Intel Celeron G6900 Benchmarks - Performance Of Intel's $40~60 Alder Lake Processor

[Anux]

Chrome in comparison flies on all my devices but all my workload is on Firefox and I just like it more.

Yeah i also like Firefox more, but I don't have noticable performance problems with it. You could try a blanc profile and see if its different. Also are you on Ubuntu or similar and running Firefox over snap, that might be the explanation for you Foxes starting behavior?

[Mike Frett]

We use to call this the Celery Stick.

[catpig]

Interesting little chip, thanks for the benchmarks. I think a lot of the commenters here are missing a key point: price. Based on the best price on geizhals (price comparison site covering most of the German market) the cheapest AMD AM4 CPU is 78€. This one costs 46€. IOW, the AMD is about 75% more expensive. At this point in time of course the Intel mainboards are preposterously overpriced, more than compensating for the cheap CPU. But presumably those mobo prices will come down once Intel releases entry level chipsets.

[yump]

8 cores sound like an overkill but 4 cores are a must nowadays IMO. Firefox here often has over 250% CPU usage (i.e. 2 cores fully saturated and a half of the third one) and it's not like I have too many tabs open. I use uBlock Origin + NoScript, so other people who don't use these add-ons must have a significantly higher CPU/RAM usage.

That is caused by malicious/incompetent web devlopment, and is not a problem that can be papered over with a bigger CPU. 250% CPU usage would drop the battery life of a laptop by a couple hours at least, no matter how many cores it had.

[yump]

Does anyone know whether Intel released something similar to the Pentium Gold processors from the previous generations?

I have a Pentium G5400 which has been powering my home NAS for the past three to four years and it performs fantastic for NAS duties like serving files, doing backups, running various daemons, etc.
It saves me money which otherwise would be spent on VPS instances which are half as powerful as this box.

It cost about £50 when I bought it. But the best bit is the power consumption of the entire box which is something like 25W in idle to ~45W peak load. It has a bunch of HDDs in RAID1 and an SSD for the OS. Not much else besides that since the CPU has built-in graphics and the mobo provides the peripheric connectivity.

There definitely is a market for these chips. Low power computers which run in the background are great.

The power consumption of a proper purpose-built small form factor system like Dell/HP/Lenovo make would be even less, and you can get those used with Skylake quad-cores for under $200 all-in. And even if you were building new, a soldered mobile chip would be a better choice.

The only market for this thing that I can see is lighting up a PCIe slot at minimum cost.

[yump]

What’s the idle power draw at the wall (PSU) or PSU out?

Struggling to find a good reason this exists as a low spec retail CPU without ECC or any other redeeming features. 4 threads are a minimum requirement for anything you’d take time to piece together that isn’t a NAS or an atom type appliance. Without ECC you might as well go buy an entire bare bones 4 core atom package that includes the case and PSU and really sips power.

This now seems like single core scraps that usually were thrown in the scrap bin at Intel.

The idle power is going to be dominated by the motherboard and the PSU, which would have to be chosen specially to minimize idle power and should work for any of the lower-end LGA 1700 chips, up to a 4-core or maybe even the 6. It will never be able to match a laptop-derived fully integrated SBC.

[yump]

Interesting little chip, thanks for the benchmarks. I think a lot of the commenters here are missing a key point: price. Based on the best price on geizhals (price comparison site covering most of the German market) the cheapest AMD AM4 CPU is 78€. This one costs 46€. IOW, the AMD is about 75% more expensive. At this point in time of course the Intel mainboards are preposterously overpriced, more than compensating for the cheap CPU. But presumably those mobo prices will come down once Intel releases entry level chipsets.

You are missing the price of the rest of the system. 91€ for a motherboard. 52€ for memory. 50€-ish for power supply of acceptable quality and 30€ for case, if you don't already have them. And i3-12100 is 136€ for 4C/8T cores and +1 GHz clock speed for your single-thread tasks.

Or you could go on eBay and get a used USFF system with 4 Kaby Lake cores for $190 (about 167€).

This chip is a waste of sand.

[catpig]

You are missing the price of the rest of the system. 91€ for a motherboard. 52€ for memory. 50€-ish for power supply of acceptable quality and 30€ for case, if you don't already have them. And i3-12100 is 136€ for 4C/8T cores and +1 GHz clock speed for your single-thread tasks.

Or you could go on eBay and get a used USFF system with 4 Kaby Lake cores for $190 (about 167€).

This chip is a waste of sand.

I mentioned the mobo price. But comparing a 136€ CPU to one for 50 or whatever is ridiculous and I think you know that
Edit: Also, I doubt many systems with that chip will have a 50€ PSU. You might think that's sensible and I might think that, but that's not gonna be the typical PSU.
Edit2: And 52€ for memory? You think systems with this chip will (or should) have 16GB? Come on... you'll be lucky if you get 2*4GB with something like this. Especially given that, iirc, Intel's lowest chipset will be restricted to single channel anyway. Remember, this chip is the market where they'll cripple your performance by saving 2€ on putting in one stick rather than 2.

[yump]

I mentioned the mobo price. But comparing a 136€ CPU to one for 50 or whatever is ridiculous and I think you know that

It isn't, and I absolutely do not know that. If you are building a new desktop PC from parts, it costs so much just to turn the chip on that the difference between 136 and 50 is only a small fraction of the total expense. Which is why building a new desktop PC from parts is not a good use of your budget if your budget is too small for at least 4 CPU cores. In this price range you should really be looking at used business surplus computers, like the USFF box I linked before.

Dell/HP/Lenovo could do it, but they could build a desktop with a soldered mobile CPU in it too, and that would be cheaper.

Also, I doubt many systems with that chip will have a 50€ PSU. You might think that's sensible and I might think that, but that's not gonna be the typical PSU.

Below that price, it looked like the only options were less reputable brands or group regulated. I'm an American though, so it's possible that I overlooked some manufacturers that haven't historically been available here.

Edit2: And 52€ for memory? You think systems with this chip will (or should) have 16GB? Come on... you'll be lucky if you get 2*4GB with something like this.

16 GiB is as low as you can go before having to regress to single channel or less than DDR4-3200/10 ns. It's not economically efficient to make smaller/shittier DRAM chips.

Especially given that, iirc, Intel's lowest chipset will be restricted to single channel anyway.

It isn't. The restriction is one DIMM per channel. Intel had a mistake on one presentation slide that was fixed after like an hour, and somehow the false information stuck all over the internet and still hasn't died.

Remember, this chip is the market where they'll cripple your performance by saving 2€ on putting in one stick rather than 2.

If there is a "they" involved, they can just use a soldered mobile chip and save 10€ by not needing an LGA socket.

[catpig]

It isn't, and I absolutely do not know that. .

Ok, well, you're completely missing the point of this chip. Nobody is gonna pair a 50€ CPU with a 50€ PSU. Not to mention that Seasonic ATX starts at below 40, you'll usually find this chip paired with the PSU that comes included with a 30€ case. Equivalent things apply to everything else. Comparing used and new in this context is also invalid because for many markets used is not considered (as you correctly state it should be, at least for parts of the market for this chip - but that doesn't change that it isn't). But thanks for the pointer on the dual channel. Good to see that Intel hasn't gone completely batshit insane, that would've been a new low, even for that company.
Edit: well, I would probably get a 40 or 50€ PSU if I had to build a new system where this CPU is fast enough, like I already said. But then if this CPU is fast enough, like you, I'd probably just get a used system.

To give an example of a situation where that isnt sensible: I used to work for Shell. That company was so incredibly efficient, it cost FOUR FIGURES IN US-DOLLARS to simply relocate a computer - into a neighbouring room. So obviously any used gear is completely out of the question because the extra maintenance cost outweighs any saving on the purchase price. On the other hand, I also worked IT at a small call centre company - there we simply bought job lots of used systems from corporate bankruptcies. Then spent hours getting rid of the BIOS passwords.