Yet another topic about CPUs/Mini PCs & JF

[reikoemco]

Hey everybody!
I know there's been a lot of these questions, but I've never found an answer or proper recommendation, so lemme ask it again please.

Planning to buy a MiniPC for JF. What CPU to look for?
My plans:
- 4k@60 HDR videos/films, bitrate may be around 90mbit/s max
- 2 to 5 clients. Few of them on 4k TVs
- I know nothing about decoding/encoding/transcoding and reading about it for a couple of days didn't change anything (I'm sorry, I'm kinda dumb)

Many ppl recommend N100 which is IMO won't be enough. 
Found some PCs built with i5-1235U and 12650H which I think will be more than enough and those are costy too.
Anyways, I could buy one of those, but just wanna hear someone regarding choosing CPU, simply 3 questions:
- Am I correct that N100 isn't capable according to my needs?
- Would i5-1235U or 12650H be 100% enough?
- Is there anything in between?

Any advice is appreciated!

[bitstream]

These Nxxx only have E-Cores, which for normal file serving is more than sufficient. However, transcoding and de/encoding needs quite some CPU power even if you can offload the video part of it to the iGPU. If you have 5 concurrent clients streaming 4k, where transcoding is needed and they start at the same time, I'd say with a N100 you're on the edge. It possible would work at the price transcoding will be slow, so now fast forward and you would have to delay trickplay generation. Also the N100 will run hot, as most of these MiniPCs are passively cooled which is not enough for higher load over a longer time. 

I'm running JF on a i3 N305 in a VM with 7 vcores, 4 GB and the iGPU passedtrough. For my little home use case it's sufficient, but I could bring it to it's knees with JF easily if I wanted to.

So, from my point of view, the key question is: Do you need to transcode the media data you have or will you mostly have direct streaming? In the latter case, no transcoding is needed which makes all the difference regarding load on the system.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/476...-i7-12650H