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Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics (hothardware.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the running-the-numbers dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel's 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now for desktops. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel's most potent incarnation of the new architecture that has been power-optimized on 14nm technology with a beefier graphics engine for notebooks. In late Q3, Intel started rolling out Skylake-U versions of the chip in a 15 Watt TDP flavor. This is the power envelope that most "ultrabooks" are built with and it's likely to be Intel's highest volume SKU of the processor. The Lenovo Yoga 900 tested here was configured with an Intel Core i7-6500U dual-core processor that also supports Intel HyperThreading for 4 logical processing threads available. Its base frequency is 2.5GHz, but the chip will Turbo Boost to 3GHz and down clocks way down to 500MHz when idle. The chip also has 4MB of shared L3 cache and 512K of L2 and 128K of data cache, total. In the benchmarks, the new Skylake-U mobile chip is about 5 — 10 faster than Intel's previous generation Broadwell platform in CPU-intensive tasks and 20+ percent faster in graphics and gaming, at the same power envelope, likely with better battery life, depending on the device.

4 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Meh by rrohbeck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Less than 10% is a "solid improvement" these days?

    --
    thegodmovie.com - watch it
    1. Re:Meh by dshk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Less than 10% is a "solid improvement" these days?

      Sadly, yes. Since AMD does not put any pressure on Intel on the CPU front, 5-10% CPU performance increase per year become the norm.

  2. Re: Well.... by mattcoz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does it matter when you're comparing Intel to Intel?

  3. Re:Waiting for secure version without Intel vPro/A by ad454 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes processors run microcode.

    But that is no reason to connect it to an antenna which allows a pc which is turned off to still be able to run wireless remote management commands.

    In security one of the most critical consideration is to reduce the attack surface.

    Intel vPro/AMT has such a large attack surface, that if we can assume there are no deliberate back doors, it is a safe bet that having it still introduces a wide range of new attack methods against us.

    And for what? Just to help make corporate IT's job a bit easier? And remember those extra gates to support it does increase the chip's die size, power consumption, and cost.

    Why not have AMT/vPro only in corporate PC's on request, and not have it in anything else.