State of Things in MiniPC world
#Gadgets
For the last couple of years, the Intel N100 CPU has been the bleeding edge of the mini PC world. Compared to previous-gen mini PCs' CPUs there was a significant boost in efficiency which made it VERY close to Single Board Computers in terms of power consumption.
The majority of devices are built on top of it with just a few differences:
- Some of the devices have upgradable RAM and SSD storage
- DDR4 vs DDR5
- Case
There is a twist. Intel N100 officially supports up to 16GB of RAM, but some manufacturers manage to put up to 48GB of RAM by somehow tweaking the BIOS. I'm not sure if it's legit but AFAIK there must be a trade-off between bandwidth & capacity which should make the official limit quite reasonable.
In November 2024 there was a new drop: Intel N150. However, it doesn't seem to make a lot of difference in performance compared to N100:
There are also very similar CPUs: Intel N200 and N300, but it's the same gen as N100, which are still very close in performance.
N305 has a slightly higher power consumption, has more cores, and performs a bit better in GPU-related tasks.
Comments