Intel Pentium N4200 vs Intel Celeron N4120

Intel Pentium N4200

The Intel Pentium N4200 is an Apollo Lake family, quad-core, ultra-low-power processor (SoC) that saw the light of day in 2016. Its four cores run at 1.1 GHz to 2.5 GHz, with only 2.4 GHz available when all the cores are fully loaded; there is no Hyper-Threading here and thus no additional threads. This chip has a fairly competent integrated graphics solution, the Intel HD Graphics 505, and eats very little (~6 W).

Curiously enough, Intel keeps making and selling the Pentium as of early 2023.

Architecture

Just like other Celeron N, Celeron J, Pentium N, Pentium J processors, this Pentium 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 such as the Raspberry Pi series.

The Pentium N4200 features the Goldmont CPU microarchitecture that came to replace Silvermont (2013), bringing with it several welcome improvements. There is still no L3 cache to be found here, however, it now takes less cycles to perform many operations, making for a double-digit IPC improvement.

The Pentium 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 Pentium 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 N4200 in our database competes with the Core i5-3339Y, a power efficient chip launched in 2013, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned, with the (much less ancient) Celeron 6305 lurking a little behind the two. In other words, the Pentium is a slow processor suitable for the most basic tasks only. As of 2021, it is light years behind the latest processors making use of high-performance architectures, such as the Zen 2-powered AMD Ryzen 3 5300U.

The Acer Aspire ES 17 ES1-732 is among the fastest laptops built around the N4200 that we know of. It can be around 50% faster than the slowest system featuring the same CPU in our database, depending on the circumstances.

Graphics

The HD Graphics 505 (18 EUs) is a rather good iGPU, considering this is a lower-end SoC released in 2016 we are talking about. As far as the feature set is concerned, the HD 505 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 simultaneously at up to 2160p60. It will also happily decode VP9 and AVC, the two codecs that YouTube mostly relies on as of 2021.

The UHD Graphics runs at up to 750 MHz. Its actual clock speed will be much lower than that, since the small power budget has to be shared between the iGPU and the CPU cores. Expect most games to run terrible, even ones that were released in 2012 or 2010.

Power consumption

Just like most other N-class Intel processors, the Pentium N4200 has a default TDP of 6 W (also known as the Power Limit 1), making it a great option for passively cooled systems. Increasing the PL1 by just one or two watts, which many systems built around Apollo Lake allow one to do, improves the chip's performance by a huge margin, speaking subjectively.

This Pentium is built with a 14 nm Intel process making for poor energy efficiency (considering 14 nm processes are really old as of mid 2022).

Intel Celeron N4120

The Intel Celeron N4120 is a quad-core SoC primarily for inexpensive notebooks and was announced late 2019. It runs at 1.1-2.6 GHz (Single Core Burst) and is based on the Gemini Lake platform. Compared to the predecessor, the Celeron N4100, the refresh offers a 200 MHz higher Boost clock. Similar to the Apollo Lake predecessors, the chip is manufactured in a 14 nm process with FinFETs but offers slightly improved processor cores, double the amount of L2 cache, a smaller package, a new generation of monitor outputs (Gen 10) and a partly integrated WiFi chip. Besides four CPU cores, the chip also includes a DirectX 12 capable GPU as well as a DDR4/LPDDR4 memory controller (dual-channel, up to 2400 MHz). The SoC is not replaceable as it is directly soldered to the mainboard.

Architecture

The processor architecture ist still called Goldmont Plus. Compared to the older Goldmont cores in Apollo Lake, they feature an increased level 2 cache (to 4 MB). That means the per-clock-performance should be a bit better, but not near the Core CPUs like Kaby Lake Y.

Performance

The average N4120 in our database is not much faster than AMD's Zen-based, affordable Athlon Silver 3050e, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned, with the Intel Celeron 6305 and the Core i5-7Y54 found close nearby as well. It's a very basic CPU that we're talking about here. While it does have four cores, these are some seriously slow cores, dashing hopes of anybody looking to get a Core i3-like performance for cheap.

GPU Performance

The UHD Graphics 600 (Gemini Lake) is based on Intel's Gen9 architecture, which supports DirectX 12 and is also used for the Kaby Lake / Skylake / Apollo Lake graphics adapters (like HD Graphics 520). Equipped with 12 EUs and a clock of up to 700 MHz, the performance should be roughly on par with the older HD Graphics 500 (Apollo Lake).

The chip also includes an advanced video engine with hardware support for the playback of VP9 and H.265 material (8-bit color-depth).

Power Consumption

Just like most other N-class Intel processors, Celeron N4120 has a default TDP of 6 W (also known as PL1), making it a good option for passively cooled laptops, tablets, mini-PCs. It's manufactured on a very old (as of late 2022) 14 nm process, though, making for poor energy efficiency.