Intel unveils Apollo Lake chip for low-cost PCs
18 Apr 2016
Intel has offered a glimpse into Apollo Lake, its next-generation system-on-a-chip, that is expected to invigorate the budget category PCs, laptops, etc, at the Intel Development Forum (IDF) in Shenzen.
Apart from its more compact size, it was efficient enough that PC makers could slim things down without hurting battery life, for instance.There was also more to it than size and cost savings, Apollo Lake borrowed the graphics technology from Intel's Skylake architecture, which brought full hardware-based 4K video playback and gave an overall boost to visual performance. It would also help bring lower-cost computers into the modern era with richer support for technologies like USB-C.
Intel has not yet revealed the clock speeds, pricing and a few other key details for its new platform, but it had promised Celeron- and Pentium-branded processors in the second half of 2016. According to commentators, they would not make one forget about higher-end Core CPUs when they shipped, but they might just raise the bar for computing - that starter laptop or tablet would not be as likely to choke on basic duties.
Based on the 14nm process, Apollo Lake system-on-a-chip came with the Goldmont x86 microarchitecture which was based on the Atom architecture.
There are likely to be 4 processor cores and on the graphics front, there was the ninth-generation graphics architecture which was also seen on Skylake processors.
This meant Apollo Lake based systems would be capable of playing back 4K video content.
Intel had been hoping that OEMs would embrace Apollo Lake for its Cloudbook initiative, which covered notebooks ranging in price from $169 to $269.
Cloudbooks, which lock step with Google's Chromebooks, come preloaded with Windows 10 and sport the clamshell configuration with screen sizes ranging from 11.6 inches to 14 inches. Cloudbooks also included devices in a 11.6-inch convertible form-factor. The machines all had solid state storage onboard ranging in size from 2GB to 32GB in its current iteration.
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