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.
Comments
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.