The Broadwell-U chip series will come forth at CES

Sep 30, 2014 06:42 GMT  ·  By

The release of the Core m central processing unit back at IFA 2014 at the start of the month was one of the juiciest news of the whole event. It couldn't be any less, seeing as how the chip was the first 14nm processor to ever be released.

Made doubly impressive by the continued failure of the rest of the semiconductor market to advance, fabrication-wise. AMD and NVIDIA have been stuck on 28nm on the GPU front, and while there are some 19nm NAND-based products out there, most SSDs still use older chips.

The idea that the Broadwell-based Intel Core m mobile processor is supposedly close to NVIDIA's Tegra K1 both in terms of processing and graphics is another brownie point.

Now, a report has emerged about the next Broadwell central processing unit. Or units, since a full set of fourteen chips is supposedly on track for a CES 2015 release.

The Broadwell-U line of Intel CPUs

The Consumer Electronics Show will take place in early January in Las Vegas, Nevada. Specifically, between January 6 and 9. It is the perfect launch ramp for a new range of laptops, and thus, a new line of processors.

The Broadwell-U CPU line is intended for high-performance notebooks and will be paired with GT2 or GT3 graphics.

The weakest GPU (or iGP actually) will be the GT HD Graphics chip, with a mere 12 Eus (execution units).

On the other end of the scale are the Broadwell-U processors, which use the GT3e “Iris Pro” graphics chipset, the HD 6100 “Iris” GT3e – as it is otherwise known, with 48 Execution Units and 128 MB eDRAM cache.

There are HD 6000 and HD 5300/5500 GT2 graphics chips as well, with 48/24 Execution Units, respectively, and no L4 cache.

There will be seventeen Broadwell-U central processors, all in BGA packaging, meaning that they will not be removable. You can see the various core counts, clocks and graphics parameters in the attached table.

As you can see, they all have a TDP of 15W, which should allow for a pretty long battery life, especially if you outfit your laptop with an SSD. Almost a given on premium mobile PCs.

The L3 cache can be of 3 MB or 4 MB, for the most part. There are only three processors that have less, namely 2 MB: a Pentium and a pair of Celeron units. That's right, 14 out of the 17 chips are Core i3/i5/i7 units.

The bottom line

The Broadwell-U CPUs are palpably superior to the Broadwell-Y Core m, which was to be expected due to the larger thermal envelope. It's too bad that DDR4 memory isn't supported by neither of them. Only DDR3 and DDR3L. Oh well, there's always something in the pipeline.

Intel Broadwell-U CPUs (4 Images)

Intel Broadwell-U CPUs Core i7/i5/i3 and Iris HD graphics
Intel Broadwell-U Core i7 and Core i5 CPUsIntel Broadwell-U Core i3 and Pentium/Celeron CPUs
+1more