Update 9/11/2019, 8:50am PT: Intel pulled the PCN document from its site, and after further investigation, the company tells us the PCN was posted in error. We've provided more detail here.
Original Article 9/9/2019 12:22am PT:
As detailed in a recent Product Change Notification (PCN) document, Intel is refreshing four of the company's Celeron and Pentium Apollo Lake processors due to degradation concerns. The problem stems from the same issue that initially cropped up with the C2000 Atom family, which had enough of an impact that Intel had to establish a reserve fund to cover the costs associated with replacing the processors.
Intel introduced Apollo Lake in 2016, and the chips are based of Intel's Goldmont microarchitecture. Like many chips before and after it, Intel manufactures Apollo Lake on the 14nm process node. Apollo Lake might consist of paltry Celeron and Pentium models, but these chips are commonly found in many budget products, including desktops, laptops, 2-in-1s and AIO (All-In-One) PCs. The following is Intel's description of the problem from the official PCN 117143-00 document.
Intel identified an issue with the Low Pin Count (LPC), Real Time Clock (RTC), SD Card interfaces on Intel Celeron N3350, J3355, J3455 processors and Intel Pentium N4200 processor resulting in degradation of these signals at a rate higher than Intel's quality goals after multiple years in service.
For those of you that want to skip the mumbo-jumbo, Intel is basically saying there are reliability issues with its Apollo Lake processors where the 14nm chips are likely to die before the warranty is up. Having identified the problems, Intel is proceeding to refresh the entire Apollo Lake lineup. Current Apollo Lake chips with the B1 stepping are moving over to the new F1 stepping. These problems stem from the same LPC bus degradation issue that was present on the Atom C2000 family, and also impacted the company's E3800-series processors.
| Model | Segment | Cores / Threads | Base Clock | Boost Clock | Cache | TDP |
| Pentium N4200 | Mobile | 4 / 4 | 1.1 GHz | 2.5 GHz | 2MB | 6W |
| Celeron J3455 | Desktop | 4 / 4 | 1.5 GHz | 2.3 GHz | 2MB | 10W |
| Celeron J3355 | Desktop | 2 / 2 | 2.0 GHz | 2.5 GHz | 2MB | 10W |
| Celeron N3350 | Mobile | 2 / 2 | 1.1 GHz | 2.4 GHz | 2MB | 6W |
The Celeron J3455, J3355, N3350 and Pentium N4200 are the affected Apollo Lake models. The first two models are desktop parts, while the remaining two are mobile chips.
Intel is urging its customers to transition existing affected products to the new stepping as soon as possible. To simplify the transition and avoid confusion between the new and old stepping, Intel adding the "E" suffix to the processor names. As a result, the processors with the F1 stepping will be marketed as Celeron J3455E, J3355E, N3350E and Pentium N4200E. If you're shopping and come by one of affected Apollo Lake SKUs, make sure the processor have the "E" suffix.
It remains to be seen if this issue is as widespread as the C2000 issue, and given that this also impacted the E3800-series processors, we might see even more Intel processor families impacted. We're reaching out to Intel for comment for further details, and will update as necessary.
