Is Intel N100 Mini PC a Good Buy?

Is Intel N100 mini PC a good buy?

It depends on what you want to do with it. It should be good for general usage, but not for gaming.

The Intel N100 CPU was released 2023 January. It is using Alder Lake-N, base on Alder Lake but with some modification.

The Alder Lake family (aka Intel 7) is one of the latest architecture. The Alder Lake-N is the ultra low power consumption CPU, eg. N100 at 6 watts only. The Alder Lake-N has 4 E-cores (Efficient core) and no P-core (Performance care). (that’s why is cheaper?)

Integrated graphic is Iris Xe. Iris Xe is a high GPU, but it is so new that you might not able to find a proper driver for it.

N5105 using Jasper Lake architecture, which is older compare to N100. the integrate graphic cards perform comparable to the Iris Xe. Intel N5105 has Intel VT-x for virtualization. Both Intel N100 and N5105 has VT-x.

If you are working with virtualization software examples virtual box, Qemu, you might want to use the N5105, but Docker on Linux, doesn’t make use of the VT-x technology. For Docker users might want to consider using Intel N100.

Anyway talk is just theory. I am waiting for my N100 machine to delivery. Then I can do testing for reference.

Docker is good for ...

Docker is good for testing and production

Docker is a lightweight container, is small, fast and secure. Docker is easy to use (should be easy to setup as well).

Docker is good for testing and deploying. For sample, you want to test your application on Red Hat Linux. You don't want to install another machine, so your test it on Docker. For sure I prefer to test it on Alpine than Red Hat.