My only real complaint about Alder Lake N is that I had the single channel DDR4 version, which I think was bottlenecking me from doing everything I wanted in a 24/7 OBS stream. Otherwise it's surprisingly very usable for your mom's Facebook and email.
I'm still waiting for the day N100/N95 finally replaces the awful, obsolete celeron processors still used at the lowest-end. Maybe whateverlake will push it down the stack.
All Alder Lake-N products are limited to single channel, there is no dual-channel support. Which is why memory speeds became more important than usual since it could actually be less bandwidth than previous generation dual-channel Jasper Lake.
From where I'm standing, Alder Lake-N has cleared away a lot of that. You can probably find sub-$100 products somewhere (particularly used market) with N4000, N6000, or something. But I even see N100, N200, and similar in the cheap laptops at Walmart.
I'm not sure I really buy into WCL being a successor to ADL-N as that seems like a really odd choice which shouldn't be better than an 8 E-core part. It would certainly be a good replacement for the 1P/4E ADL SKUs though. I'm very curious about the lack of a 6 P-core PTL design, because the last time a couple of cores disappeared it was MTL and likely due to Intel 4.
ADL-N is 8x Gracemont cores, but most commonly sold with half disabled as quad-core N95/N97/N100/N200 and now the Twin Lake refresh N150.
Skymont delivered massive integer/floating-point IPC uplifts over Gracemont/Crestmont. Darkmont probably adds a small (<5%) improvement over that. So already, four of those cores could match six of Gracemont.
Then you come to the Cougar Cove P-cores, which will absolutely smoke Gracemont. They could easily be more than twice as fast as a Gracemont core, delivering great single-threaded performance which is what users tend to notice.
There are some potential red flags:
- Will the true low-end systems get the full 2+4 die? Or cut down to 2+2, or even 1+4 or 1+3?
- The Darkmont cores are described as LP E-cores. Will they have access to L3 cache, or become much slower than expected from having no L3 and all L2 cache misses going straight to DRAM?
If it's just the core count regression you're worried about, it's unlikely the top 6-core Wildcat Lake would be slower in multi-threading than the i3-N305. Even if the LP E-cores are unexpectedly terrible, it should outperform the N305 in most scenarios, and definitely the N200.
Graphics should also be a lot faster, and it supports 33-42% faster DDR5/LPDDR5X memory with the DDR4 options taken off the table, which will help if they stick with single channel again. (This is all assuming the leak is correct)