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First Ever Apollo Lake Chromebook? ‘Amenia’ Begins Development

By 5 Comments

by Gabriel Brangers
Filed under:

apollolake

Another new Chromebook?

Absolutely! It seems not a day goes by that we don’t find evidence of a new device, hardware or some other bit of tantalizing news from the world of Chrome OS. While it seems that Braswell-based Chromebooks are having their moment in the sun, Intel’s next generation of Atom processors have found their way into a new device currently in development.




Recently, support for the new Apollo Lake chip has been added to the Chromium OS repositories. Now it seems the first board and device supporting the new SoC with Intel’s new Goldmont CPU architecture.

‘Amenia’

We don’t have a lot of information on the new device at this time. But, what we do know is that the  ‘Amenia’ is listed as a ‘chromebook’ device in the boards ebuild file. You can take a closer look at the commit here.

Anemia board overlay

ASUSFlipThe baseboard for ‘Anemia’ is code named ‘reef’ and is the first board we have seen supporting the new Apollo Lake chipset. We can also see in the commits references to ‘enable tablet mode interrupt’ which gives us a good indicator this will be a convertible device. If you’re up for picking through a lot of code you can see more details in the link below.

Anemia board.c file




Likely we will continue to see more Braswell devices hit the market over the next few months due to availability, stability and cost. But, Apollo Lake’s arrival is inevitable. We will continue to track this device in the hopes to learn more about a possible release as well as hardware configurations. To see all of the devices currently being developed, check out our upcoming devices.

Stay tuned for updates.

  • Mr Payne I have been following you as of late, when do you expect these Chromebooks to be released? Please reply

    • Gabriel Brangers

      Honestly, I would anticipate no sooner than Q1 of 2017. There are a lot Braswell devices being pushed out at the moment. Not to mention the Skylake Core processors are just now becoming common place in Chromebooks. The Apollo Device have just begun development in the past couple of weeks. The architecture is not that unfamiliar to Chrome OS but I’d say the OEMs are going to get everything they can out of the current chips before pushing the next generation. That is purely based on my opinion and previous market trends. Appreciate you following us.

      • Thanks, can’t wait. I hope that they are thin enough, fast, back lit, and made of Premier material.

        • Robby Payne

          My guess? We’ll see all shapes and forms with Apollo Lake. My hope is that it performs 30% better in the real world like Intel claims. Braswell was just a bit sluggish to me.

  • riddick

    Everytime Intel releases an improved low-end soc, their core celeron gets that much better too. Why buy a 30% better low-end soc when you can have a 20% better mid-range one (only 20% because they intentionally cripple it with a low clock speed so that it does not compete with i3). Yes there will be significantly better battery life on the low-end, but that is only needed for school kids. I have seen this at 32nm & 22nm and am expecting it for 14nm. There is no innovation in the low-end design, it’s just the transistors getting more plentiful and dynamic power going down with the voltage decrease.