Intel Unveils Low-Cost PC Platform Apollo Lake

Megalith

Megalith

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New Celeron and Pentium chips are coming, which will be used in lower-end systems such as miniature PCs and offer CPU, graphics, and battery improvements while allowing for cost reductions.

Intel claims that due to microarchitectural enhancements the new SoCs will be faster in general-purpose tasks, but at this stage Intel has not quantified the improvements. The new graphics core is listed as being more powerful (most likely due to both better architecture and a higher count of execution units), but will also integrate more codecs, enabling hardware-accelerated playback of 4K video from hardware decoding of HEVC and VP9 codecs. The SoCs will support dual-channel DDR4, DDR3L and LPDDR3/4 memory, which will help PC makers to choose DRAM based on performance and costs.
 
It looks good for low end systems, but the one piece of information I'm most curious about wasn't shown at IDF: how much faster is Goldmont than Airmont?
 
I want to see a flood of small, lightweight Apollo Lake notebooks that do not have touchscreens and run Ubuntu perfectly with no configuration. Priced well under 200 bucks.
 
the_servicer said:
I want to see a flood of small, lightweight Apollo Lake notebooks that do not have touchscreens and run Ubuntu perfectly with no configuration. Priced well under 200 bucks.
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You probably won't see that for a few reasons.

First, there really just isn't a lot of demand for a flood. Second, few manufacturers want to support any flavor of Linux. It's taken Dell quite a while to get to the point where it can have a small business doing that, but most manufacturers don't. Next, it's going to be a while before a version of Ubuntu works perfectly with all Apollo Lake hardware right off the bat. Lastly, if you really want Ubuntu, it shouldn't be too difficult to load a signed version (using MS's signed bootloader for it) on most of those laptop devices. But it's still going to take some effort to get everything working, and might include delays for particular versions of Ubuntu.

To illustrate the last parts, currently Ubuntu still doesn't support all Cherryview hardware "out of the box" and those processors have been out for over a year.
 
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