Intel Celeron N5095 vs Intel Core i5-10210Y

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 Core i5-10210Y

The Intel Core i5-10210Y is a extremely power efficient quad-core SoC for small laptops and tablets based on the Comet Lake (CML-Y) generation and was announced in August 2019. Compared to the similar Amber Lake processors (e.g. Core i7-8500Y), the only difference are two additional cores in the top models (except i3-10110Y). The processor cores are clocked between 1 and 4 GHz (all 4 cores 2.7 GHz max). Thanks to HyperThreading 8 threads can be used. Compared to the faster i7-10510Y, the level 3 cache is reduced to 6 MB and the clock rates are lower. The similar Core i5-10310Y offers 100 MHz higher clock speed, but the minimal configurable TDP is 1 W higher.

More information on Comet Lake and all the models and articles on it can be found here.

Performance

While we have not tested a single system built around the 10210Y as of August 2023, it's realistic to expect the chip to be about half as fast as the Core i5-10210U (Comet Lake, 4 cores, 8 threads, up to 4.2 GHz) in multi-thread workloads. Those 4 cores of the 10210Y are slated to be very much constrained by the low TDP target leading to high DPC latencies no matter the day of the week and generally unresponsive system behaviour.

The integrated graphics adapter is still the same as in the previous generations. It should be still called Intel UHD Graphics 615 and clock from 300 - 1050 MHz in the i5. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a VP9 and H.265 de- and encoder.

The chip is now produced in the 14nm++ process (Amber Lake Y was 14nm+) but not 10nm like Ice Lake Y. The TDP is specified at 7 Watts but can be varied from 4.5 to 9 Watt from the manufacturer (cTDP up/down) resulting in different performance (especially Turbo durations). Set to 4.5 W TDP passive cooling should be possible.