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It's a U-series CULV CPU. Intel's mainstream chip series have actually been going down in performance, as Intel tries to "recuperate" large gains in power consu

It's a U-series CULV CPU. Intel's mainstream chip series have actually been going down in performance, as Intel tries to "recuperate" large gains in power consumption levels against ARM in big gulps with each generation (it can't do that just from new nodes and IPC optimizations, so it also lowers default clock speeds). Now Intel is pushing even lower-performance chips than the U-series (the Y-series/Core M) for the mainstream, and as we've seen even Apple is going for that in the new Macbook Air. I wonder if they won't be pushing a 500 MHz (base speed) 3W TDP "Z-series" in a couple of years for most mainstream notebooks (while still charging ~$150-$200 per chip).

rsynnott 12y ago
The Macbook Air still uses an i5 (or i7 in the expensive model), though it's now a Broadwell one. The new ultra-thin Macbook uses a Core M, but is not an Air.
leoedin 12y ago
This trend is incredibly frustrating. I've been looking for a new laptop to replace a ~3 year old ultrabook and I'm actually finding that anything in a similar or smaller form factor actually has worse performance than my current laptop. It's hard to convince yourself to spend $1000 on something which brings no tangible improvement over what you already have (if my current laptop wasn't physically wearing out I'd almost certainly not replace it).
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  Well, the benefit here would be battery life considering the chipset uses less power. Not too long about we were buying ~5-6lbs Dells and HPs that maybe got 90 minutes of heavy use or 120 minutes of light use. Now multi-hour life is the norm on a form factor that weighs almost half that. Performance, depending on your needs, is probably not CPU bound. My biggest performance upgrade was installing SSDs into all my equipment. Turns out I've been disk-bound this entire time. The CPU just sits there waiting for disk data. Even with super-fast SSDs most people aren't CPU bound. Now they're network bound (why isn't this webpage loading fast enough?).

rsynnott 12y ago

The Macbook Air still uses an i5 (or i7 in the expensive model), though it's now a Broadwell one. The new ultra-thin Macbook uses a Core M, but is not an Air.

leoedin 12y ago

This trend is incredibly frustrating. I've been looking for a new laptop to replace a ~3 year old ultrabook and I'm actually finding that anything in a similar or smaller form factor actually has worse performance than my current laptop. It's hard to convince yourself to spend $1000 on something which brings no tangible improvement over what you already have (if my current laptop wasn't physically wearing out I'd almost certainly not replace it).

drzaiusapelord 12y ago
Well, the benefit here would be battery life considering the chipset uses less power. Not too long about we were buying ~5-6lbs Dells and HPs that maybe got 90 minutes of heavy use or 120 minutes of light use. Now multi-hour life is the norm on a form factor that weighs almost half that. Performance, depending on your needs, is probably not CPU bound. My biggest performance upgrade was installing SSDs into all my equipment. Turns out I've been disk-bound this entire time. The CPU just sits there waiting for disk data. Even with super-fast SSDs most people aren't CPU bound. Now they're network bound (why isn't this webpage loading fast enough?).