Intel N95 Alder Lake-N CPU Specs And Preliminary Performance Revealed In Benchmark Leak
by
Zak Killian
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Thursday, December 15, 2022, 02:02 PM EDT
Intel is sunsetting the Pentium and Celeron brands for low-end laptop parts. Low-end laptop processors will apparently just be called "Intel Processors" now. Simple enough, we suppose. The tearless electric retina of the BenchLeaks bot has spotted the first benchmark for one such processor, and it is apparently known as the Intel Processor N95.
Based on the data captured by GeekBench, this is a quad-core processor without hyper-threading. It appears to have a single 2MB allotment of L2 cache, which means that this is almost assuredly an Alder Lake-N CPU. None of these chips have been released yet, but numerous reliable leaks have painted the picture of Alder Lake-N as an eight-core die with two clusters of Gracemont efficiency cores and no performance cores at all.
However, the little N95 we have here is just a single quad-core cluster, meaning it's basically got half of the Alder Lake-N die disabled. Based on information obtained by Coelacanth's Dream, Alder Lake-N CPUs should come with Intel Arc graphics, but with just 32 execution units, which is an extremely small GPU—one-quarter of an Arc A380.
Further hampering graphics performance is the missing second memory channel. Where all of Intel's other consumer CPUs have two 64-bit memory channels, the Coelacanth's information puts Alder Lake-N down for just one. That'll severely limit performance in memory-constrained applications, although the use of fast DDR5 memory means that it probably won't be a problem in general.
After all, performance isn't exactly the point of this processor. We don't know what the actual TDP is, but Alder Lake-N is expected to span a range from 6 watts to 15 watts. Given the cut-down nature of this chip, we can reasonably assume it to fall toward the bottom end of that range.
In that light, the Geekbench 5 results are actually very impressive. The single-core score, with a maximum clock of 2.8 GHz, comes within striking distance of a full-power Haswell desktop processor, although the shared L2 and lack of hyper-threading (as well as what is surely a restrictive power limit) hurt its multi-core performance.
Much like AMD's Mendocino low-power processors, this chip is probably destined to end up in Chromebooks and similar entry-level, low-cost applications. In that context, we suspect it will do just fine, but of course, a single GeekBench result from pre-release hardware is nothing to base a final decision on.