Intel Launches Onslaught of Skylake CPUs For Laptops, Hybrids and Compute Stick

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.

Comments

It's no ARMv8

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:It's no ARMv8

[arglebargle_xiv]

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.

Re:It's no ARMv8

[Anonymous Coward]

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 screen it has to power (biggest power draw). Now compare the power consumption at idle and running.

My 2y old haswell laptop runs idle with screen on medium brightness at 3.1w. My phone which is a z3c with a 720p 4.6in screen runs right this moment at 3.3w with screen on, low brightness. armv7 that's supposedly using less power than the qcom armv8 incarnations.

Here's where the phone wins: its using a few hundred of milliwatts when idle screen off. the laptop's equivalent is sleep-mode which no one sees as the same as phone screen off as desktop apps arent able to cope with being disconnected, and it takes a little longer to wake up the pc vs the phone.

As far as load, the laptop goes around 10 watts in browsing vs 5w for the phone, and the laptop can peak at 20w if needed (its many times faster than at this power output).

Now again why would I want a laptop with a slow-ass armv8 that consumes as much or more and isnt compatible with anything my pc runs?

x86 not the x86 from 10 years ago. it works very similarly to arm (or in fact, arm works very similarly) except with more compatibility layers.
Laptop

Re:It's no ARMv8

[Anonymous Coward]

'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 screen, the ram, etc. but mainly, the OS. both arm and intel CPUs are very integrated nowadays and can fully turn off (ie use 0 power) for various components, very fast.
On a phone, when screen is off, almost everything is powered off except for the RAM. apps data access is queued. apps wake lock (opportunity to wake up he cpu to run stuff) are queued. This is considered "idle".

On a laptop, when considered idle, screen is on and everything is running. No wake lock for apps, its always on. No queueing.

Yet under these conditions intel cpus consume a tiny fraction more than arms. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that under the same conditions the arm cpu will use as much or more power, or be slower. Worse! armv8 CPUs ain't even all that cheap.

Thus as it stands, arm makes no sense for the workstation, laptop, server racks market.