Forget Intel Haswell, Broadwell on the Way

IVB is compatible with SNB and it takes a lot more changes than microcode to get both working on the same platform. It has very little to do with microcode updates, the processor should be able to run without these. Microcode's main function is to fix errata and add / disable some features. Did Clevo bring out laptops with "both" SNB and IVB support together? Only mobile support I had heard of was here http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...my-qm67-chipset-mainboard-ivb-compatible.html

Isn't mobile Broadwell going to be BGA only? In that case you would need an adapter with pins soldered to it first besides the other compatibility issues.

Oh, forgot to add, quite often the Windows OS itself will apply a microcode update if the BIOS doesn't have the latest or none.

For instance "mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll" and "mcupdate_AuthenticAMD.dll"

 

Let's put it this way... on the hardware level, Clevos are almost as easy to upgrade as desktops--the catch is getting the upgrade parts is Expensive As Hell. For the cost of two GTX 880M's and an i7-4940MX I could buy a whole new system... but it wouldn't be as capable as the current once the new CPU and GPUs were in.

Doubted Skylake was gonna happen, but the High-End Laptop Broadwells are supposed to come out Spring '15. Have to wait and see, I guess...

 

But the question was for updating BIOS for same socket different Gen CPU. Did Clevo update there SNB or IVB laptops to be able to run either on the same laptop?

AFAIK Broadwell unlocked is scheduled for second half of 2015 along with Skylake-S. Will have to wait a little longer for unlocked Skylake.

 

Seems like Broadwell-U is starting to appear, well HP envy's and pavillion's with i7-5500u and i5-5200u if your in NZ. Kiwi's at the forefront of technology again.

 

Yeah there was a leak of a Hp Envy notebook running a i7-5500u so not surprised by this... I wonder what is happening about the high performance Broadwell parts.. it's been delayed for too long..

P.S: I don't care if it's BGA junk .. It's going to mean a Haswell notebook for me..

 

I like that HP ENVY 15-k208TX, It is going to be a hell of an efficient gaming laptop with 850M, looking forward to get one soon .

 

Is a 15W dual core going to be up to the task though?

 

Why would not? The only problem, i'm not to be up to pay so much, hope they just joking with the price. These laptops should be at $500-$700 range.

 

lol, you've answered a question with a question, does that mean yes? I agree, HP prices seem a little high even including GST, perhaps Kiwi prices are higher than elsewhere.

 

Yes man, we have seen 2000 points improevement in 3Dmark vantage at CPU side, which makes pretty strong. Note a 3rd generation i5 17w ULV was already to be up for everything, this is the new i7 ulv, about 30-50% stronger.

 

0.7W idle, not too shabby.

 

3DMark Vantage with i7-5500U. Note that the CPU power throttles during 3DMark benching.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M video card benchmark result - Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz,Hewlett-Packard 229C

 

Yeah looks like the ULV's biggest downfall is the power throttling.. I wonder if there is some way to get around it but I seriously doubt this will be the case...

 

As long as Intel's XTU works with Broadwell, the undervolting would most likely help with the power throttling. Perhaps Throttlestop can also help with the throttling.

It's also likely to be dependent on the laptop platform. My laptop allows the i7-4500U to run up to 25W for hours when running Prime95, even though the TDP was rated at 15W. I'm sure there are laptops that have a stricter power limit for the same CPU.

0.75W idle is a lot better than the stock i7-4500U's 3-4W idle. I remember my previous laptop with the i7-720QM. That thing had a 20W idle.

 

Yep, unlimited power limits available with the i7-5500U but the manufacturer limits it to 15W even on AC with plenty of thermal headroom and power delivery available.

All it would take is one manufacturer to provide a few extra Watts to stop the throttling for performance mode while limiting on power saver mode. Then they could turn around and show up all those other manufacturers who are crippling the CPU performance and possibly make a killing in the market.

 

Computer companies don't use benchmarks (except for high-end GPUs). They use higher model numbers for their components to market.

I've seen plenty of laptops that had amazing hardware components and **** cooling system that resulted in the laptops running at 80C to 90C under load, or severely throttle.

HP's Elitebook 840 and 850 throttles the Radeon 8750M GDDR5 from 670/1000 mhz (core/memory) to 300/150 mhz even when it's only running Dota2 (not an intensive game) at 72C, most likely due to a strict power limit. Because the GPU constantly switches between 670/1000 and 300/150, it causes severe micro-stuttering. Running Furmark worsens the stuttering.

Yet to an average user at Best Buy, they're going to think that the laptop with the 8750M GDDR5 is going to be faster than another laptop with 8750M DDR3 or 8690M.


My old Samsung laptop had a 1.3 GHz Sandybridge i3 that locked to 800 mhz as soon as it hit battery mode, resulting in numerous applications being sluggish, such as Matlab or Autodesk Inventor. Even the SSD was being bottlenecked. Samsung's tech support informed me that it was a "feature" to save battery life and there was no way to disable the "feature".


There are also laptops with some unbalanced hardware. Such as i7s with no SSD. Or i5 with GT 610M (barely better than Intel's IGP). Or i7 with a mid-range GPU and a crappy TN display with color calibration issues and backlight bleeding.

 

Intel unveils 'Broadwell' processors, starting with dual-core chips only

Intel promises longer battery life with Broadwell CPUs for laptops - TechSpot

Intel Reveals Details On Broadwell-U At CES

Intel's 14nm Broadwell-U Processors Launched - 28 to 15W Core Family Updated With Iris 6100 and HD 6000 GPU Core, Core i7-5557U Leads The Pack

 

Hardly anything exciting.. I'm more interested if the Braodwell K chips will be coming.. Also seems a bit overkill to have the U CPU's with Iris Pro graphics... Especially with the low TDP limits, these GPU's will hardly be able to excel..

Still I'm quite sure these Intel chips will be much better then any of the junk AMD can produce in mobile CPU's..

 

Hardly any CPU performance increase (apart from increased clocks), but much better iGPU and supposedly better battery life.

Intel is claiming ~1.5hrs extra battery life, I wonder how much it will be in the real world.

 

I hope the GPU gains match up to expectations. It would be nice to not feel like a computer is neutered without a dedicated GPU.

 

IDK. I feel like a medium-end CPU is now being paired with a medium-tier GPU. This is a great machine that will last a decent amount of time for anyone doing casual graphic design or photography work, and will chew through most indie games and ask for more.

 

Am I the only one highly concerned that lack of competition has made Intel a GPU manufacturer all of a sudden? I mean, of the 1.9 billion transistors on their HD6X00 equipped dies that have been released, 1.2 billion are for the iGPU. That's... 63%. That leaves just 700 million for both uncore and cores. Just looking at the die map, you can tell exactly how much of it is now a GPU. The CPU occupies only that tiny portion of the upper right corner. As much as I love the expected improvement on the iGPU, AMD really needs to step up their game, if we want intel to stop making GPUs and get back to making CPUs.

Even on their HD5X00 series GPUs, the iGPU still takes up about half the die....

 

^GPUs have almost always been more complex than CPUs?

 

tareya got a point tho. The amount of relative die space occupied by the GPU has grown by leaps-and-bounds since Sandy Bridge. It's been clear for years where Intel's efforts have been focused on. And now with Crystallwell, even more of the package is taken up by GPU-related silicon.

 

I thought the same thing when I looked at that picture -- that's not a CPU with an integrated GPU, that's a GPU with a couple of CPU cores attached.

 

EXACTLY. That's the perfect way to put it. Virtual high five! :hi2:

 

I wonder if Skylake is going to shift the ratio, or at least, keep it close constant.

 

Doesn't matter to me what the ratio is; as long as the CPU is still the crème de la crème of what is available at any given time.

Either way; Skylake is the platform to upgrade to at this time (skip Broadwell at all costs...) and with Intel bent on playing catchup with the delays Broadwell had, we'll be seeing it sooner rather than later.

 

Right. So if Intel decided to stop all future development of processors, you would be happy buying Broadwell until armageddon? Some people are upset that CPU performance has plateaued. The reason for this is that the CPU has remained little changed generation to generation, while an ever growing proportion of die space is given to increasing the power of the IGP. I guess you really don't want an 8-core laptop CPU, do you?

You can't be serious. What gives you the idea that Intel has any intention whatsoever of "playing catchup" because of any previous phony "delays?"

 

Qing Dao, you totally read what you want to hear, huh? Was not what I said at all. Please re-read what you actually quoted me saying.


While the delays may be phony to you, I'm sure Intel has some good reasons.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...ntel-broadwell-skylake-way-5.html#post9883803


From the link in the post above:

 

You said you don't care what share of the die is given over to the GPU. There are 8 core xeons with a smaller die than the quad core with IGP, but I guess you totally don't care about having twice the CPU power.

Sure. Whatever Intel does is always the best thing possible in your eyes. Intel has shrunk their production lines, run the production lines of different processor generations concurrently and for longer periods of time, had delay after delay for every release, staggered releases of new product generations across different market segments, and stockpiled new processors for months before a release that only comes when stocks of older processors become depleted. The reason is to maximize profits. The smaller production lines are cheaper and they run as long as possible to make every possible penny from their investment AND every product, even the ones that are technically obsolete, gets sold at maximum price while hardly ever having to discount older products. But I guess you are happy with this because whatever is best for Intel is best for Tiller, right?

 

Qing, I see the blinders are on tight.

I need a igpu along with the cpu - that gives the highest performance possible for the least battery drain vs. a discrete gpu.

And yeah, Intel is doing things in the best possible light. If it weren't for idiotic laws that they have to baby step around and hold themselves back from crushing their competition, we would be enjoying 16+ core cpu's on Skymont tech by now. And, I wouldn't care what the cost was. I would be either able to afford it or not. Along with everyone else. But the performance? Yeah; ahead of what we have today on a mobile device.

 

I don't think this is an issue anymore -- their competition is not just AMD, but also ARM and they are very far from crushing the latter. Also, I do not think they are deliberately holding back for any reason. It's just that making transistors that are 10-20nm in size is hard. Nobody has managed to make a high-performance (and thus also high-frequency and high-TDP) chip with it so far -- Broadwell comes closest and it's not obvious that anyone other than Intel will even try this year. AMD and Nvidia have both been delaying the die shrinks for their GPUs for quite some time and it appears that this trend will continue.

 

Also worth mentioning in respect to core count is processes need to be increasingly parallel in order to make higher numbers actually perform better. While a 2-core CPU is nearly always between 1.5-2x the processing power of a single core CPU, the efficiency drops with each doubling of core numbers, similar to SLI for graphics cards. So while it may be possible for Intel to release 16-core processors to everyone, the vast majority of people won't see much of a performance increase over 4- or 8-core processors because their workload just does not take advantage of (or require) the extra cores. On top of that, it's not cost effective.

 

If anyone wonders, I found this leaked document directly from Intel and it confirms that all upcoming Broadwell 47W H-processors (meaning the ones we will use in gaming notebooks) will all be soldered. All 47W, wether it is 4 cores or 4 cores plus eDRAM, will be BGA.

So prepare yourself. Socket mobile CPUs are history.

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/guides/5th-gen-core-mobile-embedded-thermal-mech-guide.pdf

(Another tidbit revealed in this document is that 4C + eDRAM Broadwell need "slightly better cooling than Haswell". As if Haswell already didnt run hot)

 

This is a very naive post. You must be insane to think that legal restrictions are what's holding intel back. If anything, they've proven exactly the opposite. As AMD's market has shrunk, and they've made it clearer that they are less interested in competition, they've slowed down their release cycle.

Are you seriously trying to say that if intel didn't thave to worry about competition we'd be better off?

You should really take a step back and try to think about what the hell you're talking about.

Beyond that, frmo a technical standpoint, 16 cores? For desktops? Google Amdahl's law. We're at a really nice place, core count wise. No need to rush to 16 cores right now, we don't have the technology to scale there anyways.

Yes, this is a slightly simpler explanation for Amdahl's law. It's just that, at a code level, if you can double th eperformance of part of your code with more cores, your bottleneck instantly becomes the single threaded part of your code, and therefor you get exponentially diminishing returns.

 

It is funny to me I started this thread in 2010 . And now we have no idea what is after Cannonlake.

 

I think this was known for a while. This is why Clevo is going with desktop CPU's in their performance laptops.

Next step... desktop. Seems hard to believe, but I wouldn't doubt if motherboards sold with an integrated CPU, and only a handful at that. We are nearing the end of user upgradability in the next few years, as far as CPU is concerned. GPU and storage and RAM should be around for a while at least... I hope. It may just come down to enthusiast board, gamer/performance board, power saving board, and fanless workstation. No more myriad of options. Just some motherboard configs with a fixed CPU.

 

This is a genuinely horrifying future and I really really hope that you're wrong. I can accept the fact that I'll have to buy desktop CPUs for my laptop if I want to be able to upgrade. But soldered desktop CPU? I don't even want to think about it.

 

Sooner or later we'll see only big slates with computation and storage components behind the screen. The desktop concept would be gone, what's left is just different sizes of "tablets".

 

I'd like to think that the workstation class machines would still be very flexible, especially when there are task specific machines which would have different specifications in content creation, and would benefit from the flexibility of being able to upgrade down the line depending on the available budget.

In my former office (a relatively small one) we had to set aside machines for specific tasks because some software are just ridiculously expensive and they can't afford to put the same stuff in all the machines (software and hardware respectively) because of the licenses. Some had Photoshop some didn't. Some had Autocad, some had Revit, 3D Studio, etc and we rarely had a machine that could do everything, simply because it was too expensive. I hope for our field that we can still choose among the options whether to put a multi core multi thread cpu, or multi cpu, or Quadro card or regular GTX card.

 

@joker thats exactly why i decided no to sell my m6800 i can toss in new gpu in it down the road or just use egpu via express card which i tested and works super fine.

 

WS systems would be hit much later, but if Intel/AMD decides to BGA everything in the end then no one can escape.

Before that really happens, we could escape to server/HPC boards at least for a while when smaller WS products become another victim.

 

How dissappointing :/
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-01/...medion-akoya-e7416/3/#diagramm-pov-ray-37-rc7
4210U, 2 cores 1.7-2.7GHz.
5200U, 2 cores 2.2-2.7GHz

 

What's disappointing? Mid range platforms with midrange performance. Don't understand language, but what temps and/or power savings are achieved with the new chips?

This is something special though,

See:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8943/...ell-vpro-processors-wireless-docking-and-more

 

what happened to all these efficiency claims?