Today, Intel released new details on its upcoming Core M Broadwell processors.
The company’s next-generation 14-nanometer chips are designed to deliver high performance at a lower power, allowing for more energy efficient devices. Broadwell is expected to improve even further on Haswell’s (Intel’s current generation CPU line) battery life.
AnandTech has released a detailed look at Intel’s next-generation processors and they point towards a substantial increase in GPU performance and a minor increase in CPU performance.
“From a high level overview, Broadwell’s GPU is a continuation of the Intel Gen7 architecture first pioneered in Ivy Bridge and further refined for Gen7.5 in Haswell. While there are some important underlying changes that we’ll get to in a moment, at a fundamental level this is still the same GPU architecture that we’ve seen from Intel for the last two generations, just with more features, more polish, and more optimizations than ever before.”
Intel says the new line of Broadwell processors will allow for even thinner devices that produce less heat when running. Intel’s Broadwell line of processors are expected to ship at the end of 2014 and appear in its first devices in early to mid 2015.
The new 14-nanometer format is perfect for Apple’s rumoured 12-inch Retina MacBook, which will reportedly be thinner than the current-generation MacBook Air. The 12-inch MacBook is rumoured to sport a fan-less design, making good use of Intel’s cooler running chipset.
The current generation MacBook Air uses a Haswell-U processor from Intel that runs at 15 watts, while the new Broadwell Core M chips run at 5 watts allowing for more energy efficient devices.
However, since the Broadwell Core M chips only run at 5 watts it is unclear whether it would be able to power a Retina MacBook. Apple’s rumoured 12-inch Retina MacBook is expected to ship using the new Broadwell processors in mid-2015.
