If you waited out this year's holiday shopping season to pick-up a new notebook or hybrid 2-in-1 device, you're about to be handsomely rewarded for your patience it appears. I've been spending some quality time with Dell's impressive new XPS 13 Ultrabook that is powered by a new 14nm
Intel's 14nm manufacturing process for their Core Series mobile chips essentially just marks a die shrink for the processor architecture, though with the extra silicon real estate the shrink afforded them, Intel engineers took the time to beef up graphics resources, along with the usual architecture optimizations that typically come with such a move. The result is a slight bump in CPU throughput (think about 5-10 percent or so overall) and better battery life, but also a significant boost in gaming, multimedia and content creation performance, all of which exercise the new Intel HD 5000 series graphics block.
One look at Intel's 5th gen Core processor die map tells the story quite succinctly...
Though Intel claims Broadwell-U has a 35 percent higher transistor count and a 37 percent smaller die size overall, you can easily see how much larger the graphics engine block here is versus the chip's compute cores. At first glance you might mistake those significantly smaller CPU blocks as being under-powered, but that would be misguided. In fact, Intel's new notebook CPU architecture is proving itself slightly faster than the previous generation product and that's simply "good enough" for virtually any notebook use-case currently on the market.
However, in some quick-take graphics and gaming tests, we're seeing something like a 20 percent boost over the previous generation, which is a major upgrade for most users.
Maxon's Cinebench is a 3D rendering test that has both CPU and GPU-targeted workloads built in. In the CPU test, you can see here that the new Core i5-5200U is a little over 10 percent faster than it's predecessor, the Core i5-4200U. The OpenGL test, which measures graphics processing throughput rendering on the GPU, shows a much more substantial 20 percent lift for the Core i5-5200U. This will translate to better content creation performance where apps are either OpenCL or OpenGL accelerated, as well as much better gaming performance for the mainstream.
Dell's early release of their new 2015 XPS 13 ultrabook is one of many new products that are on their way to market now with Intel's new 14nm Broadwell-U chip on board. We're told AMD will have an answer later this year with their Carizo platform, likely sometime in Q2, which will employ their new "Excavator" CPU core. It will be interesting to see what the Sunnyvale team has on tap with their new integrated APU for notebooks. It will likely offer competitive if not better graphics performance but will have a very hard time catching Broadwell-U on the CPU front.
But does CPU really matter at this point? What's "good enough" in terms of CPU throughput? For that matter, what's good enough for graphics? Intel and AMD seem to be dialing in on optimizing notebook performance well enough such that flat out performance isn't the be-all and end-all metric anymore. It's about performance-per-watt in most notebook designs, and at 14nm Intel's design and manufacturing muscle is tough competition. I'm hopeful AMD can up the ante a bit as well, with their next notebook platform release.
Disclosure: I do retain a small position in INTC currently but in no way does it influence my opinion of the company or its products.
