Intel hasn’t formally launched its upcoming Gemini Lake chip family yet, but it’s pretty much an open secret at this point that the next-gen low-power Celeron and Pentium chips are on their way.
In fact, it’s such an open secret that a Chinese PC maker is already showing off a convertible tablet-style notebook powered by an Intel Celeron N4000 Gemini Lake processor.
Notebook Italia spotted the laptop from a company called Shenzhen Skyworld Technology at the HKTDC show in Hong Kong.
The notebook looks like pretty standard fare for a low-cost convertible: it has a touchscreen display, a keyboard and touchpad (with what looks like a fingerprint sensor in the corner), 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.
What’s unusual is the Celeron N4000 chip, which is a 6 watt dual-core processor with a base clock speed of 1.1 GHz, although it should support higher burst speeds. It’s expected to offer up to 15 percent better performance than current-gen “Apollo Lake” chips such as the Celeron N3xxx series processors. Other new features are expected to include native support for HDMI 2.0 and more cache memory.
I’m really interested to see their HEVC (h265) hardware decoding performance.
If Intel released a low cost SOC that can do 10bit h265 hardware decoding at a decent rate, I think they’ll have a real winner.
Intel has been doing really well at the h265 game recently, but you have to remind yourself that there are Chinese ARM chip makers that are doing just as well with $5-10 SOCs.