Asus announced its J3455M-E motherboard, which is its first to feature an Apollo Lake SoC. Apollo Lake is the successor to Intel’s Cherry Trail and Braswell SoCs.
Intel manufactures the Apollo Lake SoCs on the same 14nm process as its existing Skylake, Cherry Trail, and Braswell SoCs. As a result, any advantage Apollo Lake has over its predecessors will come entirely from its new Goldmont microarchitecture.
The J3455M-E motherboard utilizes the Celeron J3455 SoC, which has four CPU cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The cores are also able to boost up to 2.3GHz during certain situations, and it has a 10W TDP. Although the Celeron J3455 is clocked lower than the Braswell Pentium J3710 (2.64GHz, 6.5W TDP), the J3455 should be able to maintain its boost frequency for longer periods due to its higher TDP.
The Celeron J3455 also has a new Intel Gen9 graphics core based on the Skylake iGPU. A passive heatsink covers the entire SoC.
Asus’s J3455M-E motherboard supports two DDR3 DIMMs clocked at up to 1866MHz. Asus said the board could handle up to 8GB of memory per memory channel, for a total of 16GB.
Storage support is extremely limited, as the board has just two SATA-III ports. You can use the two PCI-E x1 slots and a PCI-E x16 slot for additional storage devices, but it is still rather limited compared to most motherboards on the market.
There is currently no word on pricing or availability.
| Asus J3455M-E Apollo Lake Motherboard | |
|---|---|
| SoC | Apollo Lake Celeron J3455 |
| Core Count | 4 |
| Clock Speed | 1.5GHz / 2.3GHz Boost |
| iGPU | HD Graphics 500 |
| TDP | 10W |
| Memory Support | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz |
| Expansion Slots | PCI-E 2.0 x162 x PCI-E 2.0 x1 |
| Storage | 2 x SATA-III (6Gbps) |
| LAN | Realtek RTL8111H |
| Audio | Realtek ALC887-VD2 |
| USB | 4 x USB 3.0 (2 on Rear I/O)4 x USB 2.0 (2 on Rear I/O) |
