What is Apollo Lake?

The recent NUC6CAYS is an Apollo Lake based computer with a quad core 1.5 GHz Celeron J3455, at the time it was released it represented the lower-end of the performance spectrum for that architecture. It has an onboard graphics chip on the system board (motherboard) and that is Intel HD Graphics 500. This is "on-die" which fundamentally means that the graphics processing unit (GPU) is on the same die as the Central Processing Unit (CPU).

So, Apollo Lake, what does this odd Intel name calling mean?

Well, from what I understand, Apollo Lake was another of the multiple code names for Intel's generations of Core processors. The previous generation was called Braswell. I think we need a table of those generations.

Sandy Bridge
Ivy Bridge
Bay Trail
Haswell
Braswell
Apollo Lake

That's not the entire story of the six generations as Intel began confusing the issue even more starting at the Bay Trail point, but I expect it was all to do with low power options, after Apollo Lake the situation is even more confusing, but we're not there yet.

The second generation Ivy Bridge had a 22 nm lithography and Apollo Lake 14 nm. This basically means that for the same square-millimetre you could fit more transistors because the size of the transistors in Apollo Lake are smaller than the Ivy Bridge.

So, without reverting to misguided mathematics again, Apollo Lake would have significantly more transistors per square millimeter. This is where my limited technical knowledge of stuff comes in, after all, even if I expound on building computers for 28 years, in reality, I only assemble computers and have the "skill" to install operating systems, drivers and software.

It is not just about a bigger number.

It really should be about what the features of the different generations offer, and the sixth generation Apollo Lake NUC provides a wide array of better system features than the second generation Ivy Bridge. A few of those being improved graphics capability, support for faster RAM and SATA transfer speeds, faster USB speeds and more features. In other words, an overall product improvement from previous generations.

Which is what we would expect.