News Intel Bids Gemini Lake Refresh CPUs Farewell

bit_user

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With Gemini Lake Refresh almost out of the picture, upcoming really low-budget devices will arrive with Jasper Lake processors as the default. It's excellent news since vendors will have no choice by to use the newer 10nm chips that will offer better performance for budget-conscious consumers.
Except... there were lots of Gemini Lake mini-ITX boards and virtually none to be found with Jasper Lake. When you can find them, they cost like 50% more.
 

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good riddance to intel's older celeron chips since the old laptop that I used had an intel celeron n3350 and it was the only device that I could use to game on. It was so awful gaming on it.
 

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good riddance to intel's older celeron chips since the old laptop that I used had an intel celeron n3350
Celeron brand is dead, but Gemini is much faster than your Apollo Lake chip, 40%+ faster. And with all the media codecs added it was quite capable. Any Celeron is a poor choice for modern gaming, classic gaming though or emulating, more than serviceable.

I am typing on a Celeron 2955U(Haswell) right now on an ancient Chromebook C720 (Running ChromeOS Flex). Still get 8+ hours battery and its my only device besides a Macbook air that sleeps correctly(Close the laptop at 80%, open it a week later still near 80%).

Looking forward to Alder/Raptor Lake-N chips (E-core only chips) and really curious to see what meteor lake strategy is at the budget bottom space, Can Intel afford disaggregation here? AMD isn't supplying much silicon here (Margins must be very low, lowest bin silicon) so I am curious what will fill this space in the future, honestly ARM could do it, but nothing as good as apple yet.
 
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Intel's Gemini Lake Refresh processors, launched in 2019, have reached end-of-life (EOL) .

Intel Bids Gemini Lake Refresh CPUs Farewell : Read more
These devices were perfect for small storage and network devices like pfSense or unRAID. They also made nice media boxes sipping just 6W typical.

And there's nothing to replace them. I mean I know Tremont exist but I haven't seen anything built on them.
 

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And there's nothing to replace them. I mean I know Tremont exist but I haven't seen anything built on them.
It's not hard to find Jasper Lake and Elkhart Lake mini-PCs, but mini-ITX boards with them are quite scarce. That's based on my own survey, carried out just a couple weeks ago.

I'm in the market for such a board, but now I'm thinking I should sit tight see if I can find an Alder Lake-N mini-ITX board.
 
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It's not hard to find Jasper Lake and Elkhart Lake mini-PCs, but mini-ITX boards with them are quite scarce. That's based on my own survey, carried out just a couple weeks ago.

I'm in the market for such a board, but now I'm thinking I should sit tight see if I can find an Alder Lake-N mini-ITX board.
ASRock Industrial has a few Alder Lake-N and Elkhart Lake mini-ITX motherboards.
 

bit_user

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ASRock Industrial has a few Alder Lake-N and Elkhart Lake mini-ITX motherboards.
Thanks for the tip! I have indeed seen their website, but can't find anywhere in the USA to buy them. I will keep an eye out for them, however.

I did find an Elkhart Lake board from Supermicro, but sourcing it remains a challenge (unless I go to ebay).

BTW, since Alder Lake-N has only a single-channel memory architecture, I'm somewhat keen to find a board that uses DDR5. So far, the ones I've seen are DDR4. With Elkhart Lake, all the boards I've seen are dual-channel DDR4.
 
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WOAH, Alder Lake-N is crazy good performance for atom class core..
Beating Haswell i5, and nearly as good as a Skylake i5 all under 12 W.
When Alder Lake launched, Intel was keen to point out that Gracemont offered Skylake-level performance. Here's Anandtech's interpretation of Intel's data:

"For performance, Intel has some pretty wild claims. It splits them up into single thread and multi-thread comparisons using SPECrate2017_int.

When comparing 1C1T of Gracemont against 1C1T of Skylake, Intel’s numbers suggest:
  • +40% performance at iso-power (using a middling frequency)
  • 40% less power* at iso-performance (peak Skylake performance)
* '<40%' is now understood to mean 'below 40 power'

When comparing 4C4T of Gracemont against 2C4T of Skylake, Intel’s numbers suggest:
  • +80% performance peak vs peak
  • 80% less power at iso performance)peak Skylake performance

We pushed the two Intel slides together to show how they presented this data.



Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16881/a-deep-dive-into-intels-alder-lake-microarchitectures/4

I think one reason it might come as a surprise is that Tremont didn't get a lot of publicity, due to Intel's 10 nm troubles and a pandemic-fueled surge in demand for Chromebooks leading to scarcity of Jasper & Elkhart Lake in other markets. Tremont was a big step forward from Gemini Lake and basically set the stage for what was to come in Gracemont.
 

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After lots of deliberation, I ended up buying an ASRock J5040-ITX.

That's right, not Jasper Lake, Elkhart Lake, or Alder-N, but a Gemini-Refresh! The reason is that it was cheap, it's enough for my current needs, I have DDR4 SODIMMs that should work (but I've read these boards can be picky), and I have a perfect case, PSU, and SATA SSD already. That's why I didn't want a whole mini-PC, which is basically what I'd have had to buy to get a Jasper Lake or Elkhart Lake.

I hope, in a couple years, I can replace it with an Alder Lake-N or Raptor Lake-N that uses DDR5. So far, the only boards with those processors are expensive Industrial ones, and nearly all are still using DDR4-3200. That's sort of a problem, because Alder-N is only single-channel. So, I'd definitely prefer one that uses DDR5.

Also, passively-cooled is a big thing, for this system. I don't want any noise, and I don't want to spend a lot of money on a fancy, fanless industrial PC. So, I have a simple airy case that uses an external Seasonic 19 VDC power brick.
 

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After lots of deliberation, I ended up buying an ASRock J5040-ITX.

So, my board arrived and I tried to boot it, last night. I used some DDR4 SO-DIMMs I had lying around, but no luck. After a brief bit of web research, it appears these boards are very picky about memory compatibility, with some users even claiming to have non-booting systems even with memory off ASRock's own QVL!

I will try some RAM that's supposedly compatible with this board, and follow-up when I do. Caveat emptor.

BTW, ASRock just announced a new version with Alder Lake N100 CPUs, in case anyone missed it. The downside is they still use DDR4, which is even worse when you consider that they're single-channel boards!


Update: when I populated the second memory slot, it started working! With just the A1 slot populated, it didn't. Weird.

Memtest86 v8.3 Pro just completed a 4-pass, 6h 44m run. No errors. So, as long as it boots reliably, I guess I'm all set.
 
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So far, I'm a bit disappointed in how hot this thing gets. The Pentium Silver J5040 is reaching as high as 84 C, sitting on an open bench. Ambient is about 24 C. Once I put it in the case, it'll be throttling a lot. My idea was for this to be completely fanless. I might have to add a case fan, though.

I might look into some way of measuring how much power the board is actually using. I suspect it's a good deal more than 10 W, under high load.

Speed-wise, it's fine for web browsing and video playback is smooth at full-screen 60 fps (not surprising, really). That's with Ubuntu 22.04.

Even though the CPU spec says it only supports 8 GB of RAM, I have 16 GB working fine (2x 8 GB). Just be careful about DIMM selection, because compatibility is spotty.