Intel Announces Apollo Lake Chips To Build Smaller And Smarter Budget PCs

Intel Inc. announced a new value platform for it’s entry-level PC’s and the 2-in-1 hybrid laptops, which is a growing market and a lot of smartphone are also banking upon this opportunity. The new platform has been codenamed ‘Apollo Lake’ and will follow in the footsteps of Intel’s Cherry-X and Braswell products, that were announced last year.

The ‘Apollo Lake’ platform promises to bring a number of interesting new features to the PC’s/desktops, which would earlier get stuck at certain tasks and couldn’t perform due to the lacking Intel Atom processors. The Atom Processors could take the burden of running the PC smoothly, but with some hiccups at the performance front due to the lack of cores and RAM. The ‘Apollo Lake’ however, promises to take care of all this.

BenchLife, a Chinese technology website reports on the new features coming to the Intel chips via Apollo Lake, let’s take a look at features we’re certain of –

• Even with Apollo Lake, Intel is determined to maintain the 14nm process of building it’s CPU cores.
• But has planned to move away from the existing architecture of Airmont and replace it with the Goldmont architecture in Apollo Lake, which will increase the performance of IA.
• It will also result in an increased battery life, better CPU core performance and an advanced GPU output with the use the new engine Gen9, that could now render videos upto 4K.
• In addition to displaying the outer part of the upgrade, the I/O has also been strengthened.

The Goldmont architecture of Apollo Lake will also support the Type-C USB and eMMC 5.0, and provide a better performance even with the four Cores embedded in this processor. All told, Apollo Lake looks like a compelling upgrade from Braswell and could lead to very compelling, low-cost PCs.

Intel at the Shenzhen Developer Forum(SDF) announced that they have over 100 design wins ready for the production of Apollo Lake. They also have a master reference design ready for the Apollo Lake processors and will start mass-production of the chips in mid-2016, i.e around June 2016.