Intel's Gemini Lake to ship by late Q1 2018

New "Atom“ notebooks / tablets

Intel canceled quite a few tablet and smartphone products from its roadmap but it is clear that it still needs a successor to Atom – the Apollo Lake product generation.

Intel launched the first Apollo Lake products in Q3 2016 and branded them as Pentium J Celeron J, Pentium N and Celeron N and later in Q4 2016 roughly a year from then it followed up with Intel Atom x7-E3950 Processor and at the high end, Intel Atom x5 and Intel Atom x3 processors.

Intel is targeting the €199 - €299 notebook/ 2 in 1/tablet market with the widely available Atom X5s. This will get replaced by the Gemini Lake generation. Gemini Lake is also known as the Goldmont plus. As the name implies this is still a 14nm improved design and not really a new architecture.

We don’t need to remind you that Intel is having trouble stepping down from 14nm manufacturing to 10nm but apparently this will happen at least for some devices in the course of 2018. Unfortunately, not for the Pentium X7/Celeron X5 previously known as Atom System on a chip. The good news is that the new 14nm++ - which is how Intel sometimes calls it, should be able to get you some additional 10 percent performance over the previous generation.

Our well placed sources suggest that there might be some Gemini Lake device announced in Q1 2018, but it is most likely that they will ship in the latter part of the quarter or in Q2 2018 in serious volumes. To refresh your memory, Gemini Lake is a quad core system on a chip targeting 4W and 6W TDP notebooks, two in ones and tablets mostly based on Windows 10. Intel calls this product bracket the Pentium N. The first leak out of Hong Kong surfaced a month ago, but Intel has yet to officialy announce the Gemini Lake SoC platform.

The new quad core processor for mini PCs and entry level notebooks also comes with 4-way decode - up from 3-way, VP9 10-bit Profile2 hardware decoding, native a HDMI 2.0 controller, Intel Wireless-AC with BT, 4 MB L2 cache per duplex - up from 2 MB with Apollo Lake.

There will be a new graphics core called UHD 605 for Pentium Silver J/N series 5xxx with 18EU and UHD Graphics 600 for Celerons with 12 EUs.

The systems based on Gemini Lake are being designed as we speak, and we would not be surprised to see some announcements at CES 2018 but it is actually up to Intel to announce the new line.