Actually I like these chips. Alot. I own an Acer Swift 1 with a Pentium Silver N5000, so Goldmont Plus with 4 cores 4 threads. Goodies:
- Display off: Laptop lasts 4.4 days with just wifi and ssh running on Arch Linux. powertop says 576mW. That shows just how very "low-power" these systems can really go. Display at 50% still 18 hours.
- System has no fans, because the 6W TDP SoC can be cooled passively using the metal case. I dislike fan noise.
- This CPU including graphics works with Linux out of the box. Screw NVidia (still), but I realize AMD has caught up somewhat with amdgpu.
- The Kaby Lake-level Intel graphics, will do 10-bit HEVC or H.264 at 1080p without dropping any frames, while barely using any power.
- The SSD in this machine (SanDisk X600 M.2) can do 508 MByte/s read 205 MByte/s write sequential. With dm-crypt on (full disk encryption) by using the CPU's crypto accelerator, those figures will only drop to 497 MByte/s read and 193 MByte/s write sequential. So only a 3-5% hit, also excellent.
- The built-in Wifi (Dual Band Wireless AC 9560) together with the CNVi radio card will max out 802.11n at 21+ MByte/s. Couldn't test 802.11ac yet. Top notch in my book.
- I paid 500 EUR for the machine, can you believe that? Could have paid 3000 for a Core i7 X1 Carbon as well, but why?
So there. OEMs can build systems with these chips that can be used even for moderately demanding CPU/RAM/disk loads. Personally I dislike fan noise from laptops so this is the major USP for me. I regularly compile new versions of ungoogled-chromium on this and sure it does take a while but not forever. Props to Intel for continuing to make such awesome low power x86 chips.
