When will Dell release a XPS 15 with the 8th Gen Cpu

Or later..

I certainly would like an 8th Gen at a minimum, but a i9 based machine would be awesome. But I guess I am dreaming a pipe dream.

I hope they move the camera to the top and have facial recognition.

 

Seeing as how an 8th gen HQ series hasn't even been announced yet, nobody knows. And I certainly would never expect a (true) i9 to appear for mobile PCs.

 

8th gen HQ in an XPS 15 is probably not a good idea, but 8th gen U seems to be. i7 8500U is reprted to offer 90% performance compared to the i7 7700HQ at around 30% of the TDP. Given the cooling limitations of the XPS 15, that appears to be a very good deal. Pair it with a GTX 1060 MaxQ - 40% more performance than the 1050 at about the same TDP, and that might be a decent overall combo.

 

In light workloads, yes, the 8550u is equally or more powerful than the 7700HQ. This is simply because of it's high single core turboboost, and equivalent multicore turboboost. However, do any kind of enduring workloads on the CPU (rendering, etc.), the 8550u drops of severely. In those cases, the 7700HQ still has a 30% lead over the 8550u.

The 8550u in the end still has a 15w TDP. And it can only sustain it's max turbo boost for 50 seconds or so, before dropping back down to that 15w TDP. In the end, for a workstation-like laptop like the XPS 15, the 8550u wouldn't make a terrible lot of sense.

Assuming Intel can make a 6-core 8700HQ with a 45w TDP, I don't see why the XPS 15 wouldn't be able to handle that. I'd assume that Intel pulls a similar trick as they did with the 7500u vs the 8550u; lower the base clock of the chip compared to last gen, but add cores and a bigger short-duration turbo-boost, to make up for the "lost" base clock.

It's up to Dell to design a laptop with a proper cooling system for a 14-inch chassis laptop. Gigabyte can do it, so can Dell. Get rid of the tapered design (it's just wasting space, that could be used for a thicker, but smaller width battery), use an equal height from front to back. Back down a tiny bit on battery size (perhaps 80Wh?), use the additional space for more cooling.

 

What is the performance comparison after the 8550u has dropped down from turbo boost (i.e. under sustained loading)? How much worse than the 7700HQ for a TDP of 15W?

As you rightly say, this is a laptop meant for serious work, and as such, an airconditioned environment cannot be guaranteed. I've worked in places where the ambient is between 35 and 40 deg C. I doubt whether any laptop will work under those conditions without throttling, so sacrificing some power for a large reduction in TDP makes sense to me. It is the performance : dissipated power ratio that I'm looking at. These new devices are definitely less powerful than their predecessors in terms of performance, but they also consume much less power, and thus are less prone to overheating related throttling issues.

 

The last few generations of XPS have been pitched to productivity users with: HQ processors, good screens, decent GPUs, in a very small, very high quality case. No surprise the "business" XPS is virtually identical. Alienware is focused on gaming.

Based on this and the new 9370's specs, I would guess the XPS 15 formula will not change much. Same case, same screens, similar balance between CPU & GPU (albeit with 6 core CPU clock speeds will drop for heat/power reasons and same major heat/power restrictions on GPU that exist today).

Time will tell when and what Dell releases as the 9570 . . .

 

Well from what I can see, most people with a 8550u (in an XPS 13) drop down to somewhere between 2.0 - 2.5 ghz. And the 7700HQ can hold a sustained 3.4ghz. So that's roughly a 30% drop in performance, just as the benchmarks (the ones that test for long duration performance) show.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1500-intel-8th-gen-core-quad-core-ultrabooks/page3.html

 

Read my review with videos of its performance here

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...ing-behavior-on-dell-inspiron-13-7000.809595/

People focus way too much on "it throttles severely" no **** its going to throttle but based on my tests its AS FAST as a i7 3840QM, Yes it does throttle and it is sustained at around 2.6ghz for 4 core loads over long periods of time, most of the time when doing things its working right at 4.0ghz with 2 cores loaded. I don't know why people have such an aversion to these CPU's when they have a ton of performance

 

Like I said, for burst work loads, it's probably going to be equal or as good as the 7700HQ. It however will not be as good as the 7700HQ in sustained workloads, like rendering. These workloads tax the CPU for 100% usage for longer than at least 10 minutes, often hours.

That has nothing to do with aversion, it simply a thing you want to keep in mind based on your workloads. If you do a lot of sustained CPU-based work loads, a 45 watt CPU is simply going to be better than a 15 watt CPU (assuming similar generations of CPUs). The 15 watt will have a limited turbo boost window, whereas the 45 watt CPU will not.

As is shown in the link I posted earlier ( https://www.techspot.com/review/1500-intel-8th-gen-core-quad-core-ultrabooks/page3.html), there is a measurable difference between the 8550u and the 7700HQ of nearly 30%, in sustained workloads. I am absolutely not saying the new 8th gen 15 watt CPUs are bad, they are great. But 30% is still a big difference if you have many sustained workloads. An 120 minute render on the 8550u would be an 80 minute render on the 7700HQ.

 

A Canuck on Reddit clams to have seen specs of a 9570 on a now-removed Dell web page. No evidence here but enough to throw fuel on the fire:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/7b95j5/xps_15_2018_i_got_a_sneak_peek/

Claims include:

Same form factor
8th gen CPU
FHD, QuadHD+, and 5k screens
GTX1060 optional (maxQ?)
Additional USB C port