Leaked Intel Core 3 N350 iGPU benchmarks point toward last-gen performance — Geekbench 5 OpenCL score lower than Intel UHD Graphics, GeForce 940M

A Geekbench 5 OpenCL (GPU) score was uploaded and shared on Twitter for the yet-unannounced Intel Core 3 N350, which seems to be an 8-core processor using last-gen Intel graphics.

The total OpenCL scoring of 6,191 points places the Core 3 N350's iGPU within range of Intel UHD Graphics (6,316, previously highest-end Intel iGPUs before integrated Arc/Iris graphics), Intel Iris Graphic Plus Graphics 650 (6,295) and the Nvidia GeForce 940M (6,244) discrete mobile GPU. Now, it's worth noting that even if these benchmarks reflect final performance, and there's a fair chance they're not, synthetic benchmarks are fundamentally flawed at communicating the actual end-user experience one should expect from a given product, particularly in pre-release.

However, if these results hold in the long term, they speak to Intel's non-Ultra Core 3 CPUs being left with somewhat anemic integrated graphics solutions. Now, no available onboard NPU (the main difference between Core and Core Ultra per the original name change announcement) probably won't matter much to most of you. However, entry-level users like decent iGPUs, and this move from Intel points toward entry-level iGPU users still gravitate toward AMD systems for their vastly superior integrated graphics.

For users who don't bother with integrated graphics, the Intel Core 3 N350 will likely still find a comfy enough spot within the market, even just as a cheap entry point to the ecosystem. The Intel Core 3 N350 designation also suggests that this design will likely utilize E-cores solely like the Intel Core N100 and N305. We can't ascertain the value of the CPU part here until we have benchmarks of those cores and not just the iGPU, though.

In any case, the appearance of the Intel Core 3 N350 on Geekbench running at up to 3,886 MHz from a 1 GHz base clock rate does seem attractive. The iGPU appears to reach a maximum frequency of 1,350 MHz, and the most curious part of the benchmarks identifies that the iGPU only has an allocation of 1.34GB— with the device totaling 3.78GB RAM, implying some harsh limits on RAM capacity for this testing. Since RAM capacity and speed tie directly to iGPU performance, there's still a chance that a better setup would likely improve these scores if they are legitimate to start.