Gigabyte announced new additions to its J and N series of embedded mini-ITX motherboards. The new platforms come with CPUs from Intel’s recently-announced Gemini Lake family, and replace the previous Apollo Lake-based boards.
The new CPUs are divided among the Intel Pentium Silver, Celeron J, and Celeron N lines. We don’t have the full specs and configuration for these boards yet, so don’t know the specific processors Gigabyte has chosen. The most powerful Gemini Lake part is the four-core Pentium Silver J5005, which runs at at 1.5GHz on a TDP of 10W.
Compared to the predecessors’ Apollo Lake platform, Gemini Lake CPUs, beyond being faster, bring decode support for 10-bit HEVC and VP9 video codecs. This will be necessary for the playback of certain HDR content from the boards’ HDMI 2.0 ports. Gemini Lake also brings some PCI-E lanes, six to be precise, but we don’t know how Gigabyte has split them. There’s at least one x2 slot free for an NVMe SSD and one consumed by an Intel AC-wifi card.
We don’t have the full details of pricing and availability yet, so we’ll update this post when we get them.
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Actually, the J5005 runs at 2.8GHz and is substantially higher performance than Apollo Lake based J4205 (brand new core and 4M L2). Check out Intel's ark page (https://ark.intel.com/products/128984/Intel-Pentium-Silver-Processor-J5005-4M-Cache-up-to-2_80-GHz). Be nice to see a full review.
What is the use case and market for such a device ?
Not saying there isn't. I just don't know it.
The motherboard with the CPU costs $100 or less. The whole platform uses less than 5W in idle and 25W in load when configured with a small power supply. What's not to like?
You can also fit in a very small and compact ITX case, making it the smallest, cheapest, lowest power consumption fully upgradeable PC.
