Intel Announces 5th Gen Core Mobile Processors, 14nm Cherry Trail At CES

Name: Intel 5th Gen Mobile Processors, Announces 14nm Cherry Trail At CES 2015
Brand: Intel

by Joel Hruska — Monday, January 05, 2015, 10:00 AM EDT

Broadwell's GPU, Price Data

Page 2: Broadwell's GPU, Price Data
- Page 1: Introduction
- Page 3: Battery Life, Cherry Trail

We've seen Intel's integrated GPUs steadily improve over the last few years, beginning with Sandy Bridge. Graphs like this are purposefully designed to convey the impression of huge performance gains, and 3DMark 06 isn't exactly a modern or relevant test, but there's no arguing the long-term trend -- as die sizes shrink, integrated graphics has gotten increasingly better.

The new graphics engines will be the Intel HD 5500, 6000, and Intel Iris 6100. The Intel Iris GPU will not offer the L4 cache that previous Intel chips have included in this brand name - that's reserved for the future Iris Pro line. Instead, Iris graphics (HD 6100) will have slightly higher clock speeds. The Intel HD 5500 has 23 or 24 EUs, while the HD 6000 will be a 48-EU part.

It's hard to understate just how much of Broadwell is a GPU story. When AMD launched Kaveri, it made much of how nearly half the APU was dedicated to graphics performance. According to our off the cuff checking, roughly 60% of Broadwell's die is dedicated to GPU performance, not counting the shared cache. Granted, Kaveri was a quad-core chip and physically much larger than Broadwell, which means that Kaveri's 47% die space still works out to more space -- but Intel is committed to improving its GPUs again.

Note, however, that the company isn't talking about DirectX 12 support for Broadwell. Whether it's waiting on that announcement until Windows 10's ship date is closer we can't say, but given that both Nvidia and AMD have announced full DX12 support for their various current hardware, we'd guess that Intel isn't leaving it off on accident.

Pricing Information:

Intel has announced a blizzard of new SKUs, all posted below, but we'll walk you through the highlights:

The Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron processors will all feature integrated graphics, though Intel doesn't brand its lowest-end chips with the same numerical designations. The Core i3 chips have 23 EUs rather than 24 EUs (it's not clear why), but retain Hyper-Threading support sans Turbo Core.

Next, the new Core i5/i7 chips. All these chips are new dual cores with Hyper-Threading, with the principle variance being GPU clock and CPU clocks. There's also a bit of play with L3 cache sizes (4MB vs 3MB) and programmable TDP targets, but the biggest single gap will bet on the GPU side. The HD 6000 chips, with 2x the EUs of the HD 5500 chips, will perform substantially better.

Finally, the new 28W processors. These are slightly faster than the 15W variants with slightly higher clockspeeds on both CPU and GPU, but no major feature departures or changes.