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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.
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.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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 competent mac users out there.
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...
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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 same. Apple in the end chose one socket and had to fit all the options using that socket - Intel chose to make their quad-core i7 a different socket and the Mac Mini's production run doesn't justify having multiple motherboards).
Macbook Air though was presumably waiting for Broadwell to come out, so quite possibly. The portables still do sell well enough that Apple puts a minimal amount of money in them.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
It wasn't supposed to be the scripted, interpreted, bloated hellhole that it is now either.
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.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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 audio dongle no longer works (stutters in both linux and win7 so its not a driver or dongle issue but something intel did really wrong on their usb system).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
It is ARM compatible. I was programming for an Android device in C for a week or so before even realizing it was an Intel device, not an ARM device, and even then only noticed because I was calling dlopen() and it didn't work importing an Intel DLL into an ARM executable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
Sounds pretty compatible if you ask me. I wouldn't expect a virtualized ARM processor to load x86 code.
Intel's NUCs are too damned expensive.
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.
Yes, to days users don't need speed, low energy consumption and miniaturization it is a most important goal.
World it's a game, so let's Play
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 able to run a simple browser without issues? And more often than not, it's the websites themselves that are slowing everything down - Slashdot is fine, but loading multimedia-heavy pages actually puts a noticeable load on a modern laptop CPU, which is quite different from a few years ago.
It is not 'a simple browser' when loaded with extensions. Without extensions, the performance of chrome and firefox are fine. My argument holds, and the issues is not the browser. The biggest issue I see is webpage bloat. 2-3 tabs can easily take over 1GB RAM, but RAM is cheap and easily upgradable in most cases.
Silence is a state of mime.
Other than ABP, NoSquint and PushBullet, I don't really have anything of note installed right now, and it's still slow as balls. :(
Laptops are where I've noticed the biggest gaps between generations lately. Comparing a first gen i7 laptop to a third gen shows huge boosts in processor performance. On the desktop? I see no reason to replace my third gen i5 (if my motherboard hadn't died I'd be using an i7 920 right now too).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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 DVR last month I went with the new Mini rather than a near-equivalent Macmini 6,2.
45watts and this case make it 100% proper and clean:
http://www.amazon.com/Streacom...
not a hack. proper install with more than enough heatsinking.
check it out!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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 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 motherboard for all the models, rather than needing multiple versions for different parts of the product line.
The Mac Pro is a different beast that has a different reason for existing. Apple probably isn't making any money on the Pro; doing all that custom engineering and manufacturing for a low volume product pretty much guarantees that. But it's a product that needs to exist to keep high end creative professionals in the fold; if no such product existed those people would start to defect to Windows or Linux. Having those people in the Mac ecosystem helps Apple sell their higher volume iMac and Macbook lines.
The Macbook Air is a key part of Apple's product line. It will certainly get an upgrade unless Apple decides to shift to ARM.
A big part of the problem is that web pages keep getting more and more Javascript code. Just having Facebook open is a huge CPU drain these days.
As photographic image improvement algorithms become more advanced, some will make their way to consumer-level software. Motion-blurred photos are very compute-expensive to correct; expect several minutes per image with a 3 GHz processor. More than a few seconds to view a sharp image is not going to make most people happy.
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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.
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 best in 1993.
You could also try LOCK CMPXCHG16B. However, cacheline-crossing locked operations can be very slow
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.