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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.
The only thing I want to know is:
Will the 28W parts be able to drive a 5K display when used with Alpine Ridge (Thunderbolt 3)?
That is: would a 13 inch Macbook Pro with Skylake be able to drive a Retina Thunderbolt Display?
Supposedly Thunderbolt 3 does support 5K resolution, and the Intel Iris 550 SKU will have 64MB of eDRAM.
I suppose we won't really know until next year.
The right to protest the State is more sacred than the State.
The number of distinct microprocessor SKUs on the market doubles every 18 months.
so what you're saying is that intel loses in every other metric except being faster? ok I might be able to see why people are sticking with x86 besides program compatibility.
besides, I certainly hope that you're not trying to suggest that octacore arm is faster than an intel octacore when all cores are running calculation...
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.
I got a quad core 2.7ghz phone(and it's not a cheap phone! I could buy a decent laptop for the price) and my aging intel 2.5ghz laptop still beats it night and day, on a common web bench the slower by mhz intel being 2-8 times better than the arm chip..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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.
What is getting sad is this pointless x86 vs ARM discussion. It's like to discuss bike vs car. Both ARM and x86 have they own technological/economical strengths and weakness'es. We can't state some sort of absolute 'winner' here. ARM as architecture always had and probably always will have better power efficiency than x86. It's just inherited from primary ARM design points to be low-power embedded system processor first, no matter whether it'a LTE router or a smartphone. And it does it's job quite well. We should also mention the fact than most ARM cores comes as SoC's, so nearly every required peripheral is implemented in a single chip, while x86 more or less are still microprocessors only. Another important aspect is what partical ARM core do you have in mind? There are ARM reference cores (Cortex family), there are custom implemented ARM cores (like Apple, Qualcomm chips have), there (probably) will be some kind of custom/high-performance ARM implementations like ones coming (hopefully) in AMD K12. Yes, as for raw performance ARM may not be such microarchitectures as Skylake, but can easily outperform atom-based x86's. I personally believe that ARM (and ARM based SoC's) have enough performance to be employed in smartphone/tablet/ultrabook segments. However, it may not be ideal choice for full-blown desktop/workstation but it was not designed to be!
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
'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.
x86 is no longer a microarchitecture. It's just an ISA. It's a total abstraction, and in mid-range to high-end processors, its translation overhead (logic and latency) is minimal. Only in the lowest-end devices (Atom) is it any kind of burden, and ARM dominates in that space.
Yes, CISC is computersciencely evil, not orthogonal, crufty, and whatever else you want to call it. But these days, x86 is just an intermediate language between the compiler and the REAL execution engine.
Well, when most users can't tell the difference between any of your products (because there barely is any) and they aren't even worth the hassle of a motherboard upgrade from previous products (much less the cost of the hardware) creating new large confusing model numbers is one way to give the illusion of a purpose I suppose.