14 DAY TRIAL // Xeon processors are designed for IT professionals, servers, cloud storage databases and workstations, but they were never meant for laptops. Until now.
In a surprising change of roadmap, Intel brings workstation-level CPUs to laptops, infusing them with unusual amounts of processing power. According to the latest announcement from Intel, the upcoming Xeon CPU available for laptops is the Intel Xeon Processor E3-1500M v5 built on 14nm process technology and based on the Skylake architecture.
Besides being more powerful than the Broadwells, the new Skylake-based Xeons will come with features usually seen in workstations and servers. Things like hardware-assisted security, error-correcting code memory and especially support for Thunderbolt 3 will be standard features on most future laptops. In addition to all these new technologies that will arrive for your laptop in a very short amount of time, Intel promised certifications for design and content-creation software that will run on notebooks.
Laptops and enterprise workstations will share the same "brain" from Intel
Unfortunately, not much is known right now about the specs of the E3-1500M v5 CPUs, although it's pretty obvious that, being based on the Skylake, they will have some serious performance potential, unlike current Broadwells. The new Xeons also have much improved integrated graphics that professional users don't really use, and improved battery life as a standard improvement of the meta Skylake platform.
However, it's to be expected that the new Xeons won't be your next eco-friendly central processing units. They will be power-hungry and really powerful, and will bring everything a powerful server or workstation enjoys from a Skylake right in your lap.
Not much is known about when exactly the new Xeons will come to laptops, but they are expected to arrive somewhere in the early 2016, as the next and probably last of the Xeon Broadwells, the Xeon D-1521 and D-1541, will arrive in November this year. We can only hope they will be realesed soon enough to energize again the dwindling worldwide PC market.
We expect more details about the new Skylake CPUs to be revealed at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum.