Details surface about Intel’s 14nm Celeron and Pentium chips for cheap PCs
"Braswell" chips are Cherry Trail Atoms repackaged for budget PCs
Earlier this month, Intel officially announced new Atom x3, x5, and x7 chips aimed primarily at Android and Windows tablets. Those chips are all part of Intel's Cherry Trail platform, which combines CPU cores based on the Airmont architecture with a cut-down version of the integrated GPU used in the Broadwell family of chips. Cherry Trail replaces Bay Trail, and we're already beginning to see it in products like the Surface 3.
Cheap PCs like Chromebooks, low-end NUCs, or HP's Stream 11 laptop are ideal candidates for cheap chips based on the Braswell architecture.
Intel will also be offering versions of the same chips aimed at cheap desktops and laptops, sold under the venerable Celeron and Pentium brand names. The Bay Trail versions of these chips were just called "Bay Trail-D," but the Cherry Trail versions get a new codename: Braswell. Today, CPU World published details on four of these new Braswell chips.
Braswell chips have the same CPUs and GPUs as the Cherry Trail Atoms, but they come with a few extra features necessary for mainstream PCs—for Bay Trail chips this included SATA ports and higher RAM limits—and higher TDPs. Chips in laptops and desktops will have more room to stretch their legs than they would in tablets, and higher TDP levels will let them run at their maximum rated frequencies for longer periods of time.
Of the four Braswell chips outed today, three are Celerons. The Celeron N3000 is a 1.04GHz (2.08GHz Turbo) dual-core CPU with 1MB of L2 cache and a 4W TDP. The N3050 bumps the TDP to 6W and the clock speed to 1.6GHz (2.16GHz Turbo). The Celeron N3150 is a 1.6GHz (2.08GHz Turbo) quad-core CPU with 2MB of L2 cache and a 6W TDP. And, finally, the Pentium N3700 is a 1.6GHz (2.4GHz Turbo) quad-core CPU with 2MB of L2 cache and a 6W TDP.
All chips support up to 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, where Bay Trail-D processors were limited to either 1066MHz or 1333MHz speeds. More memory bandwidth is good for general system performance, but it's especially good for integrated graphics performance. The integrated GPUs on the two slower Celerons are capped at 600MHz, while the quad-core Celeron and Pentium GPUs are clocked at 640 and 700MHz, respectively.
We haven't had an opportunity to benchmark any Cherry Trail or Braswell systems yet, so we're still not sure how well they'll perform relative to Bay Trail-based systems. We suspect CPU performance will be relatively similar but that GPU performance will take a bigger leap forward—Bay Trail used cut-down Ivy Bridge GPUs, so Cherry Trail and Braswell are both hopping forward two generations there. All of these chips will still be slower than Core M, the low-power Broadwell chips intended for higher-end laptops and convertibles.
Original Article http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/details-surface-about-intels-14nm-celeron-and-pentium-chips-for-cheap-pcs/