News Intel Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake CPU specs break cover — leak suggests up to 16 CPU cores and 180 total AI TOPS

[thestryker]

Wild Cat sounds very interesting to me. I currently use a home-made NAS on the basis of a Raspi 4, it's been running for 4 years now. I would like to use some Docker containers in the future, which currently isn't going very well. So I was looking at the N100, since boards with that chip are pretty cheap where I live, at 96€. Couple that with 16 - 32 GB RAM and you got a nice, inexpensive base for a NAS.

Wild Cat would be a lot more expensive at the start is my guess, the N100 certainly was, but would make for a good future upgrade, and maybe even lower N100 prices further. Though I would get the N100 rather sooner than later...

I'm not sure what all is available options wise where you are but there are some very good N305 SBCs available. That would give you a little more flexibility with regards to what all you can easily run in parallel. If you needed more single threaded performance or more GPU capability then you might be able to find something inexpensive with an 8505.

Nothing like this was available yet when I replaced my server box, but if it had I might have sacrificed overall performance for simplicity and low power: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256807101632310.html

 

[bit_user]

Wild Cat sounds very interesting to me. I currently use a home-made NAS on the basis of a Raspi 4, it's been running for 4 years now. I would like to use some Docker containers in the future, which currently isn't going very well. So I was looking at the N100, since boards with that chip are pretty cheap where I live, at 96€. Couple that with 16 - 32 GB RAM and you got a nice, inexpensive base for a NAS.

My advice would be to look at ODROID-H4 Plus. It's based on the higher-performance N97, has an inexpensive ITX adapter kit, uses a regular DDR5 SODIMM (so you can use up to 48 GB, currently), and can run passively.

ODROID-H4 PLUS – ODROID

www.hardkernel.com

If you need neither SATA nor a second 2.5G Ethernet port, the regular H4 would do.

It has two features you don't always find in these products. One is a full x4 NVMe slot @ PCIe 3.0 (although, if you need to use the SATA ports on the Plus, it drops to just x2).

More importantly, their latest BIOS enables in-band ECC. This gives you data integrity, which is important for something like a NAS. It dings performance slightly, but not enough that you'll probably notice. The best part is that it works with any RAM you use, due to the way it works. It's described, here:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18732/asrock-industrial-nucs-box1360pd4-review-raptor-lakep-ecc/2
​

I have only seen the in-band ECC option exposed on 2 or 3 other Alder Lake-N boards, and they tend to be the higher-end, more industrial-focused models.

Another feature it has is "Unlimited Performance" mode, which allows it to run at full boost speeds, without a time limit. The web page shows what kind of performance benefit this provides. You'll need active cooling, if you're going to use this feature.

At low load, it's also very power-efficient. I bought a N97 board from a different manufacturer, just weeks before the ODROID-H4 came out, and mine won't idle below 7W (headless). They claim theirs just 2.0 to 2.8 W, in the same configuration, depending on the model.

Lastly, HardKernel (who make ODROID) is based in Korea, not China. I've ordered from them, directly. They have forums with a pretty good user community and have been in the business of making small computer for more than 15 years.

I'm not sure what all is available options wise where you are but there are some very good N305 SBCs available.

The ODROID-H4 Ultra is also based on the N305.

Nothing like this was available yet when I replaced my server box, but if it had I might have sacrificed overall performance for simplicity and low power: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256807101632310.html

Although it has dual M.2 slots, I'm sure they're not x4. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't just connected at x1! That 10 GbE controller is going to need probably two lanes all to itself!

 

[thestryker]

Although it has dual M.2 slots, I'm sure they're not x4. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't just connected at x1! That 10 GbE controller is going to need probably two lanes all to itself!

They're definitely PCIe 3.0 x1 as I don't think I've seen any of these boards using anything else. I can't imagine why anyone would care about x4 on a device like this though.

I'm not 100% sure how they're doing the connectivity on the 10gb since the only detailed layouts I've seen are on the 4x 2.5gb boards. If they're giving it full bandwidth it would definitely need two lanes though.

The ODROID-H4 Ultra is also based on the N305.

Yeah that's a really good choice if you want something with better support as the connectivity loss isn't too bad.

 

[KyaraM]

I'm not sure what all is available options wise where you are but there are some very good N305 SBCs available. That would give you a little more flexibility with regards to what all you can easily run in parallel. If you needed more single threaded performance or more GPU capability then you might be able to find something inexpensive with an 8505.

Nothing like this was available yet when I replaced my server box, but if it had I might have sacrificed overall performance for simplicity and low power: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3256807101632310.html

My advice would be to look at ODROID-H4 Plus. It's based on the higher-performance N97, has an inexpensive ITX adapter kit, uses a regular DDR5 SODIMM (so you can use up to 48 GB, currently), and can run passively.

​

ODROID-H4 PLUS – ODROID

www.hardkernel.com

​

If you need neither SATA nor a second 2.5G Ethernet port, the regular H4 would do.

It has two features you don't always find in these products. One is a full x4 NVMe slot @ PCIe 3.0 (although, if you need to use the SATA ports on the Plus, it drops to just x2).

More importantly, their latest BIOS enables in-band ECC. This gives you data integrity, which is important for something like a NAS. It dings performance slightly, but not enough that you'll probably notice. The best part is that it works with any RAM you use, due to the way it works. It's described, here:

​

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18732/asrock-industrial-nucs-box1360pd4-review-raptor-lakep-ecc/2​

​

I have only seen the in-band ECC option exposed on 2 or 3 other Alder Lake-N boards, and they tend to be the higher-end, more industrial-focused models.

Another feature it has is "Unlimited Performance" mode, which allows it to run at full boost speeds, without a time limit. The web page shows what kind of performance benefit this provides. You'll need active cooling, if you're going to use this feature.

At low load, it's also very power-efficient. I bought a N97 board from a different manufacturer, just weeks before the ODROID-H4 came out, and mine won't idle below 7W (headless). They claim theirs just 2.0 to 2.8 W, in the same configuration, depending on the model.

Lastly, HardKernel (who make ODROID) is based in Korea, not China. I've ordered from them, directly. They have forums with a pretty good user community and have been in the business of making small computer for more than 15 years.


The ODROID-H4 Ultra is also based on the N305.


Although it has dual M.2 slots, I'm sure they're not x4. In fact, I'd be surprised if they weren't just connected at x1! That 10 GbE controller is going to need probably two lanes all to itself!

Thanks, you two! Will definitely look at those options. The ECC-mode on the ODROID-board does sound very interesting indeed.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks, you two! Will definitely look at those options. The ECC-mode on the ODROID-board does sound very interesting indeed.

It seems they haven't updated their product pages to mention it, but here's the forum post where they stated that support for it was included in BIOS version 1.02 for the H4 series:

https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?p=384823#p384823
​

It's also mentioned in the description of the 1.02 BIOS release:

https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-h4/hardware/h4_bios_update#bios_release
​