Gaming benchmarks for Intel’s new Alder-Lake-N SoCs have been largely absent as these chips only feature E-cores and single-channel memory support.I didn’t expect most people to even consider it for gaming purposes, but it didn’t end there team pandry on youtube Results from running some tests on the N100. Performance wasn’t great, but power efficiency was surprisingly good, hitting 60 frames per second while consuming less than 7W of power in some (very light) games.
Alder Lake-N was announced in early 2022 as the latest in Intel’s ultra-low-power and ultra-low-cost SoC. What makes these chips special is that they are based entirely on Intel’s latest Gracemount CPU core which is used as the efficiency core in the company’s Alder Lake and Raptor Lake hybrid CPUs. Intel’s Gracemount cores are surprisingly powerful for their intended role, with L3 cache support, enhanced branch prediction, and more, and Intel says these cores will be the first of the 2015 6th Gen Skylake CPU cores It claims to be as powerful as
The integrated graphics chip inside these Alder Lake-N chips is pretty decent, with 24 execution units (EUs) and capable of theoretically playing up to 8K 60 fps with AV1 decoding via Intel’s Xe-LP architecture. provide support. However, iGPU display resolution is still limited to 4K 60 fps output. Xe-LP is no Same as Arc Alchemist, with AV1 encoding support and about twice the performance. Still, it might work for light games.
Team Pandory shows how Intel’s tiny Alder Lake-N chips (specifically the N100) handle a variety of games at minimum settings and 1280×720 (720p) resolution. A small quad-core CPU with 6MB of L3 cache and a 3.4 GHz turbo was able to hit 60 fps in a few titles, but overall most titles averaged just a meager 30-20 fps. It worked.
The YouTuber tested a total of 10 games including: Genshin, dota 2, grid autosport, GTA V, Mine Craft, resident evil 5, skyrim, sleeping dog, CS:GOand Forza Horizon 4. of Three of those titles in particular CS:GO, grid autosportand resident evil 5the N100 achieved 60 fps. Resident Evil 5, it Mostly done in the mid 70’s. dota 2 It also managed an acceptable 40 fps. Unfortunately, the rest of the group ran below 30fps, with some games dropping into the low 20s. The latter he is virtually unplayable on the N100.
The N100 contains 4 Gracemount cores running up to 3.4 GHz turbo, with 6MB of L3 cache and a non-configurable 6W TDP. The maximum amount of memory is 16 GB, and we used one of his 8 GB sticks of DDR5 memory in our tests. (Since these chips only have one memory channel, this configuration does not limit GPU performance.) UHD graphics feature the Xe-LP architecture with 24 EUs and a maximum frequency of 750 MHz. Compare with faster desktop parts such as UHD. Intel Core i9-12900K Graphics 770 with 32 EUs and capable of running at 1550 MHz.
Intel’s tiny N100 didn’t deliver great gaming performance, but the performance per watt coming from an entry-level design is pretty impressive. With a total chip power consumption of just 6W, the N100 has excellent chip performance per watt. Of course, this is all relative, as most gaming laptops have significantly more graphics processing power.
The N100’s performance-per-watt gaming advantage is nowhere near playable performance for most gamers, so it’s clearly not going to be a sales-driving feature. But Alder Lake-N wasn’t designed from the start as a gaming platform, instead performing low-level tasks like web browsing, video playback, and basic office work.
But it will be interesting to see what features Intel’s most power efficient SoC platform has. Intel could put together some handheld gaming SoC competitors to rival AMD’s best handheld gaming SoCs, including the Ryzen Z1 series and Steam Deck’s custom Van Gogh APUs. Will that happen? I can’t say never…but it’s unlikely to happen anytime soon.
