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CPU-Wafer1

Dorsum in April, Intel announced its upcoming Apollo Lake platform, billed as an architectural refresh for low-cost Pentium and Celeron systems. Apollo Lake is built on Intel'southward adjacent-generation Goldmont CPU compages with Skylake-derived graphics, and will debut on a 14nm process. Actual performance figures, however, weren't discussed.

A leaked slide spotted on the Anandtech forums sheds some more than calorie-free on things and offers a preview of what Intel has packed into Goldmont and its accompanying GPU. The translated Chinese appears to the right of each information cake on the slide.

If this slide is accurate, Goldmont will ameliorate CPU operation by xxx%, introduce a new Skylake-derived GPU architecture for a 30% uplift in graphics, support DDR3L, LPDDR3, and LPDDR4, improve battery life by 15%, introduce new I/O options with added USB Type-C support, and work under both Linux and Windows 10 64-chip.

Equally updates get, these are fairly meaning, though obviously they can't be verified until we see shipping hardware. The gap betwixt Silvermont and Goldmont won't be almost as large as the departure between Clover Trail and Silvermont, but there'southward a simple explanation for that. The Atom core within Intel's Clover Trail tablet platform back in 2022 was badly outdated, having originally debuted on 45nm in 2008. To put that in perspective, ARM had moved from the ARMv11 compages in 2008 to Cortex-A8, then to dual-core Cortex-A9. The first Cortex-A15 devices shipped in 2022, merely before Intel formally launched its 22nm Silvermont architecture and starting time meaningful CPU update in iv years. Silvermont was far more potent than Clover Trail had been, specially since it offered up to four cores (Clover Trail topped out at dual-cadre + HyperThreading) and significantly improved operation per clock.

Goldmont is sticking with 4 cores and eschewing Hyper-Threading, just higher efficiency and improved clock speed make a 30% improvement quite reasonable, specially since Intel can obviously deliver it while simultaneously improving battery life for a net comeback in toll per watt. xxx% GPU uplift isn't going to turn Cantlet or Celeron systems into gaming boxes, just information technology could easily make the difference between a playable and unplayable frame rate. If we gear up 30 FPS as our minimum adequate gaming target on a budget system of this nature, a xxx% GPU increase would plough a 25 FPS game into a 32.5 FPS championship. Information technology may not compare well to monster systems with a GTX 1080, merely in a small laptop that kind of improvement is quite solid.

While Intel plans to pull out of the Android business and killed its SoCs, we should still see Goldmont debuting on lower-end ii-in-i devices and some depression-cost portable laptops. We were quite impressed with devices like the Asus T100 when Bay Trail debuted — hopefully Goldmont will give budget users more bang for their buck, while simultaneously packing in enough GPU horsepower to make the system useful for some very light gaming.