Intel Releases Broadwell-U: New SKUs, up to 48 EUs and Iris 6100
by Ian Cutress on January 5, 2015 10:00 AM ESTFitting in With Core M
The staggered release of Broadwell is nothing new. Previous releases from Intel has seen them pick a particular market and aim at that first, whether it be tablet, mobile devices, ultrabooks or desktops, with the rest to follow. Core M, Intel’s 4.5 W ‘Broadwell-Y’ part, has been in the market for over a month with designs such as the Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro, although the number of SKUs available as well as worldwide distribution has been relatively slow, with the designs featuring Core M being expensive in terms of casual computing and more premium upgrades. Broadwell-U changes this by opening up the power envelope, and as such Intel sees the market at follows:
The Broadwell-U processors from Intel are aiming to give enough performance from AIO desktop systems to mini desktops, premium mobile applications all through to large 2-in-1s. There is some overlap with Core M, particularly with the 7.5W cTDP down elements of the range, but the interesting element will be pricing. The Celerons come in around $100, with the Pentium at $160, but then it gets expensive for Broadwell-U. $275 to $315 covers all the i3 and i5 parts both at 15W and 28W, ending with $393/$426 for the i7 parts. Further to my efficiency comments above, on paper at least the i5-5350U or i5-5250U would seem the most interesting processors of the bunch.
Release Dates
In our conference call with Intel, it was clear that these CPUs are shipping to their partners today. Throughout CES there will be a number of manufacturers announcing their products, and as per the norm Intel allows the partners to introduce their own products, rather than showing examples of where Broadwell-U fits in. However, because Broadwell-U is designed to be pin-compatible with Haswell-U, we might see some manufacturers purely re-releasing some of their designs with the newer CPU and a firmware update. Nevertheless, Intel is expecting OEM systems with Broadwell-U to start shipping in North America within the month. Designs with Iris graphics, or those featuring Intel based WiGig connectivity, will be more towards the end of Q1. Overall Intel is tracking ‘hundreds of designs’ involving Broadwell, indicating that it will be a significant push to bring 14nm to the market.
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kpb321 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
We will have to wait and see. There might be more of a performance difference for Haswell than in the past because they decreased the # of EU's per slice from 10 down to 8 and increased the cache size. That should mean a lot more cache available per EU which should help keep it from being as bandwidth limited as in the past. It will probably still be bandwidth limited but hopefully just not as much making the GT3 version without eDRAM more reasonable.With that said integrated GPUs will always be behind dedicated GPUs in performance because graphics is so parallel that is scales easily with more units but those additional units mean higher power and bandwidth requirements. That's why you see high end GPUs using 200+ watts and very wide/fast memory interfaces both of which are much higher than can be reasonable handled in integrated GPU setting.
III-V - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Gen8 actually makes a lot of changes that reduce its reliance on external memory. Take a look at the bit on caches in this article. It'll still be constrained by bandwidth, but not as much as you seem to be expecting.texasti89 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
It is nice to see audio DSP element is integrated into the PCH. I hope to see more and more integration in the near future. The power charts show clearly that display panel still has the major contribution in the overall platform power consumption. I think Intel and other SoC players have reached the point where SoCs can no longer provide pronounced improvements in overall power saving given demand for higher display resolution. Igzo display technology can cut the display power by at least half which will give further opportunity for SoC designers to effectively improve efficiency.thunderising - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
So, the fastest Intel Core i7, which costs a lot of $$, and spends nearly 70% of its die space on graphics, produces 844.8 GFlops.Whereas, NVIDIA's Tegra X1 outputs 1024 TFlops.
*Claps*
Pork@III - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
NVIDIA's Tegra X1 outputs 1024 TFlops>(in FP16)< But we already live in 2015 and work with FP32 and FP64 mostly
TiGr1982 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
Talking FP64, Tegra X1 may not even have it at all, or, at best, I suppose, it may have it at the same ratio, as GM204, which is just 1/32. So, I bet, FP64 capability does not really apply seriously to Tegra X1. FP16 and FP32 to be used there.III-V - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
I'm sure it'll have some FP64 support... Probably at 1/32, 1/48, or 1/64 rate. It'd be ludicrous for it to not support it at all.TiGr1982 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
I suppose, FP64 can be at 1/32, like I said, is the case for GM204. But that's not a lot, certainly.TiGr1982 - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
X1 gives this flops for FP16 (half precision). Don't be fooled by usual nV marketing and compare "apples to apples".However, this is not to say that this Broadwell-U is very impressive. To me, it looks just as one more evolutionary step over Haswell-U. Nothing special, I would say. Still dual core x86, as a lot of people complain here - for some reason Intel strongly believes quad core is not need in -U segment. Instead, they beef up only the GPU, which may be bottle-necked anyway by DDR3 just as in AMD Kaveri case.
And all of these Broadwell-U i5 and i7 are offered for big $$$, as usual in Intel's case. Somewhat disappointing - I agree with some other posters in this thread.
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 5, 2015 - link
It is a node shrink, so you shouldn't expect anything major over Haswell. Now if Skylake doesn't bring the goods, then they'll have an issue.