Intel's Apollo Lake chips promise better Intel's Apollo Lake chips promise better budget-priced Windows 10 laptops. Users will not have to compromise on performance with a starter notebook.

With its new Apollo Lake chip, Intel wants to help PC makers to create budget-priced Windows 10 tablets, laptops and 2-in-1s that are slimmer but more powerful compared to the starter devices currently on the market. The new Intel Apollo Lake system-on-chips will launch sometime in the second half of the current year Intel just revealed this week the first details of their design.

According to the online publication AnandTech, the American high-tech giant Intel talked about Apollo Lake in China, at their IDF Shenzhen conference. The company revealed that the Apollo Lake system-on-chips for PCs are based on a new graphics core featuring Intel's ninth-generation architecture (Gen9) currently used in Skylake processors and the new Atom-based x86 microarchitecture named Goldmont.

Intel has not quantified yet the improvements at this stage. However, the high-tech company claims that the new SoCs will be faster in general-purpose tasks due to microarchitectural enhancements. According to Windows Central, budget computers that will use the new Intel chipset technology will be better than the ones currently present in the marketplace.

Entry-level laptops offer at present 18mm thick designs, 32 GB of storage, 2 GB of memory, and more than eight hours of battery life.  OEM computer manufacturer will be able to make systems thinner and increase the storage and memory capacity with the new Intel Apollo Lake.

According to Intel, Apollo Lake also offers opportunities to build 2-in-1 hybrid PCs. All this could be done while maintaining the price tag in the $169 - $269 range.

Engadget reports that the new system-on-a-chip promises to greatly improve the budget PCs category. The chipset is more efficient and more compact and will allow computer manufacturers to use smaller batteries in their systems.