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Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

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Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#21

Post by cam_l »

MBCook wrote: post #13
cromka wrote: post #3

Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!

Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.

I wonder how ibecc compares with real ecc, now that it's supported for these lower spec chips.

Will it help at all or is it a waste of time?

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#22

Post by the_snooze »

shiroiushi wrote: post #7
johnklos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I've wondered the same thing, and always come back to inexpensive Ryzens on ASRock motherboards that I simply underclock.

The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of…

I run Jellyfin on an 8-year-old Intel NUC. Works great. Don't need to worry about transcoding on the fly because I make sure all video files are in H264 going in, which can be direct-streamed to pretty much all clients.

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#23

Post by shiroiushi »

benoau wrote: post #10
shiroiushi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).

ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.

>ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th)

It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#24

Post by mikae1 »

johnklos wrote: post #4

There are lots of people out there saying to get one of these low(er) power Intel systems instead of, say, an Orange Pi 5 or some other ARM machine, but I think some of the information from the comments tells us a little more about their suitability for certain applications: "In fact ‘whole systems’ were benchmarked and not just Intel CPUs (under identical environmental conditions) since as we know in the meantime on…

I had hopes for Radxa X4 but https://youtube.com/watch?v=b--l3yU4f00 was an eye opener for me. There will compromises at this size for x86.

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#25

Post by hsjdhdvsk »

shiroiushi wrote: post #20
justinclift wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well. My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems. Random examples: • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/c…

It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC. You can still see it even in 13th generation CPUs: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232105/... But as you can see here, this is an…

I own one if these i3s from 6th gen. Bought at retail. Nothing special.

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#26

Post by shiroiushi »

the_snooze wrote: post #22
shiroiushi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of…

I run Jellyfin on an 8-year-old Intel NUC. Works great. Don't need to worry about transcoding on the fly because I make sure all video files are in H264 going in, which can be direct-streamed to pretty much all clients. https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/clients/codec-support/#vid...

>Don't need to worry about transcoding on the fly because I make sure all video files are in H264 going in, which can be direct-streamed to pretty much all clients.

That doesn't work if you use subtitles. With many formats, the subtitles have to be transcoded on-the-fly into the video, even if the source and destination resolution and codec are the same.

Also, the Intel NUC might be fine just running Jellyfin (without transcoded subtitles) using separate file storage, but if you try to combine that with a NAS box running 4-8 drives using ZFS and perhaps a few other services as well, it's probably just not enough.

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#27

Post by justinclift »

shiroiushi wrote: post #20
justinclift wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well. My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems. Random examples: • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/c…

It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC. You can still see it even in 13th generation CPUs: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232105/... But as you can see here, this is an…

> they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips

That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC. That's what I did anyway. :)

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#28

Post by shiroiushi »

justinclift wrote: post #27
shiroiushi wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC. You can still see it even in 13th generation CPUs: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/232105/... But as you can see here, this is an…

> they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips. These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC. That's what I did anyway. :)

>These days though, people are probably better off buying an appropriate Ryzen processor and motherboard that explicitly supports ECC.

As I pointed out before, you can't do that for a media server. Transcoding is necessary for many (most?) users.

>That's not really relevant to the point of them only allowing ECC on Xeon chips though. They do (or at least did) support ECC on non-Xeon chips.

That's a distinction without a difference: those other non-Xeon chips aren't useful if you can't even buy them because you're not an OEM.

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#29

Post by sirn »

cromka wrote: post #3

Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!

Some N100 do have In-Band ECC (which uses the same data lane as regular memory channel, so less usable memory space/effective memory bandwidth), such as the Beelink S12 Pro box (DDR4) and is recognized by EDAC subsystem on Linux.

    [    8.485808] [    T703] caller igen6_probe+0x138/0x780 [igen6_edac] mapping multiple BARs
    [    8.487601] [    T703] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#0: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT)
    [    8.487625] [     T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: HANDLING IBECC MEMORY ERROR
    [    8.487626] [     T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: ADDR 0x7fffffffe0
    [    8.487664] [    T703] EDAC igen6: v2.5.1

Re: Intel Processor N95 vs. N97 vs. N100 vs. Core I3-N305 Benchmarks Comparison

#30

Post by znpy »

cromka wrote: post #3

Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!

I'd rather start seeing ipmi-like controllers rather than ecc memory on high-end/prosumer hardware.
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