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

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.

Comments

Meh

[rrohbeck]

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

Re:Meh

[dshk]

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.

Re:Meh

[ranton]

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

The Intel of 2015 still has a very solid competitor eating into its profits: the Intel of 2010-13. I am typing this on a 2600K I bought in 2011, and I have no intention of upgrading any time soon. I have went from 8 GB of RAM to 16 GB, from a 128 GB SSD to a 480 GB SSD, and I upgraded my monitor setup. But my desktop processor is still more than twice as fast as my 4300U work laptop, which I never worry about being slow. I wouldn't be that surprised if this processor lasts me until 2020, unless it stops working before then.

Re:Meh

[Solandri]

It's got nothing to do with AMD. Processor performance hit a brick wall in the early 2000s. Prior to then, most performance gains came from ramping up the clock speed.

1985 - 2 MHz
1990 - 33 MHz
1995 - 300 MHz
2000 - 1.2 GHz
2005 - 3.5 GHz
2010 - 3.7 GHz
2015 - 4.0 GHz

At about 3-4 GHz,we reached a point where power leakage made higher frequencies completely impractical. AMD used a more power-thrifty architecture at that time which allowed them to briefly take the CPU lead from Intel, who was completely committed to ramping up clock speed with Prescott. Intel had to abandon netburst and later Intel CPUs were based on the mobile Pentium M, which eschewed high clock speeds to instead concentrate on lower power consumption (it was designed for laptops).

Ever since then, both Intel and AMD have kept clock speed about the same, and focused instead on redesigning CPUs for more efficient parallel processing, increasing the number of cores, and reducing power consumption. Unless there's some earthshattering technological breakthrough, the days of CPU performance increasing 10x every 5 years are over. 5%-10% a year (about 1.5x increase every 5 years, which is about the performance delta between Sandy Bridge and Skylake) is the new norm. Get used to it.

Most of the CPU improvements are instead going into reducing power consumption (Skylake uses about 1/3 to 1/4 the power of Sandy Bridge). My phone is more powerful than the computer I was using in 2000 and lasts 36+ hours on a single charge of a battery smaller than a Kit Kat bar. That is mind-boggling if you think about it.

Re: Well....

[mattcoz]

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

I want to see 11.

[Type44Q]

the new Skylake-U mobile chip is about 5 â" 10 faster than Intel's previous generation Broadwell platform in CPU-intensive tasks...

Yeah, well, I'll be impressed when it goes to 11.

Waiting for secure version without Intel vPro/AMT

[ad454]

For some reason I get very nervous with an out of band remote proprietary management system baked into recent Intel chips, which operates below the OS, and has not been independently audited and reviewed by trusted 3rd parties (such as those not associated with mass surveillance).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Note that AMT is also in all Intel chips with vPro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

This posting from the FSF (Free Software Foundation) has a decent writeup about it:
https://fsf.org/blogs/communit...

It seems that we are now in the age of hardware backdoors.

Maybe AMD which cannot seem to compete with Intel on performance and low-power, can make a niche for itself as a secure (backdoorless) alternative.

These days, I would value my privacy over performance.

Re:Waiting for secure version without Intel vPro/A

[ad454]

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.

percent

[markdavis]

>"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"

That is 5 to 10 *PERCENT* faster. Not a huge whoop. Of course, any improvement is an improvement. (At first I was reading it as "5 to 10 times faster")