Now that Intel is no longer making Atom chips for laptops and tablets, the company’s low-end, low-power Celeron and Pentium chips are what you’ll find in many entry-level computers. Right now that means “Apollo Lake” chips including the
Celeron N3060,
Celeron N3450, and
Pentium N4200.
But by the end of the year, Intel is expected to roll out its next-gen entry-level chips, code-named “Gemini Lake.”
We’ve already learned a bit about these new chips, thanks to previous leaks. But now
CNX-Software has posted a block diagram that provides even more details.
Intel’s upcoming Gemini Lake chips are expected to come in 6 watt mobile and 10 watt desktop versions and there will be dual and quad-core models.
What the block diagram seems to confirm is that we can expect the new chips to have 4MB of cache (double that found in Apollo Lake chips), support for LPDDR4-2400 memory, native support for HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2a, and eDP 1.4 (embedded DisplayPort).
There’s also an embedded wireless controller, support for eMMC 5.1 storage, and support for
4-wide pipeline 10-bit VP9 video decoding.
All told, CNX-Software estimates we should see at least a 10 to 15 percent improvement in performance over Apollo Lake, assuming you hold CPU clock speed and power constant.
In other words, don’t expect next-gen $200 laptops to outperform this year’s $1000 models. But they should be a bit of an upgrade over what’s currently in the market.
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