Intel Skylake / Kaby Lake / Coffee Lake Thread - Skylake-X reviews out (page 501)

But AMD is on 28nm, like NVIDIA, Intel is on 14... So... They are not closing the gap after all and with Polaris and Pascal comming the gap will be insane again.

 

Sure, if the two are of comparable price. Include a battery life test to let people decide what they want. What Carrizo was SUPPOSED to be able to do, was run at up to 42W cTDP for the duration of any intensive workload, and then throttle back down to 15W for lighter stuff, so you'd have power when you needed it. What it does is stay constrained within the 22W limit thanks to underbuilt cooling/VRMs and deliberately nerfed cTDP.

It still would eat battery faster than the Intel rig, so people might not like it so much if what they needed was longer life out of the battery.

 

Someone has got the NUC i5 reviewed.

Synthetic Benchmarks: http://nucblog.net/2016/01/skylake-i5-nuc-review-nuc6i5syh-nuc6i5syk-benchmarks/

Gaming: http://nucblog.net/2016/01/skylake-i5-nuc-review-nuc6i5syh-part-33-gaming-conclusions/

Too bad the nuc could only support 2133Mhz DDR4. Using 2400Mhz would only run at 2133Mhz or so the reviewer said.

 

Uh, non-K BCLK OC on a Z170 board also disables C-states and SpeedStep.

So that blows your theory out of the water.

 

In stock @ NewEgg.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...logl4wee3XRWQX4vKzaWkaAoSq8P8HAQ&gclsrc=aw.ds

 

Now we just need the i7 NUC, that one should be really interesting

NUCs also got a new BIOS update with the AVX2/FMA3 fix. My CB scores went up from 2.69 to 2.74.

 

15" rMBP replacement with Iris Pro incoming...?

 

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Version 1.75
Intel Skylake Pentium, Celeron and Core m3/m5/m7 support.

 

The review of core m7 6y75 2-in-1.

http://www.notebookcheck.com/Test-HP-Spectre-x2-12-a003ng-K3D42EA-Notebook.158165.0.html

The m7 in the tablet is slower than the m3 in the SP4. Looks like no manufacturer except Microsoft knows what needs to be done with the Core Ms.

 

Ok, lets start...
Braswell boost is insignificant since it only added boost instead of base clock. Is a lost generation from Intel. So Broxton might fix this once at all. I want Core 2 performance at lower energy cost and now is beyond imposible to bring it.
----

That Xeon GT4... Now this is interesting. The GPU as GT3 now is on nViDIA GT 740 levels BTW...so.. If the improvement is another 50%... Oh boy... AMD and NVIDIA will be on real problems if their lowest tier are not revamped...
---
Wondering at the same time if the AMD GPU presented before in the CES 2016, who has the GTX 950 performance at lower energy cost, is their lowest card and are going to replace their R5 230... If that so, they can be safe (nVIDIA will do the same)... And Intel dGPU would en again as bottom of the barrell, despite their improvements.

On the other side, if they are replacing the R7 250 or 260.. And nVIDIA are doing the same (only from GTX 950 and beyond), they will be on serious problems since Intel would managed to catch up to their low tier and would be a matter of time to catch their mid tier and makes them bleed a lot since Intel would be on a fully dominant position.

 

Yea, so many skus with edram, but so hard to find. Yes, you can order them as upgrades perhaps, but most people just walk in to a big box store and buy what is on the shelf. What Intel really needs to do is make iris pro standard (in mobile) in anything over a certain price, say, 7 or 8 hundred dollars. (Talking ultrabooks and any quad big core mobile processor).

 

It is slowly coming as the standard. Just a little more patience

 

Is it likely that Iris Pro 580 hits desktop processors?

 

NBC already did it here on m3 6y30 model.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-Zenbook-UX305CA-EHM1-Subnotebook-Review.154422.0.html

It throttled just as bad as HP's, I doubt putting in the m7 would improve anything.

 

From that article:

Sad to head about the throttling. That ASUS notebook was on my shortlist. I was hoping for a variant with 6Y54/6Y57.

But then again they are running a "X264 video-encoding benchmark test" when complaining about the throttling. If it's only used for bursty loads or not too heavy ones (web surfing, reading mails, showing a video) I wonder if it really becomes a problem?

Also worth noting that the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 performed better in this regard, while using the same CPU (6Y30). So that points to it also being dependent on the design of the device, not only the CPU.

 

It will as a Broadwell-C replacement later.

 

So, I wanted to see if I could come up with an estimate of how powerful the full Skylake Iris Pro is going to be. The existing Broadwell Iris Pro has 48 execution units. Skylake Iris Pro is going to have 72 EUs, a 50 percent increase.

Though it has been released for several months, it's not easy to find benchmarks where Broadwell Iris Pro is compared against decent entry-level GPUs. Anandtech compared it against the R7 250, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. No one buys that piece of crap. What we want to know is how it stacks up to low-end GPUs that people actually care about, like the GTX 750 Ti.

Fortunately, Tom's Hardware just ran a review of Star Wars: Battlefront where they tested it on just about every GPU, integrated or discrete, that's on the market today. This is just one game, but it is a AAA title that seems to be relatively vendor-agnostic, performing well on both AMD and Nvidia cards. At 1080p with Ultra settings and temporal AA, the Broadwell Iris Pro i7-5775C averaged 23 FPS. In comparison, the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti OC averaged 35 FPS - a 52 percent improvement. On the red team, the Asus R9 270X DirectCU II averaged 46 FPS, exactly double Broadwell Iris Pro's showing.

Let's simplify a bit and assume that scaling for Iris Pro works exactly with the number of shaders. We can expect some architectural improvements in Skylake's EUs, but to offset that we may also be seeing eDRAM bottlenecks and/or imperfect scaling. So we'll assume these two cancel each other out, and Skylake Iris Pro has 50% better performance than Broadwell Iris Pro. This would give Skylake Iris Pro a 34.5 FPS score on Star Wars: Battlefield, almost exactly on par with GTX 750 Ti.

That would be pretty decent. The GTX 750 Ti is enough for most casual gamers, capable of doing 1080p on most games if you are OK with low/medium settings. But it won't be nearly good enough for people who want Ultra settings and/or higher resolutions, or who play the most demanding titles.

And remember, this is comparing Intel's newest (not yet released) chip against old 28nm GPUs from AMD and Nvidia. By the time Skylake Iris Pro hits, there's a good chance that one or both companies will have FinFET GPUs on the market, which should more than double the power of the previous low end (Cape Verde and GM107) at the same TDP.

If Intel's 10nm process doubles transistor density again, then conceivably Cannonlake Iris Pro could have 144 EUs, which would be about as powerful as a GTX 970. But at that point, it becomes seriously questionable whether 128MB of eDRAM is going to be enough to feed it. After all, the actual GTX 970 needs 3.5GB of dedicated RAM at 224 GB/sec. A cache can be more efficient, but that seems to be pushing it. By that time, Intel might have to resort to HBM, HMC, or some similar form of ultrafast RAM to power their best iGPUs. Anyway, Cannonlake won't be here until at least 2H 2017, and probably realistically 1H 2018 for the first desktop SKUs and 2H 2018 for Iris Pro. By that time the foundry FinFET processes will be fully mature and Intel's iGPUs will have to compete against relatively cheap ~350mm^2 chips (double the strength of a GTX 970 or more) and ~500-600mm^2 salvage chips at $650 or so (twice as powerful as a GTX 980 Ti).

TL;DR: Intel might finally come up with something playable at 1080p in the iGPU market, but AMD and Nvidia don't have anything to worry about with their discrete card businesses.

 

To achieve "Thin-nirvana" the dGPU is gonna have to go.

 

Congrats on the cite, Sweepr!

 

People who want thinness above all else can buy a MacBook Air or the no-adjective MacBook. The MacBook Pro is for people who want a mobile workstation.

I expect to see a dGPU (probably AMD's Polaris 10) offered as an option for the 15" MBP in this generation. Maybe Cannonlake will reach the point where they decide they don't need it any more.

 

+1 to Sweepr as well here :thumbsup: