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Intel Hardware

Intel Unveils 5th Gen Core Series Broadwell-U CPUs and Cherry Trail Atom 78

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
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.
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Intel Unveils 5th Gen Core Series Broadwell-U CPUs and Cherry Trail Atom More

Intel Unveils 5th Gen Core Series Broadwell-U CPUs and Cherry Trail Atom

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  • Will Apple update the Macbook Air and the Mac mini with these new CPUs?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slaker ( 53818 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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)

          by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Monday January 05, 2015 @07:40PM (#48741843)

          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.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DrXym ( 126579 )
        Intel's NUCs are too damned expensive.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Will Apple update the Macbook Air and the Mac mini with these new CPUs?

      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

      • The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line .... 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.

        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.

        And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old

        There's a bit of a GPU advantage. It was enough that when when I upgraded my 2009-era Mini-based

      • 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

    • Likely but not certain. It would be consistent with their previous upgrades to those lines. There have been rumors that Apple is considering a shift to ARM for their Mac line; if they go that way they won't be buying future Intel processors.

  • 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)

  • 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.

    • 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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by nhat11 ( 1608159 )

        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

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          Also if your parts max out at 80 watt rather than 160 if someone need more performance use two of them ..

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      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.)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      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.

  • But the real question is, are they going to be underclocked, slow, pathetic pieces of garbage like the first gen mobile Haswells? Plus, some I come across from the 3rd or 4th gen are soldered to the board! If you think I'm exaggerating, the most commonly used 3rd gen celeron mobile CPU had a passmark rating of around 1900-2000. The most common N-series celeron mobile Haswell CPUs is rated barely 1000. That's half the speed.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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