Intel Apollo Lake CPUs to target growing market for inexpensive PCs

While overall demand for PCs remains weak, some segments are doing much better than the overall market. Gaming laptops for instance do quite well, and the same is true for inexpensive desktops and mini PCs, especially those using Intel's Pentium or Celeron processors.

The latter segment is seeing high demand in Europe, North America and Southeast Asia and Intel plans to respond to the trend by rolling out a new line of Apollo Lake-based processors in June-August 2016. At present, Intel is pushing Braswell or the entry-level market and this chip will see upgraded desktop models in Q1 2016 and new notebook models in Q2 2016:

Currently, over 500 million existing PCs worldwide have already been used for more than five years, and PC players including Intel, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dell and Lenovo have all been aggressively promoting their new PCs, looking to attract consumers to replace their old products.

Intel is now mainly pushing its 14nm Braswell-based SoC processors for the entry-level PC market, succeeding the 22nm Bay Trail. Intel will release upgraded versions of the Braswell processors in the first quarter of 2016 for desktops, and an upgraded one for notebooks in the second quarter.

DigiTimes writes entry-level PCs based on Apollo Lake are expected to hit retail shelve in October 2015. Apollo Lake is the successor to Braswell, it will feature dual and quad-core CPUs made on a 14nm process with Gen9 integrated graphics, Ultra HD support, USB 3.1 Type-C and eMMC 5.0.