Processor N100: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Processor N100 is an Alder Lake-N chip from 2023 built for inexpensive, quiet laptops, and 11 catalog models carry it. Against the 69 games the catalog tracks it meets the recommended CPU requirement in just one of them — Civilization 6. This guide covers where the chip ranks among laptop CPUs, what its six-watt design delivers, and which laptops use it.

Where the Processor N100 sits in 2026

A catalog score of 30.3 places the chip 425th of 737 scored laptop CPUs — the lower half of the table. The neighborhood spans a wide stretch of the ranking: the Core i3-7130U, Core i5-4340M and Core i7-3630QM (30.4 each) just above, the Core i5-4300M (30.1), Core i7-3610QM (29.5) and Core i5-4288U (29.5) just below. Matching those older i5 and i7 parts on throughput while sipping six watts is the N100's whole proposition — modern efficiency and standby behavior in exchange for outright speed.

What the chip brings

Alder Lake-N gives it 4 cores and 4 threads on a 10 nm process with a 6 W rating, a nominal 1.0 GHz base with bursts to 3.4 GHz. The only public benchmark recorded is an overall PassMark of 5,309 — entry-class throughput drawn from a sliver of the power budget of the chips around it in the ranking. Four threads at this draw are what made it viable for cheap student and household laptops.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 1 of 69 cataloged games — Civilization 6 — and meets the minimum tier for 36, including League of Legends, Dota 2, Minecraft, The Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2. The remaining 32 fall below the minimum: every modern heavyweight from Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 to Fortnite and Apex Legends. These verdicts are CPU-only, but with no discrete graphics in this roster the processor is not the only ceiling.

Laptops that carry it

The 11-model roster is budget hardware from 2022–2025: ASUS's Vivobook Go 14 and Vivobook Go 15 OLED at $246, Lenovo's IdeaPad Slim 3i in 14- and 15-inch forms at $553, HP's Laptop 15 and Laptop 17 at $553, HP's 250 G10 at $886, Acer's Aspire 3 Spin 14 at $921 and Aspire Go 15 at $650, plus Lenovo's 300w 2-in-1 Gen 5 education convertible at $1,275. The laptops around it typically show a median office comfort of 100, energy efficiency of about 87, a performance index of about 32 and portability of about 53 — machines built for basics, cool running and battery life.

Bottom line

The Processor N100 is an honest entry-level part: web browsing, documents, streaming video and schoolwork are its brief, and the cheap machines carrying it deliver those quietly. Ranked 425th of 737 with one game at the recommended tier, it is not a gaming or heavy-multitasking chip in any configuration. Within that narrow brief the $246 Vivobook Go entries make sense; anything beyond light duty justifies a step up the table.