Gaming benchmarks of Intel's new Alder-Lake-N SoCs have been scarce, as these chips only come with E-cores and single-channel memory support. We wouldn't expect most people to even consider it for gaming purposes, but that didn't stop Team Pandory on YouTube from running some tests on the N100. Performance wasn't great, though the power efficiency was surprisingly good, with some (very light) games hitting 60 frames per second with less than 7W of power consumption.
Alder Lake-N was announced early in 2022 as Intel's latest edition of ultra-low power and ultra-low-cost SoCs. The special sauce for these chips special is that they are based entirely on Intel's modern Gracemount CPU cores, which are used as efficiency cores in the company's Alder Lake and Raptor Lake hybrid CPUs. Intel's Gracemount cores are surprisingly powerful for their intended role, featuring L3 cache support, enhanced branch prediction, and more, which Intel claims makes these cores just as powerful as the 6th generation Skylake CPU cores from 2015.
The integrated graphics chip inside these Alder Lake-N chips is reasonably decent, feature 24 Execution Units (EUs) and offering up to a theoretical 8K 60 fps playback support with AV1 decode capabilities via Intel's Xe-LP architecture. The iGPU is still limited to 4K 60 fps output for the display resolution, however. Note also that Xe-LP is not the same as Arc Alchemist, which does feature AV1 encoding support and about double the performance. Still, it might be serviceable for some light gaming.
Team Pandory shows how Intel's little Alder Lake-N chips — specifically the N100 — handle various games at minimum settings and a 1280x720 (720p) resolution. The little quad-core CPU, with 6MB of L3 cache and a 3.4 GHz turbo, was able to hit 60 fps in a few titles, but overall most of the titles ran at a paltry 30 to 20 fps on average.
