Intel Unveils 5th Gen Core Series Broadwell-U CPUs and Cherry Trail Atom 78
MojoKid writes Intel has officially taken the wraps off its 5th generation Core Series notebook processor, code named Broadwell-U. This new SoC is a "tick" in Intel's tick-tock plan, which means it's mostly a die shrink of the existing Haswell architecture, at least on the CPU side. On the GPU side, there's a bevy of improvements and advances, and the video decoder block has been beefed up with dual bit stream decoders in its high-end (GT3) hardware. Other feature improvements and capabilities are expected, though Intel has been quiet on exactly what they have tweaked and changed to date. Intel is claiming that the architecture will boost battery life by 1.5 hours, speed video conversions, and offer a whopping 22% improvement to 3D performance — a gain on par with what we saw when moving from Ivy Bridge to Haswell. Intel also took the wraps off their next gen Atom CPU, code named Cherry Trail. This is essentially a 14nm Bay Trail die shrink that's been on the roadmap for a while. As with Haswell-Broadwell, the Bay Trail-Cherry Trail shift is aimed at improving CPU power consumption and overall SoC power characteristics, though again, we'll see an updated GPU baked in as well.
Macbook Air? Mac mini? (Score:1)
Will Apple update the Macbook Air and the Mac mini with these new CPUs?
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I say this in all seriousness: Who cares? If you're in Apple's world, you take what Apple gives you. If you don't like Apple's offerings, you can either invest the energy in getting a Hackintosh running or buy the thing Apple consents to sell you.
For what it's worth, Intel NUCs make pretty good Hackintoshes.
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There are plenty of Macbook Air users who are technically literate and care about such questions. Anyone working in the programming world knows that MBAs are fairly pervasive due to the long battery life and tiny size. I have a friend who coded the backend of his startup on his MBA and also uses the unix shell for unit testing in his engineering dayjob, and have interviewed at a hacker friendly programming company that is almost entirely iMacs in house.
It's not all black and white, there are plenty of compe
Re:Macbook Air? Mac mini? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plenty of Macbook Air users who are technically literate and care about such questions
He didn't say there weren't. He said it doesn't matter if they care. Because no matter how much they care, if apple doesn't adopt these and they need a new macbook... then they will buy either the slower one apple is selling or the slightly faster one for a silly markup.
And so forth... do you want a Cherry Trail mac? Maybe you do... so what?
Maybe Apple will make one, or maybe they'll just sit on their thumbs for another rake in the profit of selling a 2 year old product for the same price as the day it was announced and then go with whatever the next chipset is next year for the next refresh.
If your tech savvy and want to buy mac...
http://buyersguide.macrumors.c... [macrumors.com]
This is pretty much the site to go to. Buy something recently refreshed. Don't buy something that hasn't been recently refreshed. If you want a mini and you like the specs buy it now. Its not going to get any better any time soon.
If you want an air? Wait if you can, and buy whatever it is they refresh it with when they refresh it.
That's the point... it doesn't matter what you -want- in a product. Either it has it or it doesn't. All you can really control is whether or not you can wait for the next refresh or not... and sometimes you can't even control that.
I like Mac hardware in terms of overal build quality. I loathe it in terms of selection.
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If you've been paying attention you'd know that Apple today generally has first crack at Intel's newest hot silicon. (At least in mobile devices like laptops)
The original Macbook Air had Intel chips/chipsets that were unavailable anywhere else for a good 6-8 months.
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Mac Mini was already updated recently, so no, that won't be updated. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line - they basically do NOT sell. Apple probably wants to drop both but there's a contingent of very loud complainers who would raise the global noise level should Apple actually do so.
(And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old - blame Intel for that one since Intel decided to not keep the footprints
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You're right. Some of that noise might well be internal. I bet Apple's own developers would be pretty unhappy without those product lines.
There's a bit of a GPU advantage. It was enough that when when I upgraded my 2009-era Mini-based
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The Mac Mini is a legacy product for Apple, much like the iPod Classic was. They aren't going to be putting much money into upgrades, but they will continue selling them so long as people buy them and the parts to make them don't get discontinued. (The demise of the iPod Classic finally happened when 1.8" hard drives went out of production; Apple was the only significant customer that was still using them.) Apple might even consider going to a new motherboard for an upgrade if they can go to the SAME new mo
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Hey, sex sells. Even women get it (that's what she said).
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I own one of those old Core 2 Quads. It also was akin to a volcano. A big gigantic Zalman heatsink / fan (9700) could barely keep it cool. Nowadays, I have a 1.4Ghz dual core i5 that encodes / renders stuff faster, and uses minimal power...
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my last 2 system builds were fanless: one was haswell i3 and the other was the amazin haswell i7-4790t (tray only - very hard to find) 45w (!!) cpu. with a decent heatpipe case, its my first truly silent, fanless i7 system. I love it! builds linux kernels (make -j9) in less time than it takes to write this post ;)
the i3 is a 35w cpu and pretty amazing on its own, but the fanless i7 (mini-itx board, btw) is really something else!
only down-side is that intel farked up usb in some way so that my 24/192 uac2
Re:am disappoint (Score:4, Informative)
More speed has not been what the market has wanted in a great number of years. Lowering power consumption has taken a front seat to CPUs being faster.
That having been said, CPUs ARE getting faster, if you want to pay for it. Outside of that, a core 2 quad from SEVEN YEARS AGO is still about EIGHT TIMES AS MUCH computer power as the average Internet user needs.
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It wasn't supposed to be the scripted, interpreted, bloated hellhole that it is now either.
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The only way that will change is a killer app that requires more (which I do not see). For workstations and scientific data the march is great, but it has moved beyond consumer needs.
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In theory I would like to agree with this, but Firefox and Chrome say otherwise. In the last year, they've gone from speedy on a Core2Duo to bloated and slow on a modern i5.
You want to know the only machine I have that Firefox runs well on including my extensions? A 5Ghz (heavily overclocked, of course) i5... Even the i5 in my laptop (which turbo boosts up to 3GHz) struggles at times.
Yes, I know, I should pare down my selection of extensions etc. - but shouldn't a 3GHz i5 with an SSD and 16 gigs of RAM be a
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Other than ABP, NoSquint and PushBullet, I don't really have anything of note installed right now, and it's still slow as balls. :(
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Well the newer cpus are like World of Warcraft upgrades with stats. A little percentage points here and there add up quickly overtime.
A core2Dou speed per core (grandparent mentioned 4 core) is 1/6 the speed. I am reading 30,000 mips. An i7 has 150,000 mips. Most were just dual core so yes there is certainly a speed boast with a modern processor even if they are gradual every other year.
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These are extremely lame products. A core 2 quad from SEVEN YEARS AGO had more cores, more cache and was probably faster. Moore's law is deader than a norwegian blue.
"No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!"
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Haswell was underwhelming, and this as a 'tock' is basically Haswell SE. Now with even more minor improvements.
Well, you can't blame them for giving AMD a chance to catch up, it was looking grim with the first 3 generations of Intel Core architectures.
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haswell brought amazing power savings, and for the first time, I was able to build a truly fanless/silent i7 system.
that was a game-changer for me. nice HTPC (also doubles as a linux build server) that will handle any video I throw at it, even ones that hardware decoders have trouble with.
35w i3 and 45w i7 chips are a big step forward.
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45watts and this case make it 100% proper and clean:
http://www.amazon.com/Streacom... [amazon.com]
not a hack. proper install with more than enough heatsinking.
check it out!
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The Haswell chips idle at an incredibly low power level, but how long can you run that chip at 100% before it starts to throttle back? I appreciate a quiet system too, but I always make sure that it can run 100% indefinitely if need be.
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I've seen some benchmarks that put the Haswell Pentium G3xxx series processors (which are dual core chips) at about the same speed as the first Core 2 Quads. So basically Intel's budget processors are about equal to their top end 7 years ago, Considering that the current Pentium chips are more than adequate for most people, most people would also find that Core 2 system to be perfectly usable. Which is kind of amazing, as 15 years ago even the cheapest Coppermine Celeron was worlds faster than Intel's be
Note it's the notebook / laptop edition (Score:2)
The proper desktop one is delayed still. They have virtually no competition or incentive to release it and with people buying phones, tablets, slates, laptops far more than desktops now, the hardcore desktop community (what's left of it) is going to just have to sit and wait unfortunately.
Also it'll be, as per usual for Intel the past 4 years, about 5% faster than the old one :/ (at the same price though)
Poor AMD (Score:2)
Only a matter of time before these Atoms blow the lid off 8 core cpus sadly.
I would hate an Intel only world and I wonder how it survives. Haswel era I5s can easily outdo the 8 core as they are 50% slower per core making it an i3 competitor. Now another 22% boast would put this AMDs premier in Celeron territory.
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These latest CPUs do not appear to improve CPU performance at all. They talk about GPU improvements, reduced energy consumption, and improved video encoding. If they did not bother mentioning CPU performance then you can be assured that it is minimal if any.
What they do talk about is price [macrumors.com] - $426 for 1000 units of the i7-5557U. With prices like that there will be a market for AMD CPUs. But it is a shame that AMD is not faster. With Intel the only game in town CPU prices will skyrocket. Even now, In
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Eh they do have competition and it's bigger than AMD, it's ARMs and that is who Intel is competing and changed their business plan because of them otherwise Intel could care less about mobile
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Also if your parts max out at 80 watt rather than 160 if someone need more performance use two of them ..
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Sounds pretty compatible if you ask me. I wouldn't expect a virtualized ARM processor to load x86 code.
Get Haswell now get broadwell desktop now? (Score:1)
Get Haswell now get broadwell desktop now or wait for 2016 for sky lake?
Haswell-E sucks the $300 cpu now has less pci-e lanes then the last gen and you need to pay $200 more to get the lanes you used to get with a small MHZ boost.
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And that's such a problem because a GTX 970 uses about 10% of the 16x PCI-express 3 BW?
(Maybe it was 20%, I think 10%. I don't know how SLI work but 8x is likely still plenty.)
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It's the same with RAM.
Run a game on 4790K with DDR3 and it still will perform nicely.
Benchmark a octo-core with quad-channel 2133 and 3000 MHz DDR4 and it will show a difference in synthetic benchmarks but more or less nothing in real world usage.
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but.... (Score:2)
TSX fixed? (Score:2)
TSX was disabled in Broadwell and early Haswell chips due to a bug. Do these new Broadwell-U have the TSX fix?
I have an experimental workload for which TSX would be very helpful, due to a need for atomic reads and writes of unaligned 10-byte data items. As far as I can determine, x86 provides no other way to guarantee atomicity of an unaligned 10-byte read or write.
TSX fixed? (Score:1)
You could also try LOCK CMPXCHG16B. However, cacheline-crossing locked operations can be very slow
Better battery life, assuming... (Score:2)
Similarly, the company is arguing that it can boost battery life by 1.5 hours.
Assuming you are using the same battery.
I bought a lot of 30 laptops for my school w/ 3rd gen Core i3's. Laptops contained a 56Wh battery. Following year, I bought another lot of 30 hours with 4th gen Core i3's. Laptops contained a 47Wh battery. Give the Big 3 a CPU that extends battery life, they package it with a shorter-life battery and pocket the savings.