Most of the big news from Intel this week relates to Kaby Lake, the company's 7th-generation line of Core processors that launched for low-power laptops and convertibles just a few days ago. But Kaby Lake isn't the only line of chips launched by Intel this week: Apollo Lake, designed for entry-level laptops and netbooks, has also been quietly announced.
Apollo Lake is the latest SoC in Intel's Atom line-up, succeeding the Braswell platform. Built using new Goldmont CPU cores on a 14nm process, Apollo Lake will be the only current-generation Atom product on the market this year, as Intel cancelled both the Broxton and Willow Trail platforms (for smartphones and tablets respectively) several months ago.
With Kaby Lake occupying mid-range and high-end markets, Apollo Lake sits in the entry-level with Pentium- and Celeron-branded SKUs. On the desktop, we're seeing three 10W parts priced up to $161, the most powerful being the Pentium J4205. There's also three 6W mobile SKUs, again priced up to $161.
| Model | Market | Cores / Threads | Base Frequency (GHz) | Turbo Frequency (GHz) | GPU | GPU Frequency (MHZ) | TDP | Price |
| Pentium J4205 | Desktop | 4/4 | 1.5 | 2.6 | HD 505 | 800 | 10W | $161 |
| Celeron J3455 | 2.3 | HD 500 | 750 | $107 | ||||
| Celeron J3355 | 2/2 | 2.0 | 2.5 | 700 | ||||
| Pentium N4200 | Mobile | 4/4 | 1.1 | 2.5 | HD 505 | 750 | 6W | $161 |
| Celeron N3450 | 2.2 | HD 500 | 700 | $107 | ||||
| Celeron N3350 | 2/2 | 2.4 | 650 |
All of Intel's Apollo Lake processors support six PCIe 2.0 lanes and up to 8 GB of memory, along with increased support for HEVC and VP9 encodes and decodes. Intel is expecting 30 percent better CPU performance and 45 percent better GPU performance than Braswell.
Apollo Lake products will begin hitting the market in the coming months, although we haven't seen any announcements for products that integrate these processors just yet.