death by a thousand cuts now.

Since the question of which hardware is better, usually same performance at double the watts makes a cpu worse.

Also you are assuming infinite power availability. If you are off the grid and have power from solar or wind, then lower wattage might be preferable.

ARM boards consume more and more power generation after generation so its probably be going parity power performance profile in the end. Also the key problem for ARM boards is piss poor Linux support beyond release so x86 always wins there

the rockchip RK has a lot of nice AI opportunities, so the usage kinda matters.

If the machine was doing nothing but image inference then i'd go with the ARM. If it was a desktop replacement i'd go with the Intel.

I'll always choose Intel architecture if I can because the software just works.

Same goes for Intel's Clear Linux [1] (review [2]), which runs 24/7 on my ASRock J4105-ITX since late 2018. Still looking into upgrading to an N100 ASRock N100DC-ITX [3] or Asus Prime N100I-D D4 [4].

[1] https://www.clearlinux.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYffFkbO14A

[3] https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/

[4] https://www.asus.com/motherboards-components/motherboards/pr...

I have the Asus Prime N100I-D4 and picked it over the Asrock as I didnt want to deal with a powerbrick. I've stuffed the mobo in a 1u case with a modular 300w flexatx psu

Otherwise they are very similar boards.

Also thank you for reminding me of clear linux.

It may already be too late, but the ASRock N100M doesn't require a power brick. As opposed to the N100DC-ITX which does.

You are right, but that also means a bigger Micro ATX form factor too.

Is clear linux an alright distro to tool around on? The last I looked it up it was supposed to cater to dev ops needs

Possibly, at least with containers (mine is using containers almost entirely). Cannot say much for other use cases but the package manager in CL always seemed a little scarcer.

    Once you’re above 512KB block sizes though, the 5B runs away with it, peaking
    at 2756MB/s on the sequential write test.

That doesn't seem to be supported by what the tables above say though?

There's no mention of 2000+MB/s in them.

The numbers in the table are for the N100 machine, the 2756MB/s is what was mentioned as being the speed when the same disk was tested on the ROCK 5B ARM board (which has double the PCIe lanes)

Some are saying they'd rather have an x86 for software compatibility reasons, but for those of us with ARM64 Macintosh systems that are building home labs, it'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)

Would like to pick one up but need it to auto reboot after power loss. Anyone have one to check if this is true?

Enabling power on after power loss is "just" writing a register value to the chipset, so it's viable to have Linux do that during boot.

This is a feature of the BIOS, not of the CPU.

The only way to know for sure is from a review of the desired product, if someone happened to check the BIOS menu.

Perhaps it supports Wake-on-LAN, and you can turn it on like that?

Weirdly I've found with some (x86/x64) machines that their Wake-on-LAN doesn't work after a power loss.

But could probably use a similar idea to signal the power button with a pi or esp32?

> But could probably use a similar idea to signal the power button with a pi or esp32?

I thought of that but it's not worth it, since these N100 systems cost around $150.

Perhaps a better solution is with a 555 timer, that turns on the machine when the led goes off.

On linux I find it's usually necessary to enable WoL on boot with 'ethtool -s eth0 wol g' (you can check the current state of all most wakeup stuff with 'cat /proc/acpi/wakeup').

I have a couple of Ryzen machines like that.

They need a power button press to power on the NIC. As long as WoL is enabled everywhere, the NIC will stay on until they lose power again.

A switchbot might also be an option.

You don't even need to press a physical switch. Anything that can short a jumper on the motherboard would be enough.

> 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!

There are fanless N100 mini PCs, like the Asus PN42 and the Zotac CI343.

It's twice the watts, half the cores, but the Intel option runs rings around the best reasonable priced ARM we can buy.

I wish AMD would play in this space! They are so up market, it feels like.

There are plenty of AMD options, just search on aliexpress. I typically double the price of the unit tested in the article and get something like the Beelink Ser5, which is a 5800H iirc. You get 4x the cores for ~2.5x the price, and almost as good idle (that ~3w idle from the n100 is very impressive).

Good option for sure. I definitely strongly believe in turning laptop chips into mini-pcs. It'd be lovely to see performance scaling of a 7840U across it's 15-30W. Or a 5800U across it's 10-25W.

I do think AMD is still missing out though on a market segment. They have embedded chips like a V3C14 (a quad core v3000, zen3) which should be physically smaller offerings, should be a cheaper alternative to these mini-pcs. But in practice, there's few boards or systems available and what offerings there are seem to be boutique gear, at high price points.

Smaller & cheaper & lower power computers that can be tucked into various ubiquitous & pervasive computing scenarios remain really interesting to me. It's stellar that desktop class machines have gotten as small & affordable as they are, but I still hope to see this segment of sub-tier systems grow.

People looking for a n100 are usually deliberately looking for something in the 100 dollar range max if it performs much better than a raspberry pi. These people arent interested in a 250 dollar board and dont need so many cores. These make great little transcoding machines or routers and you dont need much more power than what these processors can provide.

If you’re wanting to save money though something with say an Intel i5-6500T (6th Generation Core) the ‘T’ meaning it’s a low power (throttled) part is worth considering. They are surprisingly close in performance to an N100: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_processor_n1... (although how much to trust those benchmarks I don’t know — it would be good to see benchmarks where all bug mitigations are definitely applied to the older CPU, edit: except neither are hyperthreaded so maybe spectre isn’t such an issue)…

Something like a HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini, can be had on eBay for around $80-100 (USD), with probably 8GB RAM and an SSD. So even less than a new thing with an N100 (although in some cases it’s close!)

It uses DDR4 (one of the first generations that did, so means if you want you can go up to 2x32GB SODIMMs). There’s a whole series of these things, servethehome has a “project tiny mini micro” covering many of them.

I really don't understand this seeming irrational aversion to the N100. The N100 uses significantly less power than 6500t, and the N100 Atom/Gracemont(iirc)Alderlake little cores have performance onpar with Skylake (8th gen) cores) and fit in much smaller form factors as a result.

The big one with the N100 is it either comes from random sellers on AliExpress, or you get something like the ASRock ITX motherboard with one on. Those motherboards alone cost the same price as an eBay system with an 6500t.

If the goal is to go with something familiar, which is why this thread was even considering the N100, then going with a system from a known supplier might be even better.

The power might not be such an issue -- while the 6500t is a 35w part, it idles quite low, it would really depend on the system it is in; I wonder how different the power draw at idle would be.

True, I didn't mean to suggest that the n100 is a bad machine. I'm actually considering getting this one for running opnsense directly (instead of as a pass-through NIC-enabled VM on proxmox)! I was just pointing out that AMD does have machines in this "mini ITX teensy tiny cheap aliexpress special" form factor.

Bottom line is that the n100 is a way better choice than pretty much any overpriced and under-supported ARM SBC these days.

I dont think AMD has the ability to make these specialized processors as easily as Intel can, though I guess the n100 could be binned alderlake chips with all the big cores disabled?

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.

I've got 4 SATA HDDs using a flashed Dell Perc H310 and 2 SATA SSDs.

I was able to remove my Nvidia GPU because the N100 supports QuickSync.

Using a single 32gb stick of DDR4 but I do miss having ECC RAM, considering I am using ZFS.

Despite the above, I couldn'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.

All Intel CPU's since 8th gen support Hardware h.265. I believe all 11th gen and newer CPU's support hardware AV1. Even the last mobile Celeron (6305) had hardware H265, AV1 and strangely AVX-512 support.

Huh? I thought av1 support was on Arc and starts on igpus with Meteorlake? And Rocketlake had avx-512 and Intel decided to disable/exclude it in the big little era cpus alderlake, raptorlake and its refresh.

Tiger Lake is the first one with AV1 decoding support. Arc and Meteor Lake add AV1 encoding support.

It does have H265 hardware encoding/decoding support. This actually makes N100 a perfect choice for running Plex/Jellyfin.

What is holding me back from getting N100 for Media Playback is mainly that there is only support for 2x SATA ports.

Of course you can just get some PCI board to help you with more disks, but I was hoping to remove that in terms of space.

I'm using a Dell Perc H310 in the PCI-E 3.0 x16 slot (which is actually only wired as x2). With just 4 SATA3 HDDs connected it works fantastically.

Hot take: VisionFive 2 is fast enough, reliable, and has low idle and peak power consumption.

It also is RISC-V, instead of legacy ISA.

Intel has been a one-trick pony for ages. Intel'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.

What people don't often consider is how poorly Intel'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.

Also, they intentionally cripple their products. It'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't plan to run much else.

Sorry, Intel, but you just aren't relevant in the low power space. I'm more than happy with my Orange Pi 5 (which, incidentally, has a 32 gig version).

The n100 is going into 100 dollar micro systems that compete with the likes of the raspberry pi 5, not every computer needs to be a gaming pc.

As far as intel’s offerings aging, tell that to the 10 year old thinkcentre with a haswell cpu in it I have that I previously used for wev development and want to turn into a hypervisor that can run a nas and other services.

Nobody says they stop working. They do end up slowing down much more than other CPUs when mitigations are applied.

N100 seems to support up to 32gb of memory. Here’s a motherboard spec that shows it:

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N100DC-ITX/#Specification

Multiple redditors also confirmed 32GB memory working with N100: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/13npvng/what_is_the_...

There is a reply at the end stating it works with 48GB DIMMs too.

Then Intel should correct their own documentation. If not in fact, they're intentionally limiting their products in spirit.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231803/...

There are a number of these small PCs running N100 that are fanless. They still require a big heatsink-case, but at least there's no fan.

Until Intel can prove to me that all x86 security mitigations are done in hardware sufficiently, instead of cycle/power/time wasting microcode fixups, I don't see Intel ever being on the list, no matter how cheap it is.

Your CPU doesn't have to be perfect, just your solution shouldn't be actively hostile.

Just wait til you hear about software.

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