Intel's 10nm Pentium Silver and Celeron CPUs are a huge leap for schools

While it may seem strange to be reading about new Pentium processors in the year 2021, bear with me. Intel just announced its N-series Pentium Silver and Celeron processors at CES, and they may just lead to some transformative changes for inexpensive education PCs. These chips are based on a modern 10nm architecture, and the company claims they’re 35 percent faster than the last generation overall. You can also expect 78 percent better UHD graphics performance, which should be particularly useful for the cool teachers who incorporate Minecraft and Rocket League into their lessons.

Sure, it’s probably easy for Intel to show off some impressive performance gains if it’s upgrading an underpowered line of processors. But this new hardware could still make a different for the plethora of students stuck with cheap Windows PCs and Chromebooks. The N-series Pentium Silver and Celeron chips will also offer gigabit Wi-Fi, faster storage and memory speeds, and up to 10 hours of HD video playback. They’ll range from the dual-core Celeron N4500 to the quad-core N6005, which will be able to reach up to 3.3GHz. Don’t scoff, even kids deserve decent performance.