Intel WhiskeyLake/Amberlake to solve WiFi issues once and for all?

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-whiskey-lake-amber-lake,news-59073.html

Far from being a boring upgrade until Cannonlake, these chips (coming in 15w flavour and 5w flavour) have quite a lot of useful features that could really make these a viable upgrade or to even wait out if you’re thinking of buying.

Integrated Gigabit WiFi controller should mean no need to use any WiFi card. Intel also boasts that the integrated chip provides great speed increases. To boot, it may also help solve many sleep/hibernation issues that are reported on the forum.

That is the main killer feature (excuse the pun) for me, but that is not all.

- Optional LTE support
- Improved battery life
- DisplayPort 1.4 support
- Voice DSP improvements (Cortana/Alexa, wake on voice)
- Faster video rendering
- Spectre/Meltdown bug fixed (WhiskeyLake)

And more!

I’ve seen a video confirming the inclusion of the AmberLake CPU’s already on the 2-1’s and the i3 Whiskeylake’s on a few machines, can’t wait for the i5/i7 to be released on the XPS 13, will insta buy!

 

I'm just hoping for a 4-8 core laptop CPU that consumes less than 35-45w at stock voltages...like an 8core using only 20w max draw then have some undervolting for 12-15w would be awesome for temperatures...Seems like AMD is leading a pretty big charge back into the desktop CPU game...wondering what they'll be able to do for laptops...

 

Tricky Intel still requires separate controller chip for Thunderbolt.

I'll wait. . .

 

Doesn't matter when the OPI link is 4x PCIe, at best. 2x PCIe for laptop vendors who cheap out on the battery. In the U/Y series chips, all 12/10 available PCIe links come from the southbridge, and not a single one from the CPU.

I suppose an integrated TB controller (if that's even possible with trace lengths) would help relieve the current issue of PCIe allocation for dGPUs.

U series has 12 links, 6 ports (means max of 6 devices).

In a "loaded" U series config, we have a dGPU, TB3, and NVMe. Each usually wants 4x. However, we also have WiFi (now integrated, yay!), Ethernet (though this is fading away), fast SD card readers (also going away... ), etc. I guess it's now doable, with Whiskey Lake. 4x each for the dGPU, TB3, and NVMe. Integrated WiFi negates the need to compromise any of the existing setups to fit the wifi card (since the Intel cards are usually the best and only come in PCIe form). Use a slow USB card reader (for microSD or SD) and it's basically everything a top end U series laptop needs.

 

Good point!

Intel has been "marketing" Thunderbolt onboard CPUs following Coffee Lake. The timing and how that will be done has been a bit "dubious".

I'm looking for Thunderbolt to minimize latency, approaching performance of PCIe devices for audio work. Not possible today running required Thunderbolt controller boards.

That said, a few audio interface makers have (finally!) gotten their Thunderbolt devices to compete with USB2 latency performance. Mind you, most still don't work well yet. I suppose that is a small step forward.​