Intel Launches Onslaught of Skylake CPUs For Laptops, Hybrids and Compute Stick 54
MojoKid writes: Intel is following up on its Skylake launch bonanza by opening the floodgates on at least two dozen SKUs mostly covering the mobile sector. The company is divvying up the range into four distinct series. There's the Y-Series, which is dedicated to 2-in-1 convertibles, tablets, and Intel's new Compute Stick venture. Then there's the U-Series, which is aimed at thin and light notebooks and "portable" all-in-one machines. The H-Series is built for gaming notebooks and mobile workstations, while the S-Series is designated for desktops, all-in-one machines, and mini PCs. Also, the Y-Series that was previously known as simply the Core M, (the chip found in products like the 12-inch Apple MacBook and Asus Transformer Book Chi T300) is now expanding into a whole family of processors. There will be Core m3, Core m5, and Core m7 processors, similar to Intel's Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 CPU models in other desktop and notebook chips.
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Apple?
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Apple have a TV-thing series, a watch series, a phone series, small tablets, larger tablets, small laptops, the large laptops, the desktop all-in-ones, and high-end desktop workstations. They are even apparently working on a car.
This is exactly the same as Intel, different products for different spaces. Intel have not yet made a CPU which looks like a bin, though.
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You are correct. We sell 68 different current Intel CPU models. That doesn't include all of the nonsocketed models that aren't end user installable like for mobile or embedded systems. There's probably over 150 different current Intel CPU models. Intel does seem to be trying to confuse the market on purpose.
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Hello, market segmentation. Microsoft wishes they could do this.
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Well, when most users can't tell the difference between any of your products (because there barely is any) and they aren't even worth the hassle of a motherboard upgrade from previous products (much less the cost of the hardware) creating new large confusing model numbers is one way to give the illusion of a purpose I suppose.
5K resolution (Score:3)
Will the 28W parts be able to drive a 5K display when used with Alpine Ridge (Thunderbolt 3)?
That is: would a 13 inch Macbook Pro with Skylake be able to drive a Retina Thunderbolt Display?
Supposedly Thunderbolt 3 does support 5K resolution, and the Intel Iris 550 SKU will have 64MB of eDRAM.
I suppose we won't really know until next year.
Re:5K resolution (Score:4, Informative)
Yes and no. Yes, they can. No, not in the way you want them to.
Alpine Ridge only supports DisplayPort 1.2, which does not have enough bandwidth to drive 5K (you need DP 1.3). So instead Intel has it carry 2 complete connections (8 lanes).
On paper that's enough bandwidth, but now you have to build a 5K display that uses multi-stream tiling to bond 2 interfaces. MST is kind of an ugly hack, and while Apple uses it on the 5K iMac since it's a closed system, it would be a bigger can of worms to use it on an external display given their demand for perfection.
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Yes. The issue isn't so much how it appears to the user as it is how it appears to the OS. MST displays have an unfortunate habit of having a tile drop out now and then, if only for a second. The iMac gets around this by being a closed system, but Apple would have to address this head-on with a 5K Thunderbolt 3 display. It's one thing for 3rd party monitors to do this, but it's another thing for 1st party m
Moore's new law (Score:5, Insightful)
The number of distinct microprocessor SKUs on the market doubles every 18 months.
It's no ARMv8 (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously, this inability to let x86 go is just getting sad. If you want something that is power efficient, you go with ARM chips. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple announced it was switching it's laptop/desktop machines over to their own ARMv8 chips because in addition to power savings, it wouldn't cost nearly as much as the chips from Intel.
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Haven't Xeon CPU's had better performance per watt than ARM since like, forever?
Re:It's no ARMv8 (Score:4, Informative)
so what you're saying is that intel loses in every other metric except being faster? ok I might be able to see why people are sticking with x86 besides program compatibility.
besides, I certainly hope that you're not trying to suggest that octacore arm is faster than an intel octacore when all cores are running calculation...
arm loses on everything except watts, for certain things, and price. but even a chip for a cheap laptop would beat an arm chip priced for a laptop.
I got a quad core 2.7ghz phone(and it's not a cheap phone! I could buy a decent laptop for the price) and my aging intel 2.5ghz laptop still beats it night and day, on a common web bench the slower by mhz intel being 2-8 times better than the arm chip..
Re:It's no ARMv8 (Score:5, Interesting)
arm loses on everything except watts, for certain things, and price. but even a chip for a cheap laptop would beat an arm chip priced for a laptop.
That was certainly something that came as a surprise to us about... oh, I think it was two years ago, just how underpowered ARM chips are compared to what look like similarly-specced x86 ones. We were looking at moving to at least some ARM-based server stuff for power and cost reasons, but quickly found that they don't come close to the performance of x86 hardware (that was after spending forever on tuning and optimisation, we assumed we'd set things up wrong but it turned out that they just don't make for good server devices).
I'm not trying to bash ARM here, just pointing out that if I want to build a versatile tablet or embedded device I wouldn't think of anything other than ARM, but for a server I wouldn't think of anything other than x86 (or equivalent, Sparc, Power, whatever). They're just designed for totally different market segments.
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'xactly there's a reasons why OEMs don't go and make ARM laptops:
- their power/speed ratio isn't what adverts claim compared to intel, nothing beat intel on on speed right now. nothing.
- apps that run on x86 dont run on armv8, you need to be able to recompile, reoptimize, etc. which is often not possible.
- non-xeon intel is iactually toe to toe with arm power-consumption wise.
I think most people figure that if their phone lasts 1-2 day idle, arm must be the reason for it. its not though. its the OS, the scr
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Both the A8X and the Broadwell Core M have a TDP of ~4.5W, so they give us a good comparison between the latest and greatest ARM vs. x86 CPUs:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/2959187?baseline=3338936 [primatelabs.com]
Lets compare against the nVidia Tegra K1 as well, which has a TDP of 5W vs. the Core M's 4.5W:
http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/compare/2959187?baseline=3347052 [primatelabs.com]
As you can see, Intel is actually competing well against the best ARM can offer in their own backyard. The A8X does ~5%
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Haven't Xeon CPU's had better performance per watt than ARM since like, forever?
But.. But... the i3.. i286.. 8088 was bad!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHXx3orN35Y
.. forget about it.
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Thats always a funny one.
Specially that it doesnt need any fancy argument. Just go to a phone shop and run the fastest, greatest phone or phablet with their UHD screen and octo core armv8 cpu, as well as their extremely well optimized version of linux.
Now browse the web a bit.
Now go get a cheap, current i5 laptop with an UHD screen. I'll just mention that this is magnitudes cheaper to get than the phone above.
Now browse the web a bit.
Ooh. Looky how much faster the laptop is. Now compare the size of the scr
x86 isn't the performance bottleneck it once was (Score:3)
x86 is no longer a microarchitecture. It's just an ISA. It's a total abstraction, and in mid-range to high-end processors, its translation overhead (logic and latency) is minimal. Only in the lowest-end devices (Atom) is it any kind of burden, and ARM dominates in that space.
Yes, CISC is computersciencely evil, not orthogonal, crufty, and whatever else you want to call it. But these days, x86 is just an intermediate language between the compiler and the REAL execution engine.
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You are wrong about the ATOMs. You don't understand that what's been wrong with Atom is intel's making, not some limitation of the architecture. Intel has deliberately handicapped Atom to avoid atom taking market-share from high priced parts. This lack of performance from Atom was completely deliberate, they wanted to make it painful to use it for anything so people would opt for the better and higher priced desktop parts.
You want evidence? Intel has recently produced "server" atom's that are what Atom coul
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2758. Same TDP slightly better performance.
http://www.supermicro.com/prod... [supermicro.com]
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That may be because a server doesn't need a shit ton of CPU, and hardware AES helps.
The other aspect is your server Atom CPU has quite unrestricted power use, comparatively.
See, this quad core Atom (named Celeron) has a GPU, is constrained to about a third the power use and thus has to underclock itself.
http://ark.intel.com/fr/produc... [intel.com]
Constraining any CPU to well below 10 watts will make it suck (unless you're satisfied with the CPU power. Netbooks are quite good if they do what you want of them)
Back door? (Score:2)
Given the above, there is an incredible opening for some TLA agency (N?A) to put their very own software/hardware back door in at the silicon l
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Other major chip manufacturers will conduct their own reverse engineering or hire speciality chip patent infringement firms to map and analyze new chips from competitors. So a company like Samsung will do a fairly thorough teardown of new Intel chips and have a fairly detailed map. Not that a suitably clever backdoor couldn't be hidden from this type of scrutiny, it's not exactly the type of thing they're looking for. The always-on Cortana DSP is worrying and they've admitted to that, that could certainly s
When's the core count ever going to change? (Score:1)
Any chance we get to find out when Intel considers an increase in cores for these product segments?
Because rather than a rather minuscule performance increase (compared to the hardware from 1-2 gens prior), that could actually make for a worthwhile reason to buy.
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72 cores, 3 teraflops. Good enough?
If it's anything like their 6700k "launch"... (Score:2)