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Intel's new chips: Low-power, lower-cost Gemini Lake CPUs for PCs, 2-in-1s, laptops

Intel unveils budget Gemini Lake Pentium and Celeron processors, due out next year.
Written by Liam Tung, Contributing Writer
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Intel says its new Pentium Silver and Intel Celeron low-power chips are made to give good battery life for everyday tasks.

Image: Intel

Intel has released the next generation of its low-power and lower-priced Pentium Silver and Celeron processors.

The new processors are based on Gemini Lake, the successor to last year's Atom-based Apollo Lake line of chips for entry-level devices.

The new Pentium Silver and Celeron chips are made for tasks like working on documents, web browsing, watching media, and editing photos and, according to Intel, offer "great battery life".

The chips are for laptops, 2-in-1s, all-in-one PCs, mini PCs, and desktops that should be available from hardware makers in the first quarter of 2018. Intel says the chips aim to give consumers a range of designs and price points for PCs that handle common tasks at home, school, or on the go.

The Pentium Silver is the budget-friendly version of the already available Pentium Gold, which is based on the Kaby Lake technology behind the higher-performance Intel Core branded chips. Pentium Gold is the highest performing Pentium processor, Intel notes.

Intel hopes the new Gold and Silver levels will make it easier for consumers to tell which price and performance mix they desire.

Intel is releasing one Pentium Silver processor for desktop and one for mobile, and four Celeron processors in total, consisting of two for desktop and two for mobile.

The Pentium Silver N5000 mobile processor offers up to 2.7GHz clock speeds while the Pentium Silver J5005 for desktops has a top frequency of 2.8GHz. Both are quad-core, four-thread processors. The Celeron desktop processors are the J4105 and J4005. The Celeron mobile processors include the N4100 and N4000.

Intel is focusing on connectivity for the new budget processors, with both featuring Gigabit Wi-Fi using the 2×2 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard with 160MHz channels. The company says you can download an 8GB file in about one minute, compared with 10 minutes using 802.11 B, G, N Wi-Fi.

It also says the Pentium Silver will give a 58 percent faster productivity performance compared with a similar four-year-old PC.

Intel is also including support for Local Adaptive Contrast Enhancement to help users see the screen in bright outdoors settings.

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Intel has set out the specs for its new Pentium Silver and Celeron desktop chips.

Image: Intel
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These are Intel's specs for the mobile versions of the processors.

Image: Intel

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