HP LEAKS SOME DETAILS ON INTEL'S KABY LAKE AND APOLLO LAKE CHIPS

HP may have tried, but it couldn't hold the secrets of Intel's unreleased Kaby Lake and Apollo Lake CPU chips close to its chest.

Some details on the new chips were unintentionally shared by HP in the maintenance documents of an unannounced PC, the Pavilion x360 m1.

PCs with Kaby Lake -- called 7th Generation Core chips -- are expected to ship this quarter. It is a highly anticipated successor to Intel's Skylake chips, with performance and multimedia improvements.

Asus announced the Transformer 3 tablet PC with Kaby Lake in June but didn't share specific chip details. Lenovo and Acer will announce new Kaby Lake PCs at the IFA trade show starting at the end of the month.

The Pavilion x360 m1 convertible PC  -- which means it can be a laptop or tablet -- can be configured with the dual-core Core i3-7100U running at 2.40GHz. The chip draws 15 watts of power and has 3MB of cache.

The Core i3-7100U chip details provide basic insight into the capabilities of other Kaby Lake chips. The chip has an HD Graphics 620 processor, which is capable of DirectX 12 gaming, and has high-definition video decoding built in. Intel has already said Kaby Lake chips will be capable of running 4K video.

The Pavilion x360 m1 can also be configured with an upcoming Pentium or Celeron chip code-named Apollo Lake. Both the Apollo Lake chips are surprisingly power-efficient and draw only six watts of power, which means long battery life.

The Apollo Lake chips are based on the Goldmont architecture, which was originally designed for Atom chips.

The Apollo Lake chip options for the Pavilion x360 m1 include Pentium N4200, which runs at 1.1GHz, but can go up to 2.5GHz, or the Celeron N3350, which can go up to 2.4GHz. The chips have 2MB of L2 cache.

Other specifications point the Pavilion x360 m1 to being a low-cost PC. It will have an 11.6-inch screen that displays images at 1366 x 768-pixel resolution, and will support DDR4 and DDR3 DRAM, depending on the chipset. It will support hard drives or SSDs. Surprisingly, it'll include only 802.11n Wi-Fi, not the latest 802.11ac. It will have USB 3.0 and 2.0 slots, not a Type-C port.

Posted by : Ruween Nugawela