Intel Unveils New Low-Cost PC Platform | Hacker News Reader

Intel Unveils New Low-Cost PC Platform

anandtech.com

94 pointselorant47 comments

Another platform for which to overcharge customers and OEMs by $70-$120 by using the names "Celeron" and "Pentium", for what is essentially a $30 mobile chip. And they use the name "Lake" in there, too, to make people think it has anything to do with the Skylake and Kaby Lake platforms (which it doesn't from a CPU point of view - Intel stopped using the Core architecture for Celerons with the Haswell version).

When I asked them at a recent event why they were doing this they even had the nerve to say "because the performance is similar". No it's not. Haswell Celerons are still almost twice as fast in single-thread performance as the latest Atom-based Celeron, and believe me the difference is very palpable. It's like comparing Core i3 and Core i7 in performance, or perhaps an even greater difference than that.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp%5B%5D=2200&cmp%...

At first they pretended that the performance is "about equal" because they started using quad-core Atom Celerons vs the previous dual-core Haswell Celerons. But now they even scaled that back, and are using dual-core Atom-based Celerons that are weaker than the latest high-end ARM chips, yet have price-points that are 3-4x bigger.

I haven't given AMD a look in a long time, but I did recently because I knew Intel is scamming the market with these Atom-based Celerons and Pentiums, and surprise-surprise. In virtually every case, you're better off getting an AMD A6 APU for the same price over any Intel Celeron or Pentium. In fact AMD is a better value for money all the way up to Core i5. Intel's chips should only be preferred from Core i5 and beyond right now. And that could also change once Zen-based APUs start arriving in notebooks. AMD is still behind in power consumption, but if that's a real drawback for you, then you could wait for their 14nm chips later this year. But money/performance, AMD beats Intel up to Core i5.

> AMD is still behind in power consumption

This is the reason why Intel can charge anything the market is able to bear. Phones, tablets, laptops, convertibles, and servers are all power-constrained. The remaining market suitable for AMD does not look too good.

Does AMD have integrated graphics to match or outperform Intel's offering?

Yes. Only the most expensive Intel chips with eDRAM outperform AMD's integrated graphics.

A lot of people don't even know what Pentium or Celeron is.. And the ones who do will propably check online reviews ;)

I don't know anyone who really cares what is inside the computer. They care that office works quicker, they can browse the web and for schools that the computer will run minecraft.

Minecraft? I'm sure there's plenty of people who play it at school, but I'm not sure that's in the mind of whatever school employee is in charge of purchasing.

It was part of our decision process.

Could you explain the decision process?

Intel did a really aggressive campain with the "intel inside", just to make sure people will _look_ for what is actually inside their computing device.

So far, it seems it's working.

Sigh, instead of "cloudbooks" we want "standalonebooks". The cloud only makes things slow, unreliable and prone to privacy invasion.

For Chromebooks that's a problem, but if I'm not mistaken, the "cloudbook" moniker is meant for Windows Laptops with Chromebook-like hardware(though the name may cover Chromebooks too, I'm not sure). In those cases, They're perfectly usable standalone, they just have anemic storage and give you A year or two trial to Microsoft, and maybe other, cloud services. But they're not tied to it as much as Chromebooks.

The processor connecting you to a LAN doesn't actually care what "cloud" you decide to connect to. My guess is that the point of this infrastructure option is to optimize for the worker bees, in which case a super-reliable network connectivity (thin client) would be valued for its ability to not slow down from the outside world's "cloud".

"Intel has not specified the TDP of its new processors" Left out the one piece of info I was most interested in.

What is the threshold you're looking for? I know the principle engineer of this project and may be able to give a yes/no answer on whether the part is at/below.

Ideally < 5 watt so it can be fanless

Cherry Trail has a 2W SDP (~4W TDP) so I'd expect something similar.

Given Core Y can be cTDP'd down to 3.5W, Apollo Lake would be completely pointless at more than 5W.

I haven't gotten a response in more than a week now, so I'm going to assume that info can't be shared. Sorry!

low cost is never the same as low TDP. never.

That was the case with the original Atom, but Braswell and the various Trails are pretty low TDP.

Low cost, high performance, low TDP - choose 2

Generally true, but all three improve over time

I'm a bit confused, how is this any different then the next iteration on the Atom line? Is it a significant improvement?

It basically is the next Atom. The Atom line has seen modest improvements over recent generations to the point that it now offers almost acceptable performance for everyday tasks. Perhaps this one will take it over the line.

It literally is the new Atom SoC architecture, the successor to Cherry Trail.

One interesting point is the reduction in hw costs due to higher integration and built-in hw (there's a slide there with some info)

reading this article on my new $84 Nextbook Flexx 9 with atom cpu... traveling EU and wanted something to book ryanair flights with, jot down a few notes with a keyboard, and not care if it' lost or stolen... it is definitely useable once the updates are all caught up... if they can be even faster, lighter, more power efficient, then yay for us consumers

I have been wondering if this will be good enough for most Office PC. You have the latest Gen 9 GPU, which could do GPU acceleration on most browsers and OS rendering. H.264 / H.265 and Vp9 Hardware decoding.

If, the Goldmont offer a decent IPC improvement, this could very well fit 90% of Office PC use case. Despite being lower price, it could offer higher margin for all parties.

I hope they make ones with dual intel gigabit network cards on the board.

Does it run Linux out of the box?

Given recent history and the public reports of kernel developers, it may not run "out of the box" acceptably for its target market (low power devices) for quite some time after release. (see: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html , although this post is about a different microarchitecture )

Why Linux in particular?

Because Bay Trail devices only came with a 32-bit UEFI making it impossible* to boot Linux. (*annoyingly obtuse to get it to work).

It is possible to boot into Linux on some baytrail chromebooks, although it seems only through google's custom build of coreboot, good luck trying to compile coreboot yourself for it.

[Source](https://johnlewis.ie/custom-chromebook-firmware/rom-download...)

That was 2 gens ago. Did Cherry Trail have the same limitation?

It's likely 32 bit (http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-compute-stick-stk1aw32sc-r...) but I'd be very happy to be proven wrong.

Well if that the case, it's more likely to be an issue of a specific chipset. i.e. buying a computer in this day and age designed for 32bit Windows.

And I do sympathise with buyers of cheap tablets but by comparison, Intel had a couple of Bay Trail NUCs for which run 64bit Linux just fine.

It's a 64 bit chip with a questionably-implemented 32 bit UEFI. GRUB can do the "mixed mode" boot - 32 bit UEFI to 64 bit kernel. https://sturmflut.github.io/linux/ubuntu/2015/01/21/installi...

As far as I'm concerned, putting 32 bit Windows on them is purely a business decision.

FreeBSD would work too. When talking about low cost computers adding a $120 Microsoft fee kind of defeats the purpose.

The fact that you can buy Windows laptops for $150 to $199 surely ought to make you realize the absurdity of that claim.

Even when Windows was at its marketing peak in the late 1990s, the largest OEMs were only paying $40-$45 for a pre-installed copy of Windows. Some were probably paying less (IBM complained to the US government when Microsoft increased its price from $9 to $27).

The low cost version of Windows XP for netbooks cost $11 to $15, and Windows 8 with Bing went for $0* on systems with 8-inch or smaller screens.

I don't know where you think you got your $120 from, but that number wouldn't have figured even in Ballmer's wildest dreams.

* It cost $10 with a $10 refund for setting Bing as the default search engine.

For me its less the money and more the performance. Windows eats processing power that I don't want to expend on a small processor. Sadly, battery performance on new hardware is often worse on Linux, so its a tradeoff.

OEMs don't pay a $120 fee to Microsoft.

I have seen quite a few laptops online where getting Linux pre-installed is actually more expensive than getting Windows. You can get them without OS, but then good luck getting everything to work.

That's because it's more expensive for a Windows OEM to pre-install and ship Linux than it is to install Windows.

You have extra hardware qualification and software testing costs, extra accounting, distribution and advertising costs, and massively higher support costs.

Not only does it cost more to pre-install Linux, you lose all the payments for distributing third-part software (ie installing crapware) in Windows, which in some cases means you can install Windows at a profit. (If a user signs up for the pre-installed anti-virus, the PC manufacturer can make more than the cost of Windows.)

That's because OEMs have to pay Microsoft for all devices sold, not all devices with Windows pre-installed. They get a better per device deal that way, but it also makes sure the version without Windows is not cheaper.

> That's because OEMs have to pay Microsoft for all devices sold

That's not true, and it has never been true.

Two decades or so ago, Microsoft offered a deal like that for DOS, but the US Justice Department stopped it almost immediately.

Nice, but 4GB RAM is more like a joke nowadays.

Depends on what you're using it for - the emphasis seems to be on Chromebooks, despite the blatantly obvious name change. I doubt that there's any technical limitation to adding more, this is just where Intel expects the market to settle.

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