Intel unveiled a line of 10nm, up to quad-core “Jasper Lake” N-series Pentium Silver and Celeron CPUs with 6-10W TPUs and slightly faster performance than Gemini Lake and Gemini Lake Refresh.

Intel announced a line of low-power N-series Pentium Silver and Celeron SoCs formerly known as Jasper Lake. The N-series is aimed primarily at the Chromebook and educational laptop market but should also find its way into more embedded products. Intel also extended its 11th Gen “Tiger Lake” Core processors with an H-series sub-family of mobile processors and enterprise focused VPro models and dropped some more details on the upcoming 12th Gen Alder Lake. We hope to get to these stories in a separate report.

Intel N-series Jasper Lake Ark page (left) and more detailed AnandTech chart
(Source for image on right: AnandTech)
(click images to enlarge)

Even more so than the more embedded focused Elkhart Lake, Jasper Lake is the heir to the Gemini Lake bloodline of Atom-class, low-power processors that followed Apollo Lake. As with Gemini Lake and the later Gemini Lake Refresh, there are no Atom-branded models, only the Pentium Silver and Celeron.

Like Elkhart Lake, Jasper Lake has Tremont cores built with 10nm SuperFin fabrication technology, as well as Intel UHD Graphics with up to 32EU Intel Gen11 technology. Jasper Lake lacks Elkhart Lake’s Cortex-M7 microcontroller and related Intel Programmable Services Engine (Intel PSE) for remote out-of-band (OOB) and in-band (INB) device management. It is also lacks the Intel Time Coordinated Computing (Intel TCC) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) found on the RE and FE Elkhart Lake models or the functional safety features found on the FE parts.

Jasper Lake does offer higher base and Turbo clock rates than equivalent Elkhart Lake parts. You get a 2.0GHz/3.3GHz split on the top-of-the-line quad-core, quad-thread, Pentium Silver N6005 vs. 1.8GHz/3.0GHz for the similarly configured and similarly 10W Celeron J6413 from Elkhart Lake. Surprisingly, the N6005 offers only slightly faster clock rates than the top-of-the-line, 14nm fabricated Gemini Lake Refresh Pentium Silver J5040, which runs at 2.0GHz/3.2GHz at 10W.

Intel is claiming up to 35 percent better overall application performance and up to 78 percent better graphics performance compared to Gemini Lake Refresh. However, the comparison is with its desktop class Pentium Silver N6000 Jasper Lake CPU with 10W TDP against a mobile class model in the Gemini Lake Refresh: the 6W TDP Pentium Silver N5030.

There are three 6W and three 10W TDP N-series models, with the two dual-core designs available with one or the other. The mobile Gemini Lake and Gemini Lake Refresh models offer a lower 4.8W TDP while the desktop models are all at 10W. The Elkhart Lake models range from 6W to 10W except for the dual-core, headless Atom x6200FE with 4.5W.

Jasper Lake processors provide 1.5MB of shared L2 cache and a generous 4MB of non-inclusive shared L3 cache. This is the same as on Gemini Lake and all but the Atom x6200FE on Elkhart Lake. The N-series SoCs support dual channel DDR4-2933 and LPDDR4X-2933, up from DDR4 and LPDDR4 at 2400MHz on Gemini Lake Refresh. Elkhart Lake supports a faster DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4-4267.

An AnandTech report notes that Jasper Lake adds an Image Processing Unit (IPU), “which when paired with a MIPI interface can enable accelerated compute for video calls and techniques, such as blurred backgrounds.”

 
Further information

Later this quarter, Intel’s N-series Pentium Silver and Celeron processor will appear in Chromebooks, which run the Linux-based Chrome OS, and in Linux and Windows-based devices in 2Q. More information may be found in Intel’s announcement and Ark page.