Thursday, September 29th 2022
Intel Core i3 N300 is a Core Processor with Just E-cores That Somehow Isn't an Atom or Pentium Silver
The upcoming Intel Core i3-N300 is an upcoming entry-level mobile processor that only has "Gracemont" E-cores, no P-cores, and yet somehow isn't branded under Atom or Pentium Silver. This isn't just because Intel retired the entry-level brands in favor of a generic "Intel Inside" brand to be used on entry-level notebooks; but very likely because of the way these chips are architected.
The i3-N300 and i3-N305 were spotted in separate Geekbench submissions discovered by Benchleaks. The chip is identified as having 8 cores and 8 logical processors (threads), but its cache is identified as being 4x 64 KB L1I, with 4x 32 KB L1D, 1x 2 MB L2, and 1x 6 MB L3. It's possible that the chip's design is very similar to a conventional "Alder Lake" processor—with a centralized L3 cache and client interconnect fabric, an uncore, and an iGPU; but with no P-cores, just the two "Gracemont" E-core clusters, each with 2 MB of L2 cache shared among 4 cores.
"Gracemont" lacks HyperThreading support, which makes this chip 8-core/8-thread. The chip comes with clock speeds of 1.80 GHz base, with 3.80 GHz boost. The chip scores a fairly high single-thread Geekbench number of 1025 points, but with 4420 points multi-thread. This would put the processor's performance roughly on-par with AMD "Renoir" Ryzen 4000-series mobile processors in the multi-threaded score; but its single-threaded score is quite-something, on par with a "Cezanne" Ryzen 5000-series mobile chip.
Sources:
Benchleaks (Twitter), VideoCardz
The i3-N300 and i3-N305 were spotted in separate Geekbench submissions discovered by Benchleaks. The chip is identified as having 8 cores and 8 logical processors (threads), but its cache is identified as being 4x 64 KB L1I, with 4x 32 KB L1D, 1x 2 MB L2, and 1x 6 MB L3. It's possible that the chip's design is very similar to a conventional "Alder Lake" processor—with a centralized L3 cache and client interconnect fabric, an uncore, and an iGPU; but with no P-cores, just the two "Gracemont" E-core clusters, each with 2 MB of L2 cache shared among 4 cores.
38 Comments on Intel Core i3 N300 is a Core Processor with Just E-cores That Somehow Isn't an Atom or Pentium Silver
But for a tablet, they have to decrease the TDP even further down to 2 watts or 3 watts maximum..
I mean, this chip has better scores than the i5 8365U I'm typing in right now and I feel the i5 is no slouch.
www.techpowerup.com/299034/amd-ryzen-and-athlon-7020-mendocino-6nm-processors-launched-for-entry-level-notebooksThe last (original) Atoms died on 22nm when Intel gave up the mobile/tablet market. Since then they've generally been getting progressively better, Intel also had this internal goal (target?) that Atoms will not exceed 50% performance of the "big" cores. Not sure if this has changed recently but it was the case for a long time.