LattePanda Mu i3-N305
The upmarket version of LattePanda Mu now comes with an Intel Core i3-N305 processor and 16 GB of RAM, essentially doubling the available performance while retaining the excellent flexibility afforded by the format. A more powerful integrated GPU also helps along — but the steeper $259 price tag, paired with certain core hardware features still being a work-in-progress might make the module a tougher sell for the first-time lay tinkerer.
Pros
- Excellent performance thanks to the i3-N305
- IBECC support
- Fairly customizable TDP
- Very flexible selection of interfaces
Cons
- Pricier than other options with the same CPU
- GPIO, eDP, MIPI-CSI and I2S still not implemented in software
LattePanda debuted their Intel Processor N100-powered LattePanda Mu modules last year, pairing the processor with ample RAM and on-board eMMC. But now, there’s a new higher-end offering in the lineup, featuring a more powerful Intel Core i3-N305 and more RAM, all while retaining the same form factor.
We have an older review of the aforementioned N100 LattePanda Mu that covers the module, but also its matching Lite carrier board. The two make for a great little pair, and since a lot of what’s been written there still applies, it could be a worthwhile read before sinking your teeth into this review.
Hope you’ll excuse us for getting off track not even a full three paragraphs in, but it’s always a bit troublesome when there are multiple different models/configurations of a product that share the exact same name. It’s just unwieldy for us at our little screens, tapping away our little articles, having to constantly reach for “the Intel N100 LattePanda Mu” or “the i3-N305–based module” and similar word salads. Just think about what all the Apple laptop review folk have to go through, with MacBook Pro (16”, 2024, M4 Max) being a completely valid product name, denoting a totally different thing than a MacBook Pro (14”, 2023, M3 Pro). Ugh.
Anyways — for the sake of clarity, whenever you see us talk about the “LattePanda Mu” without any additional descriptors during the course of this review, we’ll be referring to the new i3-N305 model.
Whew, after getting that out of our system, here’s a sweet little story as a treat. While scouring various forums, boards and documentation during our time with the N100 LattePanda Mu (see, this is exactly what we were just ranting about), searching for supplemental information for the older article, we came across some rumors that a model with a more powerful processor was in the works. The predictions (correctly) pointed towards the Intel Core i3-N305 as a likely option, and this seemed to line up with some power draw figures found in the official marketing material that didn’t make all too much sense with the Intel N100 in mind. Back then, we weren’t sure what to make of it, but it seems that the mystery’s now resolved!
Despite the shiny new processor, there have been no changes to the module format. All your old carrier boards will still be fully compatible. It’s a plug-and-play upgrade, and that’s the beauty of a modular setup.
It also goes without saying that module-based systems are the way forward for those looking to dabble in custom hardware, whether it’s because your next masterpiece absolutely needs eight USB 2.0 ports and an obscure PCIe setup or because you’ve got aspirations of going commercial. Sure, it’s more difficult and time consuming than just using an off-the-shelf SBC, but a custom carrier board is the right solution in this case — and with extensive documentation and first-party reference designs many modules offer, it’s not an impossible feat even for smaller teams.
Let’s begin by taking a look at the new module’s hardware specs. After that, we’ll also check out the performance of the Intel Core i3-N305 and compare it to the Intel N100.
But just before we continue, we’d like to take the chance to thank LattePanda for providing us with a review copy of the module. As always, all opinions are our own and no third parties had any say about the contents of this article.
LattePanda Mu (i3-N305) module: hardware
The Intel Processor N100 and the Intel Core i3-N305 are very alike in some regards. Both are Alder Lake-N series chips fully based on the Gracemont microarchitecture, fabricated on the Intel 7 node (also known as the 10 nm Enhanced SuperFin node — this perhaps being the more accurate name).
That’s where the similarities end, though. Sitting at the very top the Alder Lake-N line, the Core i3-N305 features 8 cores, twice as many as the N100 and the most out of any processor in the lineup! These cores are also clocked higher, capable of turbo boosting up to 3.8 GHz — all very neat stuff promising some rather palpable performance gains.
However, and this is a trait that all Alder Lake-N chips share (and quite a few older chips with an ‘N’ somewhere in their model number, like the ever-popular Celeron N5105), the Core i3-N305 only features Intel’s efficiency-oriented E-cores. It’s a bit surprising to see the Core i3 branding used here as such a core setup makes the i3-N305 have more in common with Atoms, Celerons, and Pentiums of the past than with most other contemporary Core i3 models. But perhaps the increased core count lets it hold its own — we’ll see during the benchmarks section!
The integrated GPU is yet another Intel UHD Graphics package, though this time we’re seeing the full 32 Execution Units (EUs) and a slightly higher 1.25 GHz clock speed — up from the N100’s 24 EUs clocked at 750 MHz. And no, the Core i3-N305 isn’t a graphical beast by any means because of this moderate performance bump, but the extra graphical horsepower should make the desktop experience, well, just a little bit smoother than on the N100.
But all good things come to an end, and with an increase in power comes an increase in power draw (funny how things work out sometimes). The Intel Core i3-N305 comes with a 15 W TDP, though there’s a configurable 9 W TDP-down option. Intel’s TDP ratings can be a little misleading to most users — so we’ll dig a bit more into what these numbers really represent and what the real-world power draw looks like a bit later. It’s… complicated.
For now, let’s turn our attention to the memory. As usual, the LattePanda Mu module itself features both RAM and some eMMC storage. Let’s talk RAM first: there’s both good and bad news in this department. The capacity’s been doubled to 16 GB and we’re still using nice LPDDR5 chips, but the speed is still capped at 2400 MHz and we’ve still only got a single RAM channel. In fact, regarding the former, a quick snoop around with dmidecode shows the LPDDR5 chips used here are capable of operating at up to 3200 MHz.
Both of these drawbacks are not a result of some odd whim over at the LattePanda HQ, but are instead courtesy of the Core i3-N305 itself. For whatever reason, Intel decided to stick to the exact same memory controller across the entire Alder Lake-N line, meaning that we’re stuck with the same single-channel, up-to-16-GB-RAM setup that even the measly Intel Processor N50 shares. And as to why this decision got made? If we had to guess, it’s corner-cutting at its finest on Intel’s part. Dual-channel RAM can help speed things along tremendously, is indispensable when dealing with integrated graphics and would’ve been a proper treat.
We don’t want to get into the RAM nitty-gritty for the umpteenth time here (especially as we’ve already done so in that N100 LattePanda Mu review we’ve mentioned already), but for the sake of completeness, we’ll clarify that by single-channel we actually mean a 64-bit wide memory bus. This is how standard DDR is labeled, and it’s how most people interpret channel count. On the other hand, LPDDR often comes with 32-bit wide channels, and LPDDR5 (and sometimes LPDDR4) in particular features two 16-bit sub-channels per channel, making the LattePanda Mu a dual- or even a quad-channel system depending on how you look at it.
In-band ECC (IBECC) also makes a return. It’s a feature available across the Alder Lake-N lineup that enables error correction without the traditional 72-bit wide channels associated with hardware-based ECC memory setups (which, by the way, these Alder Lake-N processors don’t support). IBECC still requires a specialized memory controller and, while offering additional data integrity, it sacrifices some performance and takes away 1/32 of the total available memory pool for storing the error correction codes themselves.
Well — this leaves us with the eMMC. Here, things are a lot less eventful. The setup’s essentially been copy-pasted from the older N100 LattePanda Mu: the 64 GB eMMC 5.1 chip makes a return. It’s still not the fastest thing out there, and we’re still yearning for a 128 GB option (this would’ve been a perfect opportunity), but alas — it’s rather useful for what it is and simplifies would-be carrier board designs by allowing you not to worry about external storage solutions (and also save up some PCIe lines for other uses in the process).
Now that we’ve mentioned PCIe lines, it could be a good time to take a look at the LattePanda Mu’s set of interfaces. First up, there are (up to) 9 PCIe Gen 3 lanes, 2 SATA 3.0 lanes and 4 USB 3.2 lanes that can be mixed and matched. You can’t use all of them at the same time (hence the up to), but you could, for example, have a setup that exposes 5 PCIe lanes, 2 SATA lanes and 4 USB lanes. On top of this, the LattePanda Mu packs 8 USB 2.0 lanes, 4 UART and 4 I2C ports and 64 GPIO pins straight from the main processor.
Being a module, the Mu exposes all of these through its high-density edge connector. However, it also features a few other connectors: there’s a MIPI-CSI connector, an eDP display connector and an associated connector for enabling touch support.
Those following along at home might be noticing that this sounds a lot like the older N100 LattePanda Mu. Yep —there’s absolutely no difference between the two LattePanda Mu configurations in the connectivity department. Despite packing more processing oomph, the Core i3-N305 doesn’t provide any extra interfaces over the N100. Is it just us, or do we sniff a bit of a running theme here?
The LattePanda Mu, perhaps a bit adventurously, breaks from the long-established LattePanda tradition of including an Arduino co-processor — i.e., packing in a microcontroller that’s actually in charge of the GPIO — instead relying on the Intel chip’s native GPIO capabilities. We’ve seen this choice backfire already: the N100 LattePanda Mu’s GPIO wasn’t functional at the time of our review. It’s been seven months now, there’s a new LattePanda Mu model on the market, and GPIO still isn’t functional on either.
We can’t help but feel a little let down by this, but we’ll give the team over at LattePanda the benefit of the doubt — companies like Intel are notorious for keeping a lot of their documentation confidential and it’s more than possible that the protracted development cycle has everything to do with this fact.
And by the way — the MIPI-CSI and eDP interfaces are also works-in-progress, so take that as you will.
And that’s mostly it for the new module’s hardware! To summarize, while the Core i3-N305 brings a lot more compute to the mix, there’s no underlying improvement to the processor’s interfaces or architecture. And while there’s twice as much RAM this time around, there’s no move towards a more sophisticated, faster setup, again due to the processor’s limitations. With essentially the same feature set as its predecessor, your choice of module will ultimately have to be informed by the benchmarks — and your need for the extra processing speed.
Accessories and build quality
It’s always real nice to see a well-designed piece of hardware. Pair it with a nice bit of packaging and you’ve got yourself a real treat.
This is LattePanda’s home turf. Everything from the board silkscreen printing to the quality of the PCB itself is just fantastic (though, how often are you going to directly be handling a module). On top of that, the packaging is quite nifty too, with a stylish green-on-black design. It’s the little things that count.
DFRobot’s in charge of producing all of the accessories, and we’ve seen most of these in our previous article. In order to get started with the LattePanda Mu, you’ll need one of the two official carrier boards: the $39 Lite or the $89 Full-Function Evaluation carrier. We’ve been using the Lite variant for a while and we’re more than happy with it. For most people, its lower price and compact size and USB-C PD support far outweigh the more expansive IO offered by the latter.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that any modern x86 processor without any cooling solution is a recipe for disaster, so you’ll likely want to sort this out while assembling your dream LattePanda Mu setup. DFRobot offers three official coolers for the modules, two passive and one active (these retail for $4.9, $7.9 and $12, respectively). For the Core i3-N305, you’ll likely want the latter in order to ensure optimal performance — though as all active coolers tend to do, this one produces a bit of noise (if more whooshy than usual). If you’re designing something like a piece of music hardware or a smart home gadget, this could be a dealbreaker. (Though, in all honesty, if you need to build a fanless, quiet system, perhaps the N100 would be a better starting point.)
All the official accessories are well-made, and the carrier boards are especially delightful. However, we’ve got a complaint about the active cooler (which is likely relevant to the two passive models too, but we can’t be 100% sure since we don’t have these on hand to check).
When mounted, our active cooler seems to put enough stress on the LattePanda Mu module to cause its PCB to develop a slight bend (and no, we checked, we haven’t overtightened the screws — plus, they’re spring-loaded to prevent this). It seems that the metal plate in contact with the processor die protrudes just a bit too far — but whether this is just a tolerance issue in our specific unit or a more general design quirk is still to be seen. Perhaps including a steel mounting bracket on the module’s backside would offer some reinforcement and strain relief?
This same bend also occurred on our older N100 LattePanda Mu module which rules the module out as the source of the issue. There have been no adverse effects after more than half a year — so maybe we’re being a tad too dramatic about all this…
It’s still probably not a smart idea to use thermal pads with the LattePanda Mu. They inherently take up some space and the added thickness could put even more strain on the PCB, which in turn could lead to a… snap! Yikes, we don’t want to think too much about it. Just stick to using thermal paste.
On the positive side, all the official coolers all come with just the right amount of thermal paste pre-applied, so you likely won’t have to worry too much about all this unless — like us — you want to swap out your LattePanda Mu module and reuse the cooler you’ve already got. We used the trusty Arctic MX4 paste that’s been our go-to for this kind of work without any issues.
LattePanda Mu (i3-N305) benchmarks
After all the we’ll see when we get to the benchmarks that we dropped during the course of this review, it’s nice to finally get there, isn’t it? We’re as excited as you are — but before we begin, it’s important to take note of a few things.
The i3-N305 comes with a configurable TDP, which gives us a bit more control over power draw and performance. To start things off, we’ll perform all the benchmarks at the stock TDP of 15 W, as per Intel’s documentation. The LattePanda Mu ships with this number punched into its BIOS by default, so it makes sense to run with it, as this is the sort of performance the Mu will deliver out of the box.
We’ll mostly focus on comparing the i3-N305 with the N100 in the following tests, but, for reference, we’ll also include a few popular ARM contenders, the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Orange Pi 5, as reference points. Finally, the N5105 found in the LattePanda 3 Delta, being a direct predecessor of the N100, means this SBC also deserves a spot in the benchmark graphs.
Let’s start with Geekbench 5 and 6. Compared to the N100, the i3-N305 scores wins across the board, though the increase in single-core performance isn’t terribly noticeable. Multi-core results are where the new chip comes into its own, with an almost 50% increase in Geekbench 5 and a 43% increase in Geekbench 6 results. If you’re wondering about the diminishing gains in the latter test, it’s pretty expected behavior due to a newer approach that intentionally scales worse over a larger number of cores, more closely emulating desktop app behavior.
The Sysbench CPU delivers a much more linear set of scores, due to the benchmark task’s simple and scalable nature. There’s a modest increase in single-core performance, sure — but its multi-core results that very clearly demonstrate which chip has four, and which has eight cores.
Unixbench scores tell a similar story. The two processors are a hair’s width apart in single-core results. The i3-N305 yet again shows a healthy lead in the multi-core results. Unexpected? Nope — but still pretty nice to see.
Moving on to OpenSSL benchmarks, we see a slight improvement compared to the N100, though, being a single-core workload, a minor change isn’t unexpected. Encryption workloads scale especially well, so in terms of absolute number-crunching power, we’re likely to see double the overall encryption performance on the i3-N305.
RAM performance is, broadly speaking, identical between the two LattePanda Mu versions. The Sysbench RAM test returns very similar single-core results (to nobody’s surprise), but actually scores significantly higher in the multi-core test (very much to our surprise)!
There are a few possible explanations as to what’s going on here. The multi-core Sysbench RAM test can sometimes return somewhat unpredictable results — though, we personally feel that this isn’t what we’re seeing here. LPDDR5 RAM running at 2400 MHz and utilizing a 64-bit bus has a theoretical bandwidth of 38.4 GB/s. The numbers we’re getting from the multi-core test, 31390.16 MiB/s translates to 32.91 GB/s which isn’t unrealistic.
It’s likely that the E-cores found inside Alder Lake-N processors have limited per-core bandwidth. The N100’s four cores — ultimately because of the processor architecture’s limitations — simply can’t utilize all the available memory bandwidth, while the i3-N305’s eight cores have an easier time saturating the bus.
Tinymembench results of the two systems are virtually the same across the board — again, no surprises here!
There are upgrades over in the GPU department as well — extra EUs and higher clocks allow the i3-N305 to outperform the N100 by quite a noticeable margin. Running our standard glxgears test on the i3-N305, we managed to grab a score of 10777 FPS, an impressively good result for such a small board.
glmark2, run at its native 800×600 resolution also gives a similarly good score of 3449. Compared to the N100’s 2213 point result, this is a generous improvement.
…but all these numbers were taken at that default 15 W TDP setting. Let’s dig a bit deeper and see if there’s any extra performance left on the table.
Configurable TDP and performance
Before we continue, it might be useful to take a quick look at what TDP really is. In a bit of an unintuitive twist, this metric doesn’t actually denote a component’s power draw, but rather its thermal design power, hence the acronym. (Though, TDP and power draw are often closely related since most computer components are notoriously efficient in turning electricity into heat.)
But what does TDP really mean? It’s best described as a metric, provided by equipment manufacturers, that specifies the amount of thermal energy a cooling solution must be able to dissipate in order to keep a component within safe operating temperatures — e.g., a chip with a TDP of 15 W won’t always draw exactly 15 W and won’t always draw less than that either (even though TDP is often defined at base clocks). Such a chip, however, is guaranteed to keep the temps in the safe zone as long as the associated thermal solution can consistently keep dissipating the required amount of heat.
This is, of course, an oversimplification, but it’s sufficient for the scope of this review. We’ve already gotten acquainted with PL1 and PL2 settings during our time with the N100 LattePanda Mu, and while there are some differences (and additional control options) due to the i3-N305 featuring configurable TDP, the core idea is still the same. The PL1 parameter controls the base TDP that a processor has to maintain over a given time period (and is often the number that manufacturers state in the datasheet), while PL2 controls peak thermal dissipation that a processor attempts not to surpass (this is always a higher number than PL1 and effectively controls how much extra thermal budget a processor has for turbo boosting).
Modern CPUs often opportunistically boost their clocks as much as possible while adhering to set PL1 and PL2 limits, meaning that raising them can lead to performance gains without the need for traditional overclocking, simply due to the chip entering and maintaining its turbo states more aggressively.
The natural tradeoff, naturally, is increased power draw and increased heat production, though some processors are a bit more well-behaved than others. The N100, despite its nominal 6 W rating, often sips around 13.5 W during stress tests (with the whole system then using around ~18.9 W). It’s possible to tweak certain BIOS values to make it stay within the rated 6 W constraints, but there’s a performance penalty to doing so — it’s not the chip’s default state.
The i3-N305, on the other hand, is quite true to its 15 W rating (we’ve measured a peak of ~21.4 W for the system, with s-tui never reporting more than 15 W for the CPU itself). Shockingly similar numbers to the N100, especially given the performance difference.
But this doesn’t mean that, given the chance, this new chip couldn’t give us a bit more zing…
Before continuing, we have to note that we do not recommend setting a higher-than-stock TDP if you’re using one of the passive cooling solutions due to the high likelihood of running into thermal issues.
After experimenting for a bit and keeping an eye on the temps, we’ve found that there’s a sweet spot with both PL1 and PL2 set at ~22 W. The official active cooler has an easy time keeping up with the increased thermal load, and it’s also the point where CPU performance plateaus.
Raising the TDP limit further can be handy in situations where you need some extra power budget for the GPU while the CPU is under heavy load. Stressing both at the same time, with PL1 and PL2 set at 35 W (and — for the record — maybe don’t do this at home), we managed to get the i3-N305 to briefly draw ~30 W, though it only took some 20 seconds for the system to pass 85 °C and start throttling. Not very practical, unless you’ve got a much beefier custom thermal solution on hand.
Let’s take a look at the performance gains obtainable this way. The following benchmarks were performed with the aggressive 35 W TDP setting applied. You’ll be looking at mostly the same numbers with our recommended 22 W setting unless you’re concurrently stressing both the CPU and the GPU.
Geekbench 5 and 6, as expected, don’t show any difference in single-core performance. Don’t forget, we’re not overclocking the processor. Single-core tasks generally can’t come close to reaching even the baseline 15 W TDP.
As expected, it’s the multi-core performance that shows a difference — the ~20% increase in Geekbench 5 and 15% increase Geekbench 6 results is quite substantial, especially if you’re looking to use your LattePanda Mu as a server or the heart of a high-performance standalone device.
Sysbench CPU shows a marked multi-score increase as well, though not as prominent as Geekbench.
Again, whether you’ll actually want to tweak your TDP depends on how much this extra performance matters, and how much a low power draw matters to your project. If it does, the i3-N305 also supports a 9 W TDP-down. While saving 6 W might not sound like a huge deal, it does work out to a ~40% decrease which can really help if you’re planning to run things on battery power.
The performance at 9 W takes a hit. We’re seeing numbers roughly on par with the N100 running at its stock 6-but-actually-more-like-13.5 W. Sure, it’s impressive from a technical standpoint — the i3-N305 uses ~4.5 W less than the N100 to deliver a similar performance level — but we’re not quite sure how much real-world merit there is to this, given the price difference between the two. Maybe if you’re hard pressed to reach stock N100 performance? (And yes, we also confirmed all this by measuring whole-system power draw figures: ~14.2 W and ~18.9 W respectively, which adds up surprisingly well).
At the end of the day, if going as low-power as possible is our end goal, the N100 can be constrained to actually stick to its 6 W TDP. The i3-N305’s TDP can also be further lowered, but when pushed down to 6 W, things start falling apart a little. The clocks across all eight of its cores get dropped to 1 GHz, and performance actually becomes worse than the N100’s at the same TDP. At 6 W, the lesser N100 is the clear winner — and is still the best x86 competitor to power-efficient ARM SBCs and modules we’ve seen so far.
LattePanda Mu (i3-N305) thermal performance
Now that we’ve thoroughly confused everyone (including ourselves) with the slew of various benchmarks, let’s take a look at the thermals. Naturally, thermals will vary greatly between various TDP settings, so let’s go back to that stock 15 W baseline for an s-tui stress test.
Idle temps in all cases generally seem to hover between 30 °C and 45 °C, usually closer to the upper end.
After 30 minutes of stressing the CPU, it was nice seeing the temps never get over ~65 °C. Surprisingly, this means the new chip fair quite a bit better in our stress test than the N100 did. It only settled once the temps climbed to 78 °C. Though, we have to note, our ambient temperature during the test today was 25 °C, two degrees lower than when we tested the N100.
We’ve also run the stress test with the TDP set at 22 W. This time around, the temperatures settled at 80 °C, which is a tad high, but not high enough to cause thermal throttling. Finally, with a 9 W TDP setting the chip never went over 48 °C. Fantastic!
We have to again mention that we replaced the stock thermal paste since we swapped our cooler between modules. It’s possible that the better thermal performance we’re seeing here in comes from the Arctic MX4 being a better performer than whatever factory paste LattePanda uses. We’ll try to get around re-testing the N100’s thermal performance with the Arctic as well — though no promises as to when that’ll be!
Software support and user experience
x86-based boards are unrivaled in terms of software support. They’ll happily run any OS you might realistically want to throw at them — and this includes Windows 11 — all while being easier to set up. The ability to run mainline operating systems also means much better support and easier troubleshooting, as well as access to much more information and material.
Support also extends to apps, with most desktop and server software still primarily being made for x86 systems. Sure, the past few years have marked the grand entrance of ARM chips on the desktop compute scene, but it’ll take quite a few more for them to become truly dominant in the field.
The i3-N305 is no slouch, but it definitely isn’t the fastest chip ever made — far from it! Most of our testing was done on an Ubuntu 24.04 installation which felt quite snappy and pleasant to use. Windows 11 also delivered a similar experience to what we’d expect out of an entry-level laptop, which isn’t shabby at all. Granted, a module-based setup is unlikely to end up as your web-browsing, email-writing machine, but hey — you never know.
Trying some of our favorite Linux programs, the i3-N305’s faster CPU and GPU work in tandem to deliver a better overall experience. GIMP was surprisingly smooth and VLC managed 4K video playback without any issues. Over on the Windows side, we tried running a few games, like Minecraft, Terraria and Stardew Valley. The i3-N305 is no gaming beast, but lightweight titles like these work wonderfully — something which wasn’t quite the case on the N100. Retro emulators for systems like the GBA, Sega Genesis and PS1 run even better. Someone, please, make a portable emulation machine using one of these LattePanda Mu modules.
Verdict: N100, i3-N305 or something else?
Whew — we’ve almost made it through. Should you get the new i3-N305 LattePanda Mu? Should you upgrade if you’ve got an N100 Mu? Is the price difference worth it?
Well — let’s take a quick look at how much each configuration will set you back. The base, N100, 8 GB RAM LattePanda Mu goes for $139. LattePanda released an upgraded N100 Mu variant with 16 GB RAM alongside the Core i3-N305 version, also featuring 16 GB of RAM. These two go for $169 and $259, respectively.
We’ve already mentioned that you need to get a few more things in addition to the module. The Lite and Full-Function Evaluation carrier boards retail for $39 and $89, respectively, while the three official thermal solutions cost $4.9, $7.9 and $12 — the latter being the active cooler that we’ve been using during the course of this review.
The official 12 V DC power adapter is $39, though it’s required only on the Full-Function board. The Lite carrier can take accept power from both a 12 V DC barrel jack or a 15 V USB-C PD power supply, the latter of which you probably already have lying around somewhere already.
Adding it all up, the Core i3-N305 LattePanda Mu with the Lite carrier and the active cooler will cost you $310 which is a hefty chunk. DFRobot also offers the LattePanda Mu in kit form, but these are just a convenient way of purchasing the necessary items together and aren’t cheaper than buying everything separately.
The same kit with the base N100 LattePanda Mu with 8 GB of RAM retails for $190, while the 16 GB RAM kit goes for $220.
If you’ve already invested into the LattePanda Mu ecosystem, the barrier of entry will be lower, but still — these are more expensive than much of the competition. Take, for example, the Radxa Rock X4, a full-featured SBC sporting the Intel Processor N100, which retails for $83 and comes with 8 GB of RAM. An upgraded version with 16 GB goes for $120, and the entry-level 4 GB SKU goes for as low as $65. Mini PCs sporting the same i3-N305 can be found for ~$200-$250, while $300 will already bump you up to chips like the i3-1220P, which pack significantly more punch. If you’re not sure why you’d need a module (or you’re just looking for a regular desktop system), more traditional offerings will get you a lot more bang for your buck.
However, Alder Lake-N CPUs are as power-efficient as x86 processors get, with power draws comparable to ARM systems. We can’t stress enough how crucial this isfor embedded and IoT use, and is the reason LattePanda selected the chips in the first place.
ARM based offerings can be much cheaper, however. Raspberry Pi’s Compute Module 5 starts at $45 and caps out at $95, while RK3588S-based modules like the Orange Pi CM5 can be had for as low as $70. Sure, the i3-N305 outperforms all of these by a large margin and provides significantly more connectivity, but it’s important to decide whether this (and the inherent benefits of an x86 processor) justifies the price difference in your project.
So — you’ve decided that one of the LattePanda Mu modules ticks all your boxes. The form factor, the performance, everything’s just great! But which one to get?
Well — there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but here’s out as-concise-as-possible answer. If you’re aiming to develop low-power, possibly fanless designs, the Intel Processor N100 is the safest choice. 8 GB of RAM is plenty for most embedded uses, and our time with base LattePanda Mu was generally delightful. The 16 GB variant of the model is also great if you’re looking to create some sort of custom NAS board or need a bit more space for some ML tasks.
The i3-N305 brings a lot more oomph to the table, but at almost double the price, you need to know what you’re going to be using that extra power for. It has the potential of being the more efficient chip of the two, and its improved graphical capabilities mean it lends itself very well to use in various cyberdeck designs — we can totally see it work its way into a retro gaming handheld. It’s also perfect for server use too. The possibilities as that much more endless (…as long as your definition of endless doesn’t require more than eight Gracemont CPU cores).
The main drawbacks that remain are the limited RAM performance and — sadly — still non-functional GPIO. It’s not quite a dealbreaker (especially since we except to see the latter fixed sooner rather than later), but it can turn some people away, especially at the price.
…but for those who know why they need such a flexible module, and what they’d make for it — the LattePanda Mu just got a very enticing new addition to the family.
He’s also the key person behind Mehatronika's English translations, especially of education- and maker-oriented texts.