20 ms·

Intel Skylake Launch, with Architecture Analysis

102 points by MekaiGS 11y ago

skrause 11y ago
It seems that all Skylake CPUs suitable for new MacBook Pros won't ship until early 2016. I was hoping for a new MBP this fall, but it seems that my old MacBook Air has to do it's job a little longer.
- reitzensteinm 11y ago
  I'm really looking forward to a benchmark of the GT4 graphics; I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics. Of course, it'll still be a rare and power hungry configuration, so it's not like I'll suddenly be using a Macbook, but it's a nice progression.
  - lewisl9029 11y ago
    I'm still hoping for external GPUs to catch on. A decent CPU and adequate graphics is usually all I need in a laptop while traveling, but it would be nice to be able to plug in a more beefy GPU at home to play games and drive more monitors at higher resolutions.
    - reitzensteinm 11y ago
      Well, Thunderbolt 3 now explicitly supports them (previously Intel wouldn't certify for what appeared to be non-technical reasons), so it might actually catch on. I don't expect it to be cheap; but even if the chassis is a few hundred dollars, if you can reuse them for three generations of GPU and laptop, it's probably worth it. http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbolt-3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...
      - justincormack 11y ago
        So far they have largely been built into monitors (by Sony) which gives different obsolescence profile.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    according to some bench even the i5 6500 gpu is as good as my dedicated (but old) readeon hd 6670 - which would put it in the "good enough to run crysis 2 with some compromises" territory even this GPU would make for a great value proposition in a midrange macbook pro
  - bd 11y ago
    I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics. Please don't :). New iGPUs may be catching up to old dGPUs, but meanwhile new dGPUs are just skyrocketing in power far beyond them. I made this chart to easily see relative performance of most common notebook GPUs: http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png Or if you are interested in both desktop and notebook GPUs relative performances: http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/ http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/ What Intel does is great for rising minimal specs you can expect in notebook graphics, but you can do much better than that, even cheap modern dGPUs wipe out the best iGPUs. You can extrapolate Skylake Iris Pro from Intel marketing claims vs older Iris Pros, it's going to be better but not Earth-shatteringly better. And this gap is just going to get wider in 2016, with HBM2 and 16 nm node sizes finally coming to GPUs (both to Nvidia with Pascal and AMD with Arctic Islands).
    - wlesieutre 11y ago
      Even if you're developing a high-end crazy graphics game in UT4 on your desktop with SLIed GTX 980s, it's still useful to be able to work on it from a laptop at more than 2 FPS.
      - reitzensteinm 11y ago
        That's exactly my situation. Going to 720p requires half the fill rate of 1080p. Turn off some postprocessing and antialiasing and you might get double the performance again. So if you're at 1/4 peak performance, you're still running a smooth game albeit not quite at full detail. If you're at 1/16 peak performance... things aren't looking too good by the time you get your game smooth.
      - bd 11y ago
        And that was exactly my point :) In case it wasn't clear from the context, I was suggesting getting a notebook with a discrete GPU instead of integrated GPU (that's what iGPU/dGPU stand for, not a desktop GPU). If you are game developer / graphics programmer / game player / designer / photo or video editor / VR enthusiast / anybody who cares about graphics, I would advise to get at least GTX 960M (if you have budget or size constrains, this should get you roughly to PS4/Xbox One levels, so relatively safe for this gen), but preferably GTX 970M (best price/power and you can still get slim notebook). GTX 970M will get you about average GPU performance overall, including desktops (these days I get ~50-percentile rank in 3dmark firestrike with my GTX 970M notebook, so average GPU in September 2015 is at least as fast or faster, at least for that cohort of people).
  - Symmetry 11y ago
    On Linux Intel has been doing pretty well making high performance (meaning as good as Windows) open source drivers for their integrated graphics which makes the GT4 sort of appealing to me.
- p1esk 11y ago
  What do you expect from Skylake based MBP that can't be done with the current MBP?
  - jychang 11y ago
    Well, the current 15 inch MBP is running 2 years old Haswell processors, so it's simply a bad buy when Skylake MBPs are coming out in a few months. Additionally, Skylake brings DDR4 memory, Thunderbolt 3.0 (Thunderbolt over USB), and better performance/battery life. There's also possible wireless charging support, and the Skylake integrated GPU possibly has double the speed of the Haswell Iris chips.
  - skrause 11y ago
    - USB Type-C - The ability to run external 5K monitors. Since I usually keep a laptop for at least four years, it would be unwise for me to now buy a laptop that can't do both of those technologies which I really want to have.
    - p1esk 11y ago
      I have a Haswell MBP. I don't remember a time when I had to plug a USB device into it. The only device I can think of is a flash drive, but the last time I used one was more than 2 years ago. Which USB devices do you use with your laptop? Regarding 5k displays, currently I'm still not ready to buy even a 4k version, mostly because I'm waiting for higher frequencies (via G-Sync or FreeSync, both of which require a discrete card, and it's not at all clear if those will be supported in the next MBP). 5k monitors currently cost 4 times as much as 4k. Really hard to justify buying one anytime soon. If Apple does not release Skylake MBP in October, I would recommend buying the current one, rather than suffering the horrible resolution of MBA for another 6 months.
  - toyg 11y ago
    32gb of ram, 5k monitors, Thunderbolt/USB 3, etc etc etc...
nhaehnle 11y ago
The most interesting to me is that Intel apparently stopped publishing transistor counts starting with the 14nm node. This is significant because as structure sizes become smaller, the restrictions on possible layouts (so called DRCs, design rule constraints) become ever stricter. For example, you can't just place wires wherever you want; you have to take into account the relationship to other wires. With stricter rules, the end result may be that the effective scaling achieved is worse than what the structure size suggests, because the rules force a lower density of transitors. So what are Intel hiding? Are they far ahead of the competition in terms of DRCs and don't want others to know how much, or are they struggling (like apparently everybody else) and want to hide a less-than-ideal effective scaling? Obviously, your guess is as good as mine, but it's certainly fascinating to watch the competition as Moore's law is coming to an end.
- jychang 11y ago
  > Are they far ahead of the competition in terms of DRCs I'm sure other companies like AMD can figure out the transistor count without consulting the Intel press release. If Intel isn't publishing a figure like total transistor count, it's for marketing purposes. All indicators point to the fact that Intel is struggling at the 14mm process.
  - yoha 11y ago
    *14nm
- jonah 11y ago
  How has/hasn't CPU reliability changed over the decades? Are these generally as sturdy as a 486? A 286 machine was mentioned in a recent article here, will you be able to find a running Skylake machine in 2045? How does the process size affect this? What other factors?
  - hga 11y ago
    A 286 machine was mentioned in a recent article here, will you be able to find a running Skylake machine in 2045? I've been thinking about this lately, and between the jihad against lead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest) and these machines storing the BIOS etc. in flash memory, I'm beginning to doubt it.
chipaca 11y ago
Am I alone in wanting a small (NUC or (thin?) mITX) board with a Core M on it? :-(
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  I'm not sure if this would suit your use case, but there's a Skylake Core M compute stick coming out: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/intel-announces-a-beefed-up-core-m-compute-stick-with-skylake/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/intel-announces-a-bee...
- ju-st 11y ago
  No! I still want to try out a Core M with a beefy cooling solution. You could propably beat mobile i3/i5's with it while having a very low idle power consumption...
currysausage 11y ago
I wonder why there were so few laptops with iX-5... processors in the market. Most laptops with 5th generation Cores seem to have low-power U processors, but even these are hard to find with some manufacturers. Did the full-power versions arrive too late, so manufactuters just chose to wait for Skylake?
- jychang 11y ago
  Pretty much. Apple is a good example; the Macbook Pro 15 inch skipped over the 5xxx series, and the next update should be a Skylake chip.
tychuz 11y ago
Intel processors are great and really blow competition away (on desktops). But that's kind of annoying - when there's no competition, Intel holds on releasing high end CPUs (w/ 6 cores) on new architecture and their price is insane...
- muro 11y ago
  not sure what you mean by "desktops" - their chips are the fastest CPUs you can get for notebooks, workstations and for many (most?) servers.
  - josteink 11y ago
    > not sure what you mean by "desktops" I would assume he means "non-mobile". I.e. things not ARM.
  - tychuz 11y ago
    I meant that I have no clue and intereset in notebook situation and workstation is a desktop PC. Same for servers - I have no idea what sysadmins use, nor I care. Monitoring shows CPU percentage, it reaches 80% - we tell them to upgrade. :)
- mrb 11y ago
  Hardware review sites are very good at distracting us and making us think that absolute performance is all that matters (hence your comment about "blowing competition away"). And, yes, Intel has the fastest processors. But what matters to most people is performance per dollar. And in fact AMD often beats Intel at this game, especially in the consumer market (sub-$300 range). Example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3). [1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv
glasz 11y ago
i'm pretty pissed. skylake-h chips will only have hd 530 graphics which is slower than the current version. and still no hdmi 2.0. just laughable.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  HDMI 2.0 support is supplied by the motherboard, and not a required feature. Skylake's Alpine Ridge can drive two 4k 60hz displays, and supports HDMI 2.0 operation.
  - bryanlarsen 11y ago
    Alpine Ridge is an extra cost option that won't be included in the vast majority of laptops.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Then don't buy the "vast majority of laptops" but on that includes it.
uxcn 11y ago
I'm honestly still trying to figure out the implications of eDRAM. It seems like the main benefit is offloading traffic from the memory bus, particularly now that it's coherent. Am I missing something?
- eloff 11y ago
  It's to increase the effective memory bandwidth of the system. GPUs have very high memory bandwidth requirements, so the models with the high end GPU would be limited by the memory subsystem. Using the extra cache the amount of fetches from memory can be reduced, increasing the amount of memory bandwidth available.
  - uxcn 11y ago
    That makes sense. Using it as a victim cache seemed kind of odd, but I think it makes more sense now. It seems like it's a still evolving technology. I wonder if there are corresponding performance counters.
TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
Call me crazy, but I want a processor that's just that - a processor. No integrated GPU that's just sitting there taking chip resources (die space, power leakage, etc) that could be used for better things (designing things for lower leakage current, async sections of the chip, etc). Among other things, discrete GPUs blow integrated GPUs out of the water, and the time-to-obsolescence of a GPU isn't anywhere near that of a CPU. It also makes sense from a cooling perspective - it's a whole lot easier to cool two chips in separate areas than one larger chip, generally speaking.
- zaphoyd 11y ago
  Intel has the Xeon/E/EX/EP lines for you.
  - mscrivo 11y ago
    .. and HEDT (ie. Haswell-E 6/8-core CPU's). Only problem is that the latest HEDT platform is always at least 1 generation behind what mainstream gets.
    - jfb 11y ago
      What you surrender in process node, you get back (in spades) in increased core count, PCIe lanes, and cache size.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    At an absurd price compared to their desktop lines. And also generally they come out a while after the equivalents with integrated graphics.
    - Sanddancer 11y ago
      This generation is different, but the past 4 generations, the Xeon E3s have launched pretty much simultaneously with their i5/i7 siblings, with the 12x0 versions not having integrated graphics, and usually for a bit less than their equivalent with integrated graphics. You give up on overclockability, but if you're concerned about tdp, you're probably not going to be overclocking anyways.
throwaway7767 11y ago
I've seen a lot of references to skylake "supporting wireless charging" but with no explanation on what that means. I read this article hoping for an answer but it was not mentioned. Can someone enlighten me? What does the chipset and CPU have to do with the power supply method? I'm assuming they're not including an RF power antenna on-die, so is this just code for "we got peak power consumption below the threshold practical with today's wireless power transmission devices"?
- wmf 11y ago
  Intel doesn't market chips; they market "platforms" that are bundles of chips that they want you to buy together. Centrino was the most infamous one and maybe now Intel is trying to bundle some wireless charging chips for tablets or something.
MichaelGG 11y ago
Intel SGX is possibly huge. With a trusted enclave that's verifiable, you could do things like verify that a server is actually running certain code (like a bitcoin mixer). Of course it also allows real DRM, where a remote server can verify you're running unmodified code. But how does the key management work? My personal interest is the continuing quest for a machine strong enough to develop, but not warm my hands at all. Macbooks are insanely hot (how can Apple even pretend to be about quality with those designs??), X250 ThinkPads is "alright" if I aggressively throttle the processor. Seems like the perf improvements are effectively dead so maybe we'll see cool laptops. Though OEMs seem to screw up as much as possible so who knows...
- zmanian 11y ago
  Is there any information about what processors support SGX?
- userbinator 11y ago
  Of course it also allows real DRM I think thats's the scariest part. 16 years ago people strongly oppposed the processor serial number in the P3( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870 ), something that seems almost harmless compared to what (anti-user) "security" features are in today's hardware. It's not only DRM, but no doubt other ways of taking control away from the user will be found for it. With performance not being all that much better, I'm personally going to stay on older, "more free" hardware for a while.
  - anonymousDan 11y ago
    I would think the real target market is cloud computing though.
tkinom 11y ago
"4.5W ultra-mobile Core M" - does it means if someone uses it with a typical 2250 mAh cell phone battery, it only last half hour? That's a long way to catch up with ARM SOC, right?
- nyc640 11y ago
  That's the TDP of the chip, or the maximum amount of heat it can generate, not necessarily the power draw. Also, you were assuming it was running at full load 100% of the time. I don't have a source, but for comparison I believe Apple's AX chips have a TDP of ~2-3 W.
- sliken 11y ago
  Sounds somewhat higher than an arm. But take any phone and run it under a worst case load. Say a 3d game that supports multiplayer and GPS. When you run display, CPU, GPU, GPS and WAN flat out many phones don't last very long.

102 points by MekaiGS 11y ago

It seems that all Skylake CPUs suitable for new MacBook Pros won't ship until early 2016. I was hoping for a new MBP this fall, but it seems that my old MacBook Air has to do it's job a little longer.

reitzensteinm 11y ago
I'm really looking forward to a benchmark of the GT4 graphics; I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics. Of course, it'll still be a rare and power hungry configuration, so it's not like I'll suddenly be using a Macbook, but it's a nice progression.
- lewisl9029 11y ago
  I'm still hoping for external GPUs to catch on. A decent CPU and adequate graphics is usually all I need in a laptop while traveling, but it would be nice to be able to plug in a more beefy GPU at home to play games and drive more monitors at higher resolutions.
  - reitzensteinm 11y ago
    Well, Thunderbolt 3 now explicitly supports them (previously Intel wouldn't certify for what appeared to be non-technical reasons), so it might actually catch on. I don't expect it to be cheap; but even if the chassis is a few hundred dollars, if you can reuse them for three generations of GPU and laptop, it's probably worth it. http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9331/TB19_575px.png http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbolt-3 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbo...
    - justincormack 11y ago
      So far they have largely been built into monitors (by Sony) which gives different obsolescence profile.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  according to some bench even the i5 6500 gpu is as good as my dedicated (but old) readeon hd 6670 - which would put it in the "good enough to run crysis 2 with some compromises" territory even this GPU would make for a great value proposition in a midrange macbook pro
- bd 11y ago
  I'm a game developer, and it might just be the first time I can work on a laptop with integrated graphics. Please don't :). New iGPUs may be catching up to old dGPUs, but meanwhile new dGPUs are just skyrocketing in power far beyond them. I made this chart to easily see relative performance of most common notebook GPUs: http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png http://alteredqualia.com/texts/notebooks/nvidia-gpus.png Or if you are interested in both desktop and notebook GPUs relative performances: http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/ http://alteredqualia.com/tools/gpus/ What Intel does is great for rising minimal specs you can expect in notebook graphics, but you can do much better than that, even cheap modern dGPUs wipe out the best iGPUs. You can extrapolate Skylake Iris Pro from Intel marketing claims vs older Iris Pros, it's going to be better but not Earth-shatteringly better. And this gap is just going to get wider in 2016, with HBM2 and 16 nm node sizes finally coming to GPUs (both to Nvidia with Pascal and AMD with Arctic Islands).
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Even if you're developing a high-end crazy graphics game in UT4 on your desktop with SLIed GTX 980s, it's still useful to be able to work on it from a laptop at more than 2 FPS.
    - reitzensteinm 11y ago
      That's exactly my situation. Going to 720p requires half the fill rate of 1080p. Turn off some postprocessing and antialiasing and you might get double the performance again. So if you're at 1/4 peak performance, you're still running a smooth game albeit not quite at full detail. If you're at 1/16 peak performance... things aren't looking too good by the time you get your game smooth.
    - bd 11y ago
      And that was exactly my point :) In case it wasn't clear from the context, I was suggesting getting a notebook with a discrete GPU instead of integrated GPU (that's what iGPU/dGPU stand for, not a desktop GPU). If you are game developer / graphics programmer / game player / designer / photo or video editor / VR enthusiast / anybody who cares about graphics, I would advise to get at least GTX 960M (if you have budget or size constrains, this should get you roughly to PS4/Xbox One levels, so relatively safe for this gen), but preferably GTX 970M (best price/power and you can still get slim notebook). GTX 970M will get you about average GPU performance overall, including desktops (these days I get ~50-percentile rank in 3dmark firestrike with my GTX 970M notebook, so average GPU in September 2015 is at least as fast or faster, at least for that cohort of people).
- Symmetry 11y ago
  On Linux Intel has been doing pretty well making high performance (meaning as good as Windows) open source drivers for their integrated graphics which makes the GT4 sort of appealing to me.
p1esk 11y ago
What do you expect from Skylake based MBP that can't be done with the current MBP?
- jychang 11y ago
  Well, the current 15 inch MBP is running 2 years old Haswell processors, so it's simply a bad buy when Skylake MBPs are coming out in a few months. Additionally, Skylake brings DDR4 memory, Thunderbolt 3.0 (Thunderbolt over USB), and better performance/battery life. There's also possible wireless charging support, and the Skylake integrated GPU possibly has double the speed of the Haswell Iris chips.
- skrause 11y ago
  - USB Type-C - The ability to run external 5K monitors. Since I usually keep a laptop for at least four years, it would be unwise for me to now buy a laptop that can't do both of those technologies which I really want to have.
  - p1esk 11y ago
    I have a Haswell MBP. I don't remember a time when I had to plug a USB device into it. The only device I can think of is a flash drive, but the last time I used one was more than 2 years ago. Which USB devices do you use with your laptop? Regarding 5k displays, currently I'm still not ready to buy even a 4k version, mostly because I'm waiting for higher frequencies (via G-Sync or FreeSync, both of which require a discrete card, and it's not at all clear if those will be supported in the next MBP). 5k monitors currently cost 4 times as much as 4k. Really hard to justify buying one anytime soon. If Apple does not release Skylake MBP in October, I would recommend buying the current one, rather than suffering the horrible resolution of MBA for another 6 months.
- toyg 11y ago
  32gb of ram, 5k monitors, Thunderbolt/USB 3, etc etc etc...

nhaehnle 11y ago

The most interesting to me is that Intel apparently stopped publishing transistor counts starting with the 14nm node. This is significant because as structure sizes become smaller, the restrictions on possible layouts (so called DRCs, design rule constraints) become ever stricter. For example, you can't just place wires wherever you want; you have to take into account the relationship to other wires. With stricter rules, the end result may be that the effective scaling achieved is worse than what the structure size suggests, because the rules force a lower density of transitors. So what are Intel hiding? Are they far ahead of the competition in terms of DRCs and don't want others to know how much, or are they struggling (like apparently everybody else) and want to hide a less-than-ideal effective scaling? Obviously, your guess is as good as mine, but it's certainly fascinating to watch the competition as Moore's law is coming to an end.

jychang 11y ago
> Are they far ahead of the competition in terms of DRCs I'm sure other companies like AMD can figure out the transistor count without consulting the Intel press release. If Intel isn't publishing a figure like total transistor count, it's for marketing purposes. All indicators point to the fact that Intel is struggling at the 14mm process.
- yoha 11y ago
  *14nm
jonah 11y ago
How has/hasn't CPU reliability changed over the decades? Are these generally as sturdy as a 486? A 286 machine was mentioned in a recent article here, will you be able to find a running Skylake machine in 2045? How does the process size affect this? What other factors?
- hga 11y ago
  A 286 machine was mentioned in a recent article here, will you be able to find a running Skylake machine in 2045? I've been thinking about this lately, and between the jihad against lead (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_pest) and these machines storing the BIOS etc. in flash memory, I'm beginning to doubt it.

chipaca 11y ago

Am I alone in wanting a small (NUC or (thin?) mITX) board with a Core M on it? :-(

lewisl9029 11y ago
I'm not sure if this would suit your use case, but there's a Skylake Core M compute stick coming out: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/intel-announces-a-beefed-up-core-m-compute-stick-with-skylake/ http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/intel-announces-a-bee...
ju-st 11y ago
No! I still want to try out a Core M with a beefy cooling solution. You could propably beat mobile i3/i5's with it while having a very low idle power consumption...

currysausage 11y ago

I wonder why there were so few laptops with iX-5... processors in the market. Most laptops with 5th generation Cores seem to have low-power U processors, but even these are hard to find with some manufacturers. Did the full-power versions arrive too late, so manufactuters just chose to wait for Skylake?

jychang 11y ago
Pretty much. Apple is a good example; the Macbook Pro 15 inch skipped over the 5xxx series, and the next update should be a Skylake chip.

tychuz 11y ago

Intel processors are great and really blow competition away (on desktops). But that's kind of annoying - when there's no competition, Intel holds on releasing high end CPUs (w/ 6 cores) on new architecture and their price is insane...

muro 11y ago
not sure what you mean by "desktops" - their chips are the fastest CPUs you can get for notebooks, workstations and for many (most?) servers.
- josteink 11y ago
  > not sure what you mean by "desktops" I would assume he means "non-mobile". I.e. things not ARM.
- tychuz 11y ago
  I meant that I have no clue and intereset in notebook situation and workstation is a desktop PC. Same for servers - I have no idea what sysadmins use, nor I care. Monitoring shows CPU percentage, it reaches 80% - we tell them to upgrade. :)
mrb 11y ago
Hardware review sites are very good at distracting us and making us think that absolute performance is all that matters (hence your comment about "blowing competition away"). And, yes, Intel has the fastest processors. But what matters to most people is performance per dollar. And in fact AMD often beats Intel at this game, especially in the consumer market (sub-$300 range). Example: I recently built a Linux video transcoding machine to reencode H.264 BluRay movies to smaller H.264 files [1]. A $110 AMD FX-8300 is able to reencode an average BluRay movie around 47-50 fps, while you would need to spend more than twice that amount of money to match this performance with Intel (the performance of the FX-8300 at this tasks falls between a $200 Intel i5-4590 and a $250 Xeon E3-1231 v3). [1] Using: avconv -i input.mkv -threads auto -s hd720 -c:v libx264 -c:a libmp3lame -sn -b:v 1400k -b:a 128k -ac 2 output.mkv

glasz 11y ago

i'm pretty pissed. skylake-h chips will only have hd 530 graphics which is slower than the current version. and still no hdmi 2.0. just laughable.

DiabloD3 11y ago
HDMI 2.0 support is supplied by the motherboard, and not a required feature. Skylake's Alpine Ridge can drive two 4k 60hz displays, and supports HDMI 2.0 operation.
- bryanlarsen 11y ago
  Alpine Ridge is an extra cost option that won't be included in the vast majority of laptops.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Then don't buy the "vast majority of laptops" but on that includes it.

uxcn 11y ago

I'm honestly still trying to figure out the implications of eDRAM. It seems like the main benefit is offloading traffic from the memory bus, particularly now that it's coherent. Am I missing something?

eloff 11y ago
It's to increase the effective memory bandwidth of the system. GPUs have very high memory bandwidth requirements, so the models with the high end GPU would be limited by the memory subsystem. Using the extra cache the amount of fetches from memory can be reduced, increasing the amount of memory bandwidth available.
- uxcn 11y ago
  That makes sense. Using it as a victim cache seemed kind of odd, but I think it makes more sense now. It seems like it's a still evolving technology. I wonder if there are corresponding performance counters.

TheLoneWolfling 11y ago

Call me crazy, but I want a processor that's just that - a processor. No integrated GPU that's just sitting there taking chip resources (die space, power leakage, etc) that could be used for better things (designing things for lower leakage current, async sections of the chip, etc). Among other things, discrete GPUs blow integrated GPUs out of the water, and the time-to-obsolescence of a GPU isn't anywhere near that of a CPU. It also makes sense from a cooling perspective - it's a whole lot easier to cool two chips in separate areas than one larger chip, generally speaking.

zaphoyd 11y ago
Intel has the Xeon/E/EX/EP lines for you.
- mscrivo 11y ago
  .. and HEDT (ie. Haswell-E 6/8-core CPU's). Only problem is that the latest HEDT platform is always at least 1 generation behind what mainstream gets.
  - jfb 11y ago
    What you surrender in process node, you get back (in spades) in increased core count, PCIe lanes, and cache size.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  At an absurd price compared to their desktop lines. And also generally they come out a while after the equivalents with integrated graphics.
  - Sanddancer 11y ago
    This generation is different, but the past 4 generations, the Xeon E3s have launched pretty much simultaneously with their i5/i7 siblings, with the 12x0 versions not having integrated graphics, and usually for a bit less than their equivalent with integrated graphics. You give up on overclockability, but if you're concerned about tdp, you're probably not going to be overclocking anyways.

throwaway7767 11y ago

I've seen a lot of references to skylake "supporting wireless charging" but with no explanation on what that means. I read this article hoping for an answer but it was not mentioned. Can someone enlighten me? What does the chipset and CPU have to do with the power supply method? I'm assuming they're not including an RF power antenna on-die, so is this just code for "we got peak power consumption below the threshold practical with today's wireless power transmission devices"?

wmf 11y ago
Intel doesn't market chips; they market "platforms" that are bundles of chips that they want you to buy together. Centrino was the most infamous one and maybe now Intel is trying to bundle some wireless charging chips for tablets or something.

MichaelGG 11y ago

Intel SGX is possibly huge. With a trusted enclave that's verifiable, you could do things like verify that a server is actually running certain code (like a bitcoin mixer). Of course it also allows real DRM, where a remote server can verify you're running unmodified code. But how does the key management work? My personal interest is the continuing quest for a machine strong enough to develop, but not warm my hands at all. Macbooks are insanely hot (how can Apple even pretend to be about quality with those designs??), X250 ThinkPads is "alright" if I aggressively throttle the processor. Seems like the perf improvements are effectively dead so maybe we'll see cool laptops. Though OEMs seem to screw up as much as possible so who knows...

zmanian 11y ago
Is there any information about what processors support SGX?
userbinator 11y ago
Of course it also allows real DRM I think thats's the scariest part. 16 years ago people strongly oppposed the processor serial number in the P3( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10106870 ), something that seems almost harmless compared to what (anti-user) "security" features are in today's hardware. It's not only DRM, but no doubt other ways of taking control away from the user will be found for it. With performance not being all that much better, I'm personally going to stay on older, "more free" hardware for a while.
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  I would think the real target market is cloud computing though.

tkinom 11y ago

"4.5W ultra-mobile Core M" - does it means if someone uses it with a typical 2250 mAh cell phone battery, it only last half hour? That's a long way to catch up with ARM SOC, right?

nyc640 11y ago
That's the TDP of the chip, or the maximum amount of heat it can generate, not necessarily the power draw. Also, you were assuming it was running at full load 100% of the time. I don't have a source, but for comparison I believe Apple's AX chips have a TDP of ~2-3 W.
sliken 11y ago
Sounds somewhat higher than an arm. But take any phone and run it under a worst case load. Say a 3d game that supports multiplayer and GPS. When you run display, CPU, GPU, GPS and WAN flat out many phones don't last very long.