Intel isn’t developing Atom chips for smartphones, tablets, or low-power laptops anymore. But it looks like the Atom brand will live on.
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco next week, the company will unveil some details about next-gen Atom chips based on the new Apollo Lake platform.
There aren’t many details available at this point, but as PC World notes, the technical session schedule includes a few events related to the unannounced, next-gen Atom products.
The upcoming low-power chips are positioned as solutions for drones, robots, Internet of Things (IoT) products, and other embedded applications. Intel says they’ll also be designed to work with the company’s RealSense ZR300 depth-sensing camera. That could mean the chips will also be used for virtual reality or augmented reality devices… or maybe the camera will just help drones and robots keep from bumping into things.
Intel says the processors will use the latest version of the company’s Gen 9 graphics and Intel also plans to offer new developer tools in a “Media SDK for embedded Linux for IoT.”
We should learn more about Intel’s plans for the next-gen Atom chips on August 17th… but at this point, I’m more interested in learning when the company will release Celeron and Pentium Apollo Lake processors. Those are the chips that will likely show up in next-gen tablets, notebooks, and 2-in-1s as replacements for the Braswell chips that power current devices like the new HP Stream 11, Stream x360, and Stream 14 laptops that will hit the streets later this month.