alt Hacker NewsI can't know what Ascalon will actually be, but back in April/May 2025 there were actual performance numbers presented by Tenstorrent, and I analyzed what was shown. I concluded that Ascalon would be the x86_64 equivalent of an i5-9600K.
That's useable for many applications, but it's not going to change the world. A lot of "micro PCs" with low power CPUs are well past that now. If that's what Ascalon turns out to be, it will amount to an SBC class device.
I don't know what bubble you are living in, but the i5-9600K is many steps up beyond "SBC class".
The Raspberry Pi 5 results on Geekbench 6 are all over the place. A score between 500 to 900 in single core and a 2000 multi core score.
Radxa 4 is an SBC based around the N100 and it basically gets the same or slightly higher performance as the Raspberry Pi 5.
Meanwhile the i5-9600K gets a score of 1677 in single core, which is 83% of the performance of the entire Raspberry Pi 5 and gets a score of 6199 when using multiple cores, that's 3x the performance.
I'd call this at least "Laptop class" and you even admitted yourself back in 2025 that you're using a processor on that level.