Mobile Skylake launching September 2015

I personally don't like Apple products because every time I use them, or think about buying them, I feel frustration. Something is always not working as expected/at all, and I need to waste my precious time hacking/jailbreaking/whatever, both reading about and implementing, to make it at least bearable. It's simply not fun for me anymore. When I get a new device, I want to use it - as fast as possible - instead of fracking with it.

I won't deny others right to enjoy their Apple devices like someone here =). People are different, they have different needs and priorities. It's a pity, though, that buying a desired device for many enthusiasts is becoming extremely hard, almost impossible task - because some features simply disappear from new notebooks, no matter how much you are willing to pay. Slowpoke CPU performance increase rates with newer generations allow to keep using some older machines without major drawbacks, but that is kinda wrong. Progress should be mostly for the good, and not dirty compromises.

 

If someone enjoys their notebook, then by all means... I'm happy for them. It doesn't mean apple made a good notebook. I enjoyed quite a bit of time in battlefield 4, but it's by no means a good game (crashes, driver instability issues across both nVidia and AMD cards, punkbuster implementation using ridiculous amounts of CPU for absolutely no reason, various game-breaking features that seem to multiply every time DICE tries fixing something, etc).

The question I keep asking people is "why are you okay buying a broken/designed-not-to-work-properly and/or anti-consumer laptop because it is thin, but you cannot make the same choice for any other device on the planet?" and so far, nobody has replied with any sort of reason. So either people aren't using any logical thought and are acting in the "ooo shiny!" manner where "shiny" is replaced by "thin", or there is some secret club in the world that makes it their mission to never post a statement about why buying broken equipment is a sound idea anywhere on the internet that I will ever witness it, but to make sure all other users on the planet know the answer so it looks like I'm the only one not seeing something.

That, or people are perfectly fine with double-standarding, and nobody cares about laptops anymore.

 

I just wish manufacturers and consumers would realize how soft aluminum is, and use better materials rather than just copy Apple.


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Alienware uses Carbon Fiber on the new 2015 machines but sadly those aren't supposed to be called Alienwares anymore Lol

 

Those are so far of a cry from the old alienwares it's honestly sad.

 

I'm gonna jump in on this one. Technology has sufficiently advanced such that people will be happy buying and using the crappiest machines going because they still work fine for browsing the internet. People are sufficiently brain-washed by marketing such that they think their product is good value for money. People are insufficiently experienced; they spend £xxxx on an apple machine which, as you say, isn't even up to its own spec, yet have nothing to compare it to and absolutely no idea how a similarly priced machine from another manufacturer would perform. People are insufficiently educated and can't appreciate evidence when it's presented to them, as it has been in recent posts in this thread. People think the individuals giving them genuine advice are haters.

They're not haters, they're just looking at you in the same way that you would look at a tin foil hat wearer if you saw him wearing an actual tin foil hat. Sure he might be happy with his tin foil hat, but it's stupid and it's doing nothing for him, and he wasted £200 on it because he bought it from some website that said it protects his brain 4x more than standard tin foil. The 'haters' are commenting on the facts, and they're curious as to why you aren't listening to sound advice.

I imagine no-one's answered your question, D2 Ultima, because they wouldn't know where to begin.

 

This defeats the purpose of buying a "gaming" laptop, however, and more reinforces that people should look at machines like the AW13 or a dell XPS 13 etc as the ULV chips aren't going to overheat and will do fine for light gaming and non-stressful CPU work. Which is all people who defend the laptops seem to say they want to do...

Now, it may just be my brain working differently than 99% of humanity, but shouldn't this be a massive red flag? If someone is explaining to you that you are wasting time/money/<insert resource here>/etc on something that isn't good/doesn't work/is broken/is designed to "loan" you rather than "sell" you/etc and you are absolutely adamant that you do not care about this information, but you have no idea why you don't care... that should be a cue to take a LONG HARD LOOK at your priorities and whether or not you're being sensible. I keep saying it this way with this analogy of a car. If a car existed and it had an engine/wheels/drivetrain/transmission/etc set up to drive at 120KMph but it shuts off and the steering locks up at 95KMph, why would you buy it, recommend it and defend it because you never pass 80KMph when driving? Why not buy a variant of the same car that's designed to go 90KMph that will never shut off? It still suits your needs. In fact it'd suit them better. It's EXACTLY like that in my head when people blindly defend things. I can always give a reason why I'm defending something. Sometimes the reasons are good. Sometimes the reasons are not. But I at least have some rationale behind what I do, and if someone can convince me that my rationale is flawed and something else is better, it's no harm to adapt.

 

And those laptops (well, maybe not the XPS 13) do one thing that people either forget about or don't want to do: compromise. Can't have it all? Well, make compromises to get as close as possible. But some people don't want that. They want their, excuse me, THE ideal laptop. But that just will never happen. Somewhere, along the way of either debating which laptop to get or owning the supposed "ideal" laptop, something's going to screw up, making the "ideal" laptop not so ideal anymore.
And then there's the reason of having some headroom. Having better specs for safety, something some people just do because they want to be cautious about not meeting some program's requirement or extending the life of the laptop. I'm not sure how strong this particular argument is, but with how decent the low wattage CPUs are, I'm thinking "weak".

 

Consider Religion X and Atheism. Both sets of people know they're right. They have their reasons, and they know the other side is wrong. They're 100% certain. They can spend all day explaining, constructing logical and strong arguments, drawing diagrams, presenting slide shows, but there's no way they could make the other person appreciate their point of view. It wouldn't matter how much evidence was presented, how much they disproved each others' arguments... I'm sure you get my point by now.

You know the person who buys an apple computer for gaming purposes has made the wrong decision, but are you going to convince him of that? No. And they doesn't necessarily mean he's not listening, or that he's an idiot, or anything like that.

Although I used religion in the example here, it wasn't meant to spark any kind of discussion in that area, it;s just the most straightforward example i could think of. It's been used to show that humans are obviously very far from purely logical. Sometimes you can't change someone's mind, and sometimes you can't see the other person's point of view. The good thing is, sometimes you don't need to and it doesn't really matter.

 

D2 Ultima, consumers are sheep flock who buy whatever marketing people aka shepherds throw at them. They define themselves with what they consume, seeking image, not the real thing.

 

People who buying an Apple laptop are normally not performance enthusiasts or gamers. They use rather their laptops in cafes and browsing on internet and drinking their cafe latte. Not wrong with that. I think they know very well that their Apple laptops not is a high end gaming or a performance laptop. They buy it for the design not the performance.

 

I'm so tired of apple discussion in Skylake topic! Is there any macbook with Skylake now or what?

Subscription... deleted.

 

To play devil's advocate here for a moment. One thing that I had thought about before is that if there is the lowest end quad core, say i7-4710HQ for example, and Apple or some other manufacturer wanted to have a quad core in their laptops, and there's no other option, well I can see limiting the performance of that chip to meet the TDP limitations of the cooling system.

On that note, Apple puts a high end CPU in their system and it throttles like crazy. It's not like it runs at stock 3.2GHz and never boosts, because they know the system can't handle it, they let it boost and get crazy hot and throttle so performance is worse than if they just limited max performance.

I think this is where Intel (or AMD, yawn) needs to start offering ULV quad core CPU's. Forget hyperthreading. Just offer an 18W or 25W TDP quad core. I mean they make a quad core Atom CPU for crying out loud at 4W TDP and it performs reasonably well.

Meh, not sure where I'm going with this exactly, but what I think I'm trying to say (darn voices in my head again... shoo, shoo!) is that the systems could be and *should* be designed better to the point where heat management and throttling should not even be a concern.

 

They do have 28w dual core low voltage CPUs. I'm not so sure what's so great about them compared to the 15w ones aside from the higher clocks and Iris graphics (well, the larger TPD is nice). So yes to quad-core 28w ULVs.
At least we're getting quad i5's on the mobile side of things. We could be getting closer to quads in ULVs.

 

I am also eyeing up the new 2015 Dell XPS 15, this should be good. Have to wait and see what is in it, Skylake I would think with being super top secret.

 

First, people buy plenty of other devices which are either anti-consumer (e.g. nearly every locked phone) or are designed in a way that does not make optimal use of their components which is what I believe is what you call broken or not working properly.

Second, the reason for buying thin and light laptops is pretty obvious: many people simply don't care about the same features as you do. To get the most out of a modern CPU or GPU, you need to either find a brilliant idea for a new cooling solution or put it into one of the huge and heavy monstrosities from Clevo/Alienware/etc. Most people prefer something that is easier to lug around. Thus, while it is true that a quad-core CPU placed in a thin-and-light will not perform to its full capabilities, its performance is generally more than enough for any task that people who buy thin-and-lights will put it to.

To be honest, I'm about halfway to agreeing with the thin-and-light people. What exactly are the powerful CPUs and GPUs in laptops being used for? I need a powerful CPU for work, but there's no way my laptop will come anywhere close to my work machines which, at the same generation as my laptop (Sandy Bridge), have 16 physical cores per node and 4 nodes per box (so 64 physical cores per box). The newer Ivy Bridge and Haswell boxes have even more cores while laptops are still stuck at 4. It doesn't matter how much one overclocks a laptop, it will never come anywhere close to the performance of a server and it's a very rare line of work that requires its heavy-duty production machines to be mobile.

The only thing that comes to mind is gaming, but very few games nowadays have both the kind of graphics that pushes the hardware and the kind of gameplay that makes the game worth playing in the first place. The few exceptions are usually better a year or two after the release, when a version with all of the DLC has come out and at that point, it's not very challenging for contemporary hardware anymore. I think if I can get something 15% better than my current Sandy Bridge performance, but in a thinner, lighter and quieter laptop, I'll probably go for it.

 

I can see locked-down phones etc, and I am aware of those in the market, but I'm unsure of other devices that can't use their hardware. Or, if they can't, it's because people overclock them (I know people have overclocked their phones for example). I want to be clear: I am speaking about pure stock here. I could not care less if someone buys a machine that performs perfectly at stock and is annoyed that it can't handle an overclock. It's when a machine at stock, intended configs is broken that I have issues. And I can't think of any phones or other hardware that does this than laptops, really.

Well considering the fact that the P650SE is ~0.24" thicker and at most 1.5 pounds heavier, and offers a full complement of I/O ports and does not have heating issues at stock unless you run P95 and Furmark together or something... I don't see where the huge "monsters" like mine need to be bought. But that ~1 pound and 0.24" seems to be "way too much" for people, and is cause for them to buy the aforementioned broken hardware. I do not get it. If the difference was 4 pounds versus 8 pounds and 0.98" thick versus 2.2" thick, then your arguement is sound. One is distinctly larger and heavier for very little performance benefits. But that's not the case; there are well-performing machines that are not so large from Clevo (and I believe even MSI's GE series as well) and hell, even ASUS has some as far as I know. So I don't get the insistence on such small machines.

If you buy something with 15% better IPC but it clocks slower than your SB... then you're getting equal or worse performance, not better.

I do agree with this bit, wholeheartedly, however until it arrives, we still shouldn't have to be terribly worried about heat management/throttling with what IS here.

 

980M doesn't throttle at stock in a device as thin and light as the Gigabyte P35X v3! CPU does hit the heat threshold more frequently than P651SG, but this is exactly what Skylake sets out to solve, no?

Heat will likely be reduced with Skylake because of the lack of the FIVR, or so I think I have heard. Is this correct?

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The 970M throttles in the P34x though, and the CPU issues of the P35x are a problem, moreso than I had realized with your original review (from seeing other people talk about it is where I realized you had a pretty cool machine). Skylake made NO promise of reducing heat. As far as we know, TDP has increased and IPC is a bit better. That's it.

Skylake may not be using FIVR but it's using lots of other stuff. As far as right now is concerned, expect Skylake to run hotter until proven otherwise.

 

Skylake moves the VR off-die but integrates the PCH. You know, the separate die on the mobo that runs pretty hot and usually has its own thermal pad.

 

Ohhhhhh INTEL
YOU LOVE MAKING THINGS HOT FOR US LAPTOP USERS THANKS
CHANGE YOUR NAME TO AMD ALREADY

 

BUT AMD CPUS RUN WAY COOLER THAN INTEL

 

THEY WILL NOW

 

THEY ALWAYS HAVE.

I'm serious. AMD CPUs have different thermal specs. Safe temps are like 30C lower than Intel.

 

Yeah I know XD

 

This is the road to oblivion, the node shrink to the 14nm and the PCH integration will definitely make the CPU very hot & unable to hit 4+ GHz clocks, OC friendly. Haswell manages with very high temps & the significant IPC improvement is also not much worth to make a full upgrade from Haswell to Skylake..tbh IB to Skylake & Just for the sakes of DDR4, more 3-4x pcie, nvme support and the trade off is a HQ BGA chip with massive heat (?), BGA on both DT and NB realms.

These M$ and Intel are destroying the enthusisast with their greed, M$ is killing the PC definition by that Win10 & the Intel won't make a high end CPU without that Iris Pro stupid iGPU, the 4790K does have a 4600 and no one uses that It's just sitting there idle, waste of space / power / resource & except the Haswell-E, even the Xeons now will be shipping with that GTxe stupid crap and I guess considering the track record of AMD the Zen won't be able to shake the stronghold of the Intel's Quad core i5 performance...

The mobile high end market is dead. Only the HEDT CPU DTRs from Clevo will keep 1-5% of NB enthusiast market alive...

 

Yeah, I still don't understand why they don't make an "enthusiast" chip eliminating the dGPU and offering an extra core or two, and even on a bigger die for improved thermals. Enthusiast users would likely pay the premium for such a chip especially if it eliminated turbo boost and unlocked clocks and voltage. Keep the VR and PCH separate, heck even move them as a separate die on the CPU PCB if you have to, at least it would get added surface area. But not integrated with the CPU die. Boo.

 

IIRC from Skylake onwards IVR is being dumped but the PCH integration again gonna cost for heatup adding to the IrisPro, atleast the integration is limited to H (BGA- Quad Mobile chips & DT variants), U (ULV), Y (Netbook CPUs) variants and not S (PGA), We should be safe as long as the trend of ZM/DM and the SM-A (Maybe HEDT CPU ? ) / WM continues..

 

Are you talking about for laptops? Because the entire "-E" lines (Sandy-E, Ivy-E, Haswell-E, etc) pretty much exist for this purpose. There's no iGPU and extra cores/higher TDP/etc.

 

Yes I mean for laptops.

 

Just use the laptop in your lap, you'll save money not having to have a vasectomy

 

I can use my laptop in my lap and it isn't hot =D

 

Intel Core M 14nm Fanless

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...-will-boost-2-in-1-hybrid-sales-by-70-percent

John

 

Goodbye socketed Intel mobile CPUs. ;_;

It looks like my current 4900MQ is the last of a dying breed.

 

No wonder Intel continues to spew out garbage processors.

 

My new fan uses ~10W !

So ...

• check email
• watch youtube
• play candycrush

Yeees, this device will do all that !

Wait, what? You may want to run a spreadsheet!!? No, no, no, you'll need the all-new fanless Xeons for that ! Heck no, it doesn't need cooling, that's just a gimmick for non-Apples. Yes, it's really powerful too; it has 16 32 cores ! 32!!!

 

I thought a cpu had to have a tdp of 4w or under to be fanless, so how does 10w now become fanless.

John

 

Anything can be fanless with a 10Kg radiator...

 

I'm surprised there ain't no full-blown-Windows-running smartphones, except for good old F-07C. Maybe with Skylake...

 

Late September or early October for mobile

http://www.kitguru.net/components/c...7-6700k-and-core-i5-6600k-skylake-s-revealed/

 

Desktop Skylake launch models (Intel Product Change Notification): http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/dabacf8e-2957-4fd9-9d22-899bd5fd1bca/PCN113879-00.pdf

 

The secret is out! We now know how the OEM trays will be packaged!

 

There is a thing called "throttling" and "overheating". And OEMs are not above using that for gimmicks, and consumers have proven time and time again that they're willing to buy it if it means they get something thin and/or silent. Heat be damned, it'll run youtube videos.

 

One doesn't require active cooling in a thin and silent system if you use proper materials which can keep the load temperatures low.

This is a consistent issue with OEM's. Since they use cost efficiency to cut production costs wherever possible, they won't really put in too much time to think into how to efficiently cool any system without active cooling while also using as little as possible - because otherwise, in the current system, any such solution would be deemed as 'cost prohibitive' - therefore, even though its more than possible, it won't be done.
They are mainly out to cut production costs for themselves as much as possible while charging larger prices for consumers.

To top it off, the active cooling solutions in most laptops never really deviated from copper heatsink and fan since laptops were first made.

 

What materials? Sources?

The trick is removing heat - a different material may have a larger thermal mass, so it can absorb more heat, but transferring it out is more important than absorbing it. And yes I'm an engineer.


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Synthetic diamonds for example.
In chemical structure it is identical to the 'real' diamonds (nothing more than pressurized carbon) and it has high thermal and electrical conductivity.
http://electroiq.com/blog/2014/01/synthetic-diamonds-role-in-thermal-management/
http://www.e6.com/wps/wcm/connect/e6_content_en/home/the power of supermaterials/synthetic diamonds extreme properties

Synthetic diamond chips have been produced for over a decade now.
If the material was adopted early on, then actually, you wouldn't really need to use a large amount of synthetic diamonds for cooling the components.

Well actually, had we focused on making electronics with synthetic diamonds from early on with better materials, we probably wouldn't even need cooling to begin with.
And of course, it is being discussed about using synthetic diamonds for this:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18736-diamond-chips-to-make-meaner-greener-electronics.html

Then of course there's graphene (for which a band gap was devised back in 2008 and 2009), and another option is with carbon nanotubes.

CNT and Synthetic diamonds have patents from the early to mid 90-ies for uses in electronics - whereas Graphene was 'officially' isolated in 2004.
But the likelihood of the said materials being used early on wherever possible is next to non-existent because the market still hasn't exhausted the cash flow from silicon (even though we are getting ridiculously low performance increases every 12 to 24 months - and this is largely due to profits).

 

I would say it's way more likely/realistic that while diamonds have higher thermal conductivity, it still doesn't solve the basic thermodynamic problems in a cost effective way. Copper+fan is WAAAAAY cheaper than diamonds plus magic. You still need airflow and thermal mass to dissipate the heat being produced. Garbage.

 

I wasn't referring to cost effectiveness.
I was saying that we have better materials at our disposal that can provide more than adequate solutions when it comes to cooling.
Its not my problem the manufacturers are consistently behaving in a greedy capacity and creating products with poor quality which consumers end up paying for just so they can continue with cyclical consumption - the fault is systemic.

 

I need to interject here. There is a HUGE difference between being a greedy corporate company trying to pinch the very last penny like the company that makes Beats by Dre headphones do, and a solution that is too costly to be practical in normal usage.

For example, let's say I can use a state of the art system for heat dissipation with a natural vacuum solution and diamonds and other special compounds, where I can cool components more efficiently than an Alienware M18x R2... somehow. But that cooling solution costs $1000 in itself, not counting the rest of the parts in the laptop and the chassis itself. Now to turn a profit from that, I'd need to flip it for $1200 or so (to mitigate labour costs in construction of the laptop itself and whatnot) then again to add the cost of all the other parts. Now where a top end laptop with a copper heatsink and fan from Clevo's current line all filled out might cost say... $3000, this new model might cost $4000. But it does exactly the same thing, except maybe it's 5 degrees cooler under overclocked load and of course silent as there's no fans. There's honestly not very many people who would pay that difference.

And then again, what about with a model that's got medium parts? Like a $1800 machine? Who'd pay $2800 for the same machine that you can get for $1800 where the cooler temps don't matter as the parts aren't top notch and are cooler and/or non-OCable?

 

Eeeeeexactly. This is how business is done. Thanks for the clear explanation - you've said it much better than I was able to.


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