Intel Unveils New Low-Cost PC Platform

Does it run Linux out of the box?

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.

Why Linux in particular?

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.