Intel released a presentation entitled “Design Considerations and Reference Designs for Entry, Value and Mainstream PCs” at IDF 2016 Shenzhen, explaining the company vision about low power laptops and mini PCs. At the core of those devices will be “Apollo Lake” Pentium and Celeron Processors with 6 to 10W TDP replacing Braswell processors with better CPU and graphics performance, lower power consumption, and low overall BoM cost.
Beside mini PCs, the processors will also find their way into what Intel calls Cloudbooks, some sort of laptops with 2 to 4GB RAM, 32 to 64GB storage, no hard drive, and displays whose size ranges from 11.6″ to 14″. So it looks like Cloudbooks may be the new Netbooks, with better performance and larger displays.
Cost savings on the mainboard are achieved thanks to the integration of many features (Signal Processor, SD Card bridge chip, Spead Spectrum Clock…), low power consumption leading to smaller batteries, the ability to load the BIOS/UEFI to the eMMC instead of an SPI flash, etc…
The savings appear to be small, but bear in mind that those are for the bills of materials, so the retail price savings may be two to three times higher.
Intel also unveiled a Cloudbook reference design with the complete BoM which show what we may expect later this year, as OEM/ODM manufacturers are likely to take the easy way at first, by simply copying Intel reference design, possibly by removing some of the features in the processor.
That means Apollo Lake Cloudbooks with a 11.6″ full HD display, 32 to 64 GB storage, 4GB RAM, 802.11ac WiFi , and USB type C connector should be expected in the second part of 2016.
Via Liliputing and some Google searches…
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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