A fresh look at PCs.
BERLIN: INTEL HAS OFFICIALLY RELEASED the full product SKU line-up for its 6th-generation Core processor family, based on the 14nm Skylake architecture. The new Skylake processor will double the battery life of a PC, double its graphics performance and boost its web application performance by 50% compared to PCs of three years ago, Intel said.“This is something that only happens once every decade or so,” opines Skaugen while describing the perfect synchronicity in the release of Windows 10 and the sixth-gen Core processors. Until now, Intel had unveiled only desktop models of its new quad-core chip designs, the Skylake-K variants comprising the Core i7-6700K and the Core i5-6600K aimed at gamers and computing enthusiasts. The chips represent the world’s biggest chip maker’s hopes for reviving the sagging PC market, just as the Windows 10 operating system represents Microsoft’s aspirations for growth on the software side.
It’s rare for a brand new operating system to coincide so neatly with a new CPU generation, and the shared hype is likely to drive positive sales for both Microsoft and Intel. The three dimensional camera views looks at the users face from two angles, so it can’t be faked it with a picture, said Patrick Moorhead president of Moor Insights and Strategy in Austin, Texas. Intel signaled the new chips — now dubbed 6th Gen Intel Core processors — were coming for everything from tablet computers to high-end gaming PCs. Skaugen says Intel has been working on the Skylake architecture for more than four years, and it’s collaborated with Microsoft on generating some synergies along the way.
The desktop family comprises a Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 line-up aimed at all types of desktop devices across the market, from gaming towers, traditional PC towers, all-in-ones, mini PCs, portable all-in-ones and the Intel Compute stick. As of Wednesday at IFA in Berlin, we have a nearly complete picture: its speeds, feeds, and prices, as well as much more about the internal design—and the hopes and dreams riding on this new family of chips.
We can’t test everything at PCWorld, but what we can do is provide a handy scorecard of the Skylake chips Intel is launching Tuesday at the IFA show in Berlin. Moorhead thinks the PC market lacks confidence in itself. “This is the greatest time to be in PCs, he said. “Tablets have found their stasis point and they didn’t kill the PC,” it’s still an enormous market, he said. For businesses, Skaugen promises “this will be the most secure software and processor combination ever” thanks to built-in software guard extensions.
For mobile devices, Intel has released three types of processors: the 4.5W Y-series with Intel HD graphics 515 aimed at “great performance in 2-in-1s and detachables”; the 15W U-series with Intel HD Graphics 520 for “thin and light powerful systems”; and the most powerful 45W H-series with Intel HD Graphics P530 for “the ultimate mobile experience”. Intel’s betting the functionalities available with the new processor will help consumers realize that as well. “Simply put, we think there’s no better time to buy a PC than now,” said Skaugen.
Intel said that the new processors and Windows 10 are optimized to work best together, providing better overall experiences, removing computing frustrations, and providing more secure computing. Intel is also integrating a sensor hub and an image signal processor into some of its mobile-focused processors, consolidating all processing and making things simpler for the software engineer. By our count, Intel’s announcing 48 new Skylake sixth-generation Core chips this week at IFA: the Core Y-series chips for tablets, U-series chips for thin-and-light notebooks, and the H-series chips for “ultimate mobile” and performance mobile workstations, while the S-series chips will be included in both performance and value desktops, all-in-ones, and mini PCs. Here’s what you need to know about Skylake in a nutshell: The prices that Intel has published appear to essentially to be the same that Intel is charging for its Broadwell chips—meaning that, from a price perspective, it’s a no-brainer to bypass Broadwell or Haswell for Skylake. Intel has also updated the Core M chip in its 6th-gen Core chip line-up which promises double the performance in “leading tablets” and mobile devices with 14 percent better graphics since the previous generation and up to 10 hours battery life on Windows 10.
Think “a fanless, convertible notebook as thin as a tablet and with as much battery life, but with the performance to run full PC applications,” Moorhead said. In an unexpected twist, Intel will also apply its good-better-best branding to its Core M lineup (along with a confusing naming switch to a lowercase ‘m’). But there’s a catch for desktop users: Skylake uses a new motherboard socket and memory, meaning that you’ll practically have to invest wholesale in a new system. The ability to log in just by looking at the PC is courtesy of Windows 10’s Hello feature, which requires the new Core processor and a computer with Intel’s RealSense 3-D camera installed. That reaction would usually take 30ms, but now Intel has shifted the intelligence over to the processor and is allowing it to make the determination itself.
What’s special about Skylake is that it is the first mainstream Intel desktop platform to support DDR4 memory, and is claimed to deliver 30 percent better performance than a three-year-old PC based on Ivy Bridge architecture, 20 percent better performance than a two-year-old PC (Haswell), and 10 percent better performance than a one-year-old PC (Broadwell). Chris Walker, vice president and general manager of the notebook products group at Intel, said humbly in an interview with VentureBeat that the chips are the company’s best processors ever. Throughout the fourth quarter and into 2016, Intel plans to launch vPro versions of the Core i5, Core i7, m5, and m7 chips; plus more Pentium and Celeron versions. Skylake is the successor to the chipmaker’s Broadwell architecture, and was first put on the radar at Intel’s Developer Forum last year when the firm previewed the chip, touted to deliver significant increases in performance, battery life and power efficiency. A Windows 10 update will enable this functionality in the “near term,” and it might be something we can expect on Mac computers as well, though Skaugen refuses to divulge specifics on Apple’s plans.
He would only say that the “architectural benefits and things that are in Skylake, we would hope and expect Apple to make use of.” Among the things encouraging Skaugen to be bullish about Intel’s present release is also the rapid pace of iteration that he anticipates with Windows 10. “The evergreen release cycle of Android and iOS coming to Windows helps Intel light up new hardware features that much faster.” It used to be, he says, that Intel would have to wait for two or three years until a major OS update would harness the latest additions or integrated technologies in Core processors. Yes, I have college-age kids that can type on glass faster than I ever thought possible but when it comes to writing a paper or some other exercise that requires entering more than a few sentences, even they generally move over to a PC with a keyboard. Kirk Skaugen, the senior vice president who heads Intel’s client-computing group, says Intel is eyeing more than 500 million PCs in use that are at least four years old. Some are being tested in pilot programs at hotels such as Marriott and Hilton, the company said. “What’s been a negative is it’s coming a little later than people expected,” said Hung. “It probably should have been on the shelf already for back-to-school shopping.”
With Intel CEO Brian Krzanich recently admitting that Intel may be slipping in its long-established adherence to Moore’s Law, there’s an understandable shift within the company to deliver more than just pure computing power. The computers also will be smaller and lighter, because Skylake chips use less power, meaning components can be placed closer together and will require less cooling. Compared with the most recent systems, Intel says mainstream laptops with Skylake chips are 10% faster on standard productivity applications at 20% lower power consumption. A decent chunk of Intel’s Skylake vision concerns its related PC technologies: things like wire-free charging and display; TrueKey security, and its RealSense cameras.
All of these combined efforts, plus the help of willing partners like Microsoft, should ensure that “innovation won’t slow down for the end user.” Skaugen is also unwilling to “accept the idea that things will slow down after 10nm,” suggesting that the jump after the next shrinking in manufacturing size might not take as long. Skaugen predicts Skylake will help popularize newer ones—including ultrathin notebook PCs that require no cooling fans and “compute sticks,” cartridge-style devices that plug into TVs to provide them computing power. Even better, Microsoft, Intel and component companies — such as touchpad/fingerprint reader maker Synaptics — are working with the FIDO Alliance, an industry consortium of tech, banking and other e-commerce companies, to enable the secure transfer of your unique digital identity. The new PCs’ features should lure users away from their older systems—at least, that’s the plan. “There’s over a billion PCs that are more than three years old now.
The Skylake processors are the second to be built with Intel’s 14-nanometer process, and that helps make them much more scalable, Walker said. “This product will scale from 4.5 watts to 91 watts,” he said. “It can go from fanless tablets to two-chip desktop designs. Intel designs chips on a “tick-tock” basis: first migrating an existing design to a new process technology, then designing a new chip from the ground up.
You might want to consider buying a chip with Intel TXT technology built in, however; that’s the Trusted eXecution Environment which seems to be at the heart of new Windows technologies such as Windows Hello and Passport. Those requirements were met with a mixture of consternation and innovation alike from the engineers Weiss manages, with some claiming it was impossible. “We proved them wrong,” she said during a briefing with reporters.
This is where Microsoft’s support and quick implementation comes into play again, and that relationship will continue to be important as Intel looks to push other technologies like its upcoming Thunderbolt 3 interconnect. Employing a slightly more expansive definition of “mobile,” Intel’s Skylake also marks the company’s debut of overclocking-ready K Series processors for notebooks. “We look at the enthusiast and gaming community,” explains Skaugen, ”and we see [that] increasingly, people are going mobile. Each little improvement adds up: adding a digital PLL for “major” power savings across the whole of the chip; increasing speed with a lower minimum voltage; and doubling the number of manageable power domains. People want to game when they’re travelling.” Intel has seen great interest from “both the boutique gaming players and the big OEMs” and Skaugen expects them all to get into laptop gaming with a renewed vigor. With Skylake, PC makers are now able to set their own constraints, too: throttling a CPU if a notebook detects that the underside is too hot, or giving a burst of power when needed.
As to the more professional user, there are now also mobile Xeon models among Intel’s sixth-gen lineup, which Skaugen says will allow 3D designers to work on the move without having to carry their assignments “all the way across town.” The Xeon-powered machines, he says, will be “kind of luggable, but still portable.” There’s a symmetry of purpose between Intel’s efforts and Microsoft’s. To be fair to Haswell, there was a Core i7-4790S version with the same TDP rating as its Skylake counterpart, but the clocks drop even lower, to 3.2GHz. Skaugen articulates Intel’s mission as “a continuum of performance, from servers to wearables.“ But he also sees Intel’s role as evolving toward being a “communications and connectivity company as much as an IT company.” A decade ago, Intel was “a PC company aspiring to sell PCs and servers.” The new vision for the future is one where “if it consumes electricity, it computes; and if it computes, it connects; and if it’s smart and connected, it will be best to have Intel.” The obvious gap in Intel’s connectivity continuum is actually the most popular and important category of them all: smartphones.
Even though Skylake represents a processor redesign and not a process shrink—where most of the power reduction takes place—Skylake should consume less power than a similar Haswell chip. The bottom line is that, if, like most people, you haven’t really given much thought to the PCs that I’m betting are still part of your life, you probably should. Those are both critical issues in computer gaming, mobile workstations and other graphics-intensive markets that new Skylake-based systems will initially target.
That’s the Achilles heel that Intel doesn’t like to talk about much, but it’s certainly something the company is taking seriously. “Smartphones are incredibly important to our business,” says Skaugen, while noting Intel’s growing 4G modem business and established strong reputation in China. Intel’s Core i7-5820K and higher “Haswell-E” chips that use larger sockets and don’t contain integrated graphics all contain 6 cores and 12 threads. The funny thing is that it’s happening in parallel with Microsoft’s redefinition of what a PC is or can be, and so even as Intel moves into new device segments and areas of business, it might still find itself technically providing parts for Windows PCs.
That will probably be just fine by Skaugen, who seems determined to ensure that every single electronic device out there has at least a little bit of Intel inside it. Intel resuscitated the Pentium brand awhile back, a seemingly odd throwback to the days not too long past when gamers had to tweak HIMEM.SYS and other system files to allow their PCs to work. Here’s the interesting thing, though: Because there’s no Turbo Boost self-overclocking mode, the Pentiums are actually clocked faster than some of their Core cousins. Intel can’t shave as much power in the mobile space, where the maximum thermal power of a Broadwell chip, 47 watts, is nearly identical to the 45 watts that a mobile Skylake processor consumes. Intel’s Skylake-specific Speed Shift feature reduces the time in which a chip needs to shift from a high-power to a low-power sleep state to as little as 1ms, versus 30ms or so before.
While older DDR3 memory modules are supported, they’re specifically low-voltage DDR3L modules, implying they’ll be reserved for specialty low-power applications. In other words, while you might be able to jury-rig a build of an older hard drive and graphics card, your motherboard, CPU, and memory will have to be repurchased. As Ung notes, the upshot is that you can run your graphics card at full bandwidth while still having a super-fast PCIe or M.2 SSD, or multiple SATA SSDs along with your your 10Gbps USB 3.1 devices, without sacrificing performance, as you would with older chipsets. In general, though, Intel’s mobile chips show a definite progression down the performance curve: The more expensive Core i7s boast larger cache, robust Turbo Modes, and a faster maximum graphics clock speed. Intel’s vision is that your power cord will be replaced by a Rezence wireless charging mat, your display cable by WiDi or WiGig, and your ethernet cable by wireless networking.
Because laptops in general are getting thinner by the day, it might not be totally clear whether you’re buying an ‘ultrabook’ or just a thin laptop. Some of these technologies you should be familiar with: Thunderbolt 3.0, the 40Gbps connector that integrates into the USB-C physical form factor and provides charging, to boot; Wireless Display (WiDi), along with the upcoming managed WiDi Pro; WiGig, similar to WiDi but for your desk; and what Intel calls Intel Unite, a simple videoconferencing application that taps into the power of Intel’s chips. Also, Intel has included what appears to be a down-clocked mode, for activities like simply displaying this article, for example, that require less exertion from a chip. The Iris Graphics brand has generally been used for Intel’s premium graphics product, which means the lower-power products may actually outperform the chips with more cores. (But note the “TBD” designation in the pricing column.
Iris Graphics is coming later, and Intel’s not saying when.) If you’re wondering why, it’s likely because higher-wattage quad-cores are almost always coupled with discrete graphics for more performance. Eventually, the PCI-SIG hopes to mainstream a technology called Oculink, which lets gamers could tote around a low-power laptop by day and connect it to an external GPU for gaming after hours. Unfortunately, the industry is giving you a mixed message: on one hand, Microsoft is saying that just about anyone can upgrade to and run Windows 10 on their existing PCs, all for free. Still, the selling point is power: Core m chips run at just 4.5 watts, and Intel believes you’ll get up to ten hours of battery life with a Core m tablet.
It’s useful information, because eventually, you’re going to see an ad or a sign advertising a “Core i7” computer on heavy discount, and you’re going to be tempted.