Intel touts tardy Broadwell Core CPUs for laptops, PCs Intel kicked off this year's CES conference in Las Vegas by taking wraps off the much-delayed fifth generation of its Core line of processors, along with the newest generation of its Atom chips for tablets. The new Core line, codenamed "Broadwell-U," brings Chipzilla's 14-nanometer process technology to mainstream desktops, …
My desktop is a dual-core gen 4 Celeron and is fast enough for everything I need it for. Some in family have commented that it's "very fast" -- that's because it has an SSD not an HD. CPU was chosen for fanless operation, for which purpose these new 15W parts represent a big improvement.
~4% CPU performance gain ain't great
I'd call it "lost in the noise".
That said, how often is something like Microsoft Word CPU-bound? For most users, I'd bet even Excel spends very little time actually calculating. (People who use Excel for serious data-crunching - quants and computational scientists and the like - probably see it CPU-bound more often. But they're a minority.)
So 4% improvement for "productivity applications", while negligible, is also probably reasonable, simply because those applications spend so little time on the CPU. They spend most of their time waiting for the user, and most of the remainder in I/O.
Intel is particularly proud of the graphics performance upgrades of the 14nm chips. Broadwell offers up to a 22 per cent improvement in 3D graphics performance, the company said, and video conversion runs 50 per cent faster.
22 percent improvement on poor only gets you to barely adequate...
It's wonderful to get reviews on new CPU's but I (and others) would certainly appreciate some indication of the socket type the new CPU requires and what new chipset provides all the features that the CPU provides.
A CPU without a motherboard is almost less than useless. An incompatible motherboard certainly is.
And I fully agree that typical Intel graphics are not up to snuff compared to a $300 Radeon or NVidia card, however for simple tasks like normal word processing, Browsers and Youtube videos, the Intel stuff is way better than it used to be and most motherboards have an onboard HDMI connector now. Probably quite good enough for a skinny laptop/tablet but not for 4K. Hell 8K is not that far away so they better get to work.
Much easier to diagnose a bad video card with the option of using the onboard GPU. I just wish there were more BIOS options for control of which components are on or off.
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