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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

#31

Post by adrian_b »

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!

The Alder Lake N CPUs have in-band ECC memory controllers, because they are also sold as Atom CPUs for industrial applications.

I do not know if the IBECC controller is functional in all models, but it is usable at least in the models that are marked by Intel (in Intel Ark) as suitable for embedded use, like N97 and i3-N305.

The IBECC controller requires BIOS support. Among the computers known to have BIOS support for IBECC is ODROID H4/H4+/H4 Ultra (the 3 models differ in the CPU model or the number of Ethernet ports and SATA support).

IBECC works with non-ECC DDR5 or LPDDR5 memories, but it reduces the available memory capacity and performance in comparison with traditional ECC. Because no memory vendor offers LPDDR memory with ECC, IBECC is the only way to implement ECC in the CPUs like Alder Lake N or Amston Lake, which are intended to be used with LPDDR5 memory.

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

#32

Post by adrian_b »

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.

The recent generations of Atom CPUs for industrial applications include an in-band ECC controller, which works with non-ECC DDR or LPDDR memory.

Besides the Alder Lake N or Amston Lake CPUs that are branded as the Atom x7000 series, some of the models branded as N CPUs, e.g. N97 and i3-N305 also have a functional IBECC controller, if the computer BIOS provides means to enable it.

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

#33

Post by sirn »

shiroiushi wrote: post #23
benoau wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.

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

#34

Post by adrian_b »

cam_l wrote: post #21
MBCook wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It reduces the memory capacity and the memory performance, in comparison with real ECC.

Nevertheless, this will rarely matter for the kind of applications typically run on small computers with Atom CPUs, which are rarely more demanding than a router/firewall or a network-attached storage server.

You can see examples of performance decrease with IBECC here:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie...

For most applications the performance decrease should be less than 10%. The Intel IBECC controller includes a special cache memory, to decrease the number of additional memory accesses required by IBECC. Otherwise the memory performance would have been halved.

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

#35

Post by adrian_b »

shiroiushi wrote: post #15
Teever wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?

From what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.

While Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application.

There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) CPUs.

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

#36

Post by shiroiushi »

sirn wrote: post #33
shiroiushi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 l…

ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.

>e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569

Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost.

It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.

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

#37

Post by shiroiushi »

adrian_b wrote: post #35
shiroiushi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.

While Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application. There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) C…

Good to know!

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

#38

Post by justinclift »

shiroiushi wrote: post #28
justinclift wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 withou…

They look pretty easily available to me, or are you going to exclude Ebay now as well?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/305342386279 (note: I don't know the seller)

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

#39

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…

> if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.

That's not correct. I literally linked to some non-suffixed processors that support ECC in the comment you're replying to.

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

#40

Post by cromka »

sirn wrote: post #29
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: D…

DDR5 has in-band ECC by default on all platforms, though.
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