[1]

At the top-end of Intel's current Alder Lake line-up is the [2]Core i9 12900K while at the opposite end is the Celeron G6900... The Celeron G6900 is a dual-core Alder Lake processor with a suggested customer price of $42~52 USD (though for the limited quantities available, I ended up paying $69). Curiosity got the best of me for seeing how well this lowest-end Alder Lake part performs under Ubuntu Linux.

[3]

The Celeron G6900 launched this month along the likes of the [4]Core i5 12400 for the expanded Alder Lake S line-up announced at CES. The Celeron G6900 is powered by two "Golden Cove" Performance cores but with Hyper Threading disabled, so it's just a two core/thread processor and without any energy efficient Gracemont cores. The Celeron G6900 run at a 3.4GHz base frequency without any turbo capabilities. The Celeron G6900 has a 2.5MB L2 cache and 4MB smart cache. On the plus side, at least even ~$50 Celeron processors these days offer AVX2 support.

[5]

There are UHD Graphics 710 (Gen12) with the Celeron G6900 and the graphics frequency can clock up to 1.3GHz. This very barebones Intel 7 processor has a recommended customer price of $42~52 USD (though for the tight availability from Internet retailers the listings have generally been $59~70) and this processor has a rated 46 Watt base power consumption.

[6]

With not having a mix of P/E cores, there is less Linux support woes to worry about in not needing to ensure your kernel is behaving properly between the mix of cores -- just like the Core i5 12400 fairing well on Linux. The main Linux support caveat to note is needing Linux 5.16 or newer for the Alder Lake S graphics out-of-the-box but on older kernels you can still use the i915.force_probe module option to enjoy working accelerated ADL-S graphics on an older kernel. In any case, I always recommend running as new of a kernel (and Mesa) as possible for going with new hardware.

[7]

I've been having some fun benchmarking the Celeron G6900 for seeing how it performs on Linux under a mix of new and old hardware... Rather than going with a pricey Z690 motherboard for this cheap processor, it was tested from an ASRock B660M-HDV motherboard and 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3600 memory. This ASRock B660 motherboard retails for $95 USD and this micro-ATX board supports two DDDR4 DIMMs, one PCIe x16 4.0 and two PCIe 4.0 x1 slots, one PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 slot, six USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, Gigabit LAN, and other basic connectivity. The ASRock B660M-HDV has been working out fine in my testing under Linux with the recent software stack.

[8]



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30653

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_2_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30851

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_3_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_4_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_5_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=intel-celeron-g6900&image=intel_g6900_6_lrg