...J1900 also has 4 cores and threads.
My bad. I was under the impression that Intel only made single-core Celerons with hyper-threading disabled, after I saw a couple of them in NAS's and ones running FreeDOS.
I always had this impression that the modern Pentiums they make were dual-core or maybe sometimes quad-core, as a lower tier to the Core i3 lineup.
I have a server running a Xeon E5-2650 which is at 2GHz and that also runs Core kinda slow, not really abysmal as OP's waiting times but not as fast as I'd like, which is speed of the node running on my E3-1240 at 3.3GHz.
Still though, the L1 cache on that J1900 is really small at 2MB, my 2650 has 30MB by comparison. Given that Bitcoin Core is written in C++, I'd love to see some optimization that pushes more of the transaction that's currently being verified on the L1 cache which is much, much faster than main RAM.
Yeah, Intel has totally messed with the naming structure of their chips. In terms of what features they have and what they can do.
A lot of times "The right tool for the job" can be tough to determine.
Picking on your 2650 vs the OPs Celeron. For the power draw / TDP of *just that CPU* I can put together and entire system with the OPs CPU.
The Celeron is way limited, less max memory, less memory speed *but it is the "L" low power memory* lower I/O speeds but the chipset is a much smaller die that uses a fraction of the power required to run the server chipset. So, it's like hauling lumber in a big Ford F350 pickup vs a small Kia. I can do all the lumber in 1 trip with the Ford but it costs more to buy in the 1st place and uses a lot more fuel. Even if I have to make 2 dozen trips in the Kia to move the wood it might still burn less gas then the pickup. But...is it the right tool for that job? If your time is free and you don't care, you might look nuts doing it but it might be the best way.
Same here, if you are syncing just to have it running and have a copy around, set it and forget it and come back in a week.
If you need a few hot spares to run your online crypto business, that is a different conversation.
-Dave