Even though everyone’s been talking about Intel’s Kaby Lake launch lately, it’s worth keeping in mind that the company is also catering to the needs of entry-level laptops and netbooks by releasing Apollo Lake SoCs. As the latest SoC in Intel’s Atom line-up, Apollo Lake represents the official successor of the Braswell platform, and it was manufactured using new Goldmont CPU cores on a 14nm process. Since the Broxton and Willow Trail platforms for smartphones and tablets have been cancelled, Apollo Lake will be the only current-gen Atom product available this year, and with Kaby Lake taking over the mid-range and high-end market areas, Apollo Lake will offer Pentium and Celeron SKUs at an entry-level.
The most powerful desktop offering comes in the form of the Pentium J4205, but there are also three 6W mobile SKUs available, which shouldn’t cost more than $161 each. All Apollo Lake processors will support up to 8GB of memory and six PCIe 2.0 lanes, and it’s worth noting that HEVC and VP9 encodes and decodes won’t be a problem either. When compared to Braswell, we’re looking at potential performance increases of 30 percent on the CPU side and up to 45 percent in the GPU department, which is definitely impressive.
