Now that Intel is no longer making Atom chips for laptops and tablets, the company’s low-end, low-power Celeron and Pentium chips are what you’ll find in many entry-level computers. Right now that means “Apollo Lake” chips including the Celeron N3060, Celeron N3450, and Pentium N4200.

But by the end of the year, Intel is expected to roll out its next-gen entry-level chips, code-named “Gemini Lake.”

We’ve already learned a bit about these new chips, thanks to previous leaks. But now CNX-Software has posted a block diagram that provides even more details.

Intel’s upcoming Gemini Lake chips are expected to come in 6 watt mobile and 10 watt desktop versions and there will be dual and quad-core models.

What the block diagram seems to confirm is that we can expect the new chips to have 4MB of cache (double that found in Apollo Lake chips), support for LPDDR4-2400 memory, native support for HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.2a, and eDP 1.4 (embedded DisplayPort).

There’s also an embedded wireless controller, support for eMMC 5.1 storage, and support for 4-wide pipeline 10-bit VP9 video decoding.

All told, CNX-Software reports we should see at least a 10 to 15 percent improvement in performance over Apollo Lake, assuming you hold CPU clock speed and power constant.

In other words, don’t expect next-gen $200 laptops to outperform this year’s $1000 models. But they should be a bit of an upgrade over what’s currently in the market.

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16 replies on “Intel’s Gemini Lake chips to feature native HDMI 2.0, more cache, better performance”

  1. Yes 10-15% increase from L2 4Mb, but I wonder would clocks stay same, like 1.10/2.5GHz

    1. …and you’d be right !
      (man, I wish AMD releases a Ryzen SoC to battle against the Atom, Core M, Core i5-U and Core HQ’s)

  5. how will prices of devices wrunning the Gimini Lake compared to similar devices running Apollo Lake?

    i.e. can we still expect to see PC Sticks in the low $100’s?

    1. Intel prices on low end SoC usually stays same through generations, so I think we should expect nicely priced laptops like a Apollo lake ones..

    1. Probably pure performance, simply because the L2 Cache doubled, that alone should provide extra 10% performance, I think… Gpu wise? Not Much would change if any

    2. It’s only for the CPU part. 15% is the target, and 10% the minimal improvement expected between Goldmont and Goldmont Plus cores.

  7. Out of curiosity, what does the “fuse” protect, and how is the fuse blowing different than “it’s broken?” I assume it’s not replaceable. so does it somehow reset?

    2. Fuse is a type of ROM that can be easily changed in a single layer. Most Intel chips have it and a change to it increases its separate revision number, not the stepping of the entire die. Fuse-pull is part of the internal power-up sequence of the die, where each IP block gets a static configuration from the central fuse block. Most IP blocks are not allowed to be enabled until they have their fuse configuration.

  8. The 10 to 15% performance improvement is not my estimation. It’s something I read in a document (which I can’t share online).

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