Intel Celeron N3350 vs Intel Celeron N5095 vs Intel Pentium Silver N6000

Intel Celeron N3350

The Intel Celeron N3350 is an Apollo Lake family, dual-core, ultra-low-power processor (SoC) that saw the light of day in 2016. Its two cores run at 1.1 GHz to 2.4 GHz; these are not Hyper-Threading-enabled meaning there are no additional threads. This chip has a fairly competent integrated graphics solution, the Intel HD Graphics 500, and eats very little (~6 W).

Amusingly enough, Intel keeps making and selling the Celeron as of late 2022, albeit the price has dropped from about $100 to about $20 per unit making the CPU even more popular with ultra-budget nettop and laptop makers.

Architecture & Features

Just like other Celeron N, Celeron J, Pentium N, Pentium J processors, this Celeron is notable for its small die size. It is easy to manufacture, lowering the costs and enabling Intel to compete with various ARM-based products (hello, Raspberry Pi).

The Celeron N3350 features the Goldmont CPU microarchitecture. This replaces the dated Silvermont (2013), bringing with it several welcome improvements and making for a double-digit IPC improvement. There is still no L3 cache to be found here, however, it now takes less cycles to perform many operations.

The Celeron is compatible with DDR3L-1866, LPDDR3-1866, LPDDR4-2400 RAM. Intel's guidelines state that up to 8 GB are supported; that being said, various forum users report that the CPU functions just fine if mated to 16 GB and even 32 GB of RAM. The chip features six PCI-Express 2.0 lanes for connecting various devices, meaning a four-lane NVMe SSD will not be able to deliver a data transfer rate of more than 2 GB/s. eMMC and SATA storage is supported natively, too.

This Intel CPU is Secure Boot-compatible; technically, it will have no issue running 64-bit Windows 11. However, Microsoft only allows Windows 11 to be installed on systems with CPUs released in 2017 or later, making 64-bit Windows 10 the only OS that the Celeron is officially compatible with.

Last but not the least, please keep in mind that this is not a user-replaceable CPU. It gets permanently soldered to the motherboard (BGA1296 socket interface).

Performance

The average N3350 in our database is just as fast as the Atom x5-Z8300 and the Core 2 Duo SU7300, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. Which is not fast at all. In fact, the two cores of this Celeron trail behind a single core of any half-decent CPU such as Intel's very own Core i3-7130U. A proper x86 CPU, Celeron N3350 will let you run nearly any Windows app, the caveat being that you will have to wait for several seconds every time you click on something. Windows 10 takes nearly a minute to fully boot with this CPU.

Graphics

The Intel HD Graphics 500 (Apollo Lake) is the highlight of this little Celeron. As far as the feature set is concerned, the HD Graphics 500 is not much different from the HD Graphics 520 or any other graphics adapter that full-blown six-generation Intel Core i3/i5/i7 chips have. This iGPU is compatible with DX12; it will drive up to 3 monitors with resolutions as high as 2160p60. It will happily decode VP9 and AVC-encoded videos, too. These are the two codecs that YouTube mostly relies on, as of 2021.

It's not all roses and sunshine. To keep power consumption under control, the number of Execution Units was reduced to 12 (the HD Graphics 520 has 24 EUs at its disposal, for reference). Besides, the UHD Graphics runs at up to 650 MHz which is not a lot. Very few games will be playable on this graphics solution - mostly, ones that were released in the 2000s or even in the 1990s.

Power consumption

The Celeron's default TDP (also known as the Power Limit 1) is 6 W, making it a great option for passively cooled systems. Increasing the PL1 by one or two watts, which many systems built around Apollo Lake allow one to do, makes for a much more responsive user experience, speaking subjectively.

Energy efficiency isn't great here, as Intel's 14 nm processes are very old as of mid 2022.

Intel Celeron N5095

The Celeron N5095 is an inexpensive quad-core SoC of the Jasper Lake product family designed for use in affordable SFF desktops and laptops. It features four Tremont CPU cores running at 2 GHz that Boost to up to 2.9 GHz with no thread-doubling Hyper-Threading technology in sight. A pretty basic iGPU is present as well.

The only difference between the N5095 and the N5095A is that the latter comes with support for more proprietary Intel technologies such as the Smart Sound DSP, Wake on Voice and HD Audio.

Architecture and Features

Tremont brings many improvements over Goldmont Plus, the architecture that we know from the N5030 and myriads of other N-class CPUs. An up to 30% boost in single-thread performance is to be expected thanks to smarter prefetchers, branch prediction improvements and other refinements, according to Intel. These new chips are physically larger than their immediate predecessors as a result. Either way, this is still a "small" core rather than a "big" one according to ChipsAndCheese.

The Celeron has 1.5 MB of L2 and 4 MB of L3 cache and is compatible with DDR4-2933 and LPDDR4x-2933 memory or slower. Support for Intel CNVi Wi-Fi 6 modules is baked into the chip, as are 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 3.9 GB/s. USB 4 or Thunderbolt aren't supported however.

Please also note that the Celeron gets soldered to the motherboard (BGA1338 socket interface) for good and is thus not user-replaceable.

Performance

The average N5095 in our database is about as fast as the Core i3-10110U, Core i3-1005G1, Celeron N5105 and also the Ryzen 3 3200U in multi-threaded workloads. Which is just enough for the most basic of tasks in late 2024.

Performance will get a significant hit if the power target is set to 10 W or 6 W instead of the Intel-recommended 15 W value.

Graphics

The DirectX 12.1-capable 16 EU UHD Graphics runs at up to 750 MHz and is in many respects similar to what Ice Lake CPUs come equipped with. This graphics adapter is capable of driving up to 3 SUHD displays simultaneously; HEVC, AVC, VP9, MPEG-2 and other popular video codecs can all be hardware-decoded. AV1 and VVC can't.

As far as gaming is concerned, it is reasonable to expect playable framerates in really old games (like Dota 2 Reborn) provided one sticks to lower resolutions such as HD 720p.

Power consumption

While most N-class chips have a 6 W long-term power target, the Celeron N5095 has a 15 W TDP to mimic much faster U-class Core processors. This isn't a great CPU for passively cooled designs.

The N5095 is built with the same 10 nm Intel process as Ice Lake-U processors for pretty unimpressive power efficiency, as of late 2024.

Intel Pentium Silver N6000

The Intel Pentium Silver N6000 is a quad-core SoC of the Jasper Lake series that is primarily intended for inexpensive notebooks and was announced in early 2021. The four Tremont CPU cores clock between 1.1 and 3.3 GHz (single core Burst) and offer no HyperThreading (SMT). The N6000 uses 1.5 MB L2 and 4 MB L3 cache. The chip is manufactured on the first-gen 10 nm Intel process, the same process as Ice Lake.

Architecture

The processor architecture is called Tremont and a complete redesign compared to the old Golmont Plus cores in the predecessor. According to Intel, the single thread performance of a core could be improved by 30% on average (10 - 80% in all tests of SPECint and SPECfp).

Features

In addition to the four CPU cores, the SoC integrates a 32 EU Intel UHD Graphics GPU clocked from 350 - 850 MHz and a dual-channel DDR4 / quad-channel LPDDR4x memory controller (up to 16 GB and 2933 MHz). The chip now also partly integrates Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+), 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes, 14 USB 2.0/ 3.2 ports and two SATA 6.0 ports. The package got bigger and measures 35 x 24 mm (compared to 25 x 24 mm for the N5030 e.g.). The SoC is directly soldered to the mainboard (BGA) and can't be easily replaced.

Performance

The average N6000 in our database proves to be an OK entry-level processor, as of late 2022, its multi-thread benchmark scores nearly matching those of the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U. Yes, the chip is a whole lot slower than the latest Ryzen 3 and Core i3 processors, but it will at least let you run your day-to-day apps without annoying slowdowns.

The Asus Vivobook 13 Slate is among the fastest systems built around the N6000 that we know of, thanks to the long-term CPU power limit of 10 W. It can be more than 20% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Power consumption

Like nearly all other N-class Intel processors, the Pentium N6000 has a default TDP of 6 W (also known as the long-term power limit). This is low and thus good enough for passively cooled tablets, laptops, mini-PCs.

The SoC is built with Intel's 2nd generation 10 nm process (not 10 nm SuperFin or Intel 7) for low, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.