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