Intel’s Apollo Lake platform wants to beef-up, slim down entry PCs

Intel wants to make sure that your next entry-level PC can hold its own with its newly announced Apollo Lake platform.

Unveiled at IDF Shenzen in China this weekend, Intel’s looking primarily at the low-cost market, micro PCs, ultra-thin devices and tablets. Apollo Lake is based on a 14nm fabrication process, akin to Intel’s flagship Skylake platform.

Apollo Lake though wants to makes more USB ports available, improve power usage to performance, and bolt on a new graphics core, taken from Skylake.

The platform will use Goldmont CPU cores, and will support up to four cores. Additionally, DDR4 or DDR3 RAM modules will also be supported, which will give manufacturers a little more leeway in terms of budget and target audience.

And finally, the packages will likely be named as Celeron and Pentium depending on the price range. Intel hasn’t shed much light on these figures, or any other hard information such as clockspeeds, or thermal output.

It has however said that users can expect the new platform in the second half of 2016.