by johnklos | 2025-07-04 17:45:54+00:00
Reddit is filled with posts where people try to make their values in to everyone else's.

Want an Arm SBC? Get an N100 instead! Want a Ryzen to transcode video? Get an N100 instead! Want a NAS? Get an N100 instead!

I get it, N100 people - you get a shiny new toy, and you want to hype it up as the Next Best Thing that's a great choice for everyone. The problem is that it's not the best choice for everyone, and it's getting old hearing about it.

Here are some reasons the N100 isn't best:

SBCs are smaller and almost always take less power.

Intel QuickSync isn't the same quality as software based transcoding, and not everyone wants to compromise on quality.

Like Jeff points out, N100 systems cost more, and the added performance over a Pi of some sort isn't always needed (although it's funny that the same people who point out the higher performance of N100 over a Raspberry Pi will at the same time dismiss a low power Ryzen :P).

They cost more.

N100 systems don't have enough PCIe lanes to replace certain I/O heavy uses.

Some people don't like the x86 ecosystem. N100 fans try to tell everyone that there's more software because it's x86, but that's a negative thing for some of us who prefer to install from source.

Intel gatekeeps products by removing features when there's no reason to do so. Even my 2014 AMD Athlon 5350 systems, which are very decently performing low power systems and which I'm still using as routers / firewalls / servers in many places, have ECC support in the CPU. (I wonder how the N100 would compare with a 2014 Athlon 5350, but that's a question for another time.)

The primary reason for me is a little different: Intel makes shitty decisions. All of the CPU vulnerabilities found that I know of have affected Intel CPUs more than AMD or Arm CPUs. Why? I think it's because Intel tries so hard to chase performance and marketing points that they prioritize this over security and reliability.

I bought an eight core Bulldozer in 2012 for compiling because I preferred eight integer cores over four cores plus hyperthreading in a Core i7-2600. Benchmarks then showed the Intel beat out AMD in many benchmarks then. However, more than a decade later, with toolchain improvements and with performance impacts of Spectre and Meltdown, my Bulldozer now beats an Intel i7-2600 at many modern benchmarks.

But it's not just security - Intel's 13th and 14 generation degradation debacle again shows that Intel is more concerned with marketing and benchmarks than having good, reliable products. That their CPUs can take hundreds of watts to compete with Ryzen illustrates this well. Would this be an issue with N100? Probably not, but I don't want any CPUs from a company that will compromise their products for profit and marketing purposes.

They tried to do AVX-512 and made a huge mess of which products have it - again, Intel were more concerned with benchmark results. After all, Intel's not going to release benchmark figures that show the effects of dropping the whole CPU's clock while running AVX-512. They tried to play us.

The bottom line is that I don't trust Intel, which is why I'll never get an N100, and all of these other reasons are why I'd never recommend them.