If you need a new laptop, you might want to hold off until later this year when Intel’s newest chips are available. Tiger Lake chips promise faster speeds, better graphics and longer battery life.
Any thoughts on just how much of a change this will be from current generation? They go into detail regarding laptops, but I’m curious about the overall changes.
What sounds really interesting is the change in manufacturing:
Before now, chip designs were married to the manufacturing process, a “tick-tock” cycle that improved the chip’s architecture one year then shrank its components the next. Now, Intel is moving to a “transistor resilient design” that’s no longer tied to a particular manufacturing process. That will provide more flexibility, including a better ability to outsource production to rival chip foundries like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC).
Anything that helps keep the competition going is a win for consumers!
My understanding is that Intel moving forward is going to be going big/little designs.
That means a portion of the CPU will be high power, high performance cores, and another portion will be low-power, high efficiency ARM cores, similar to what we see in mobile devices.
Will this work? I don’t really know. I think it ultimately will depend on the operating system and the individual applications to leverage these resources.
If OS can delegate background tasks to the ARM cores, and gaming loads can be delegated to the power cores, then it might give us some benefits.
But if this comes at the cost of losing core count in favor of efficiency cores that never get used, then I don’t know if that will be good for enthusiasts.
I can’t imagine that Intel would intentionally give up their clear advantage with enthusiasts.
It’s a really interesting concept though. Perhaps these fundamental design changes will allow them to maintain their advantage in single threaded performance and catch up in overall performance.
If they can achieve that it will be a good day for all of us!
I don’t think they really care about the enthusiast market really - these optimizations will almost certainly lock out or greatly reduce user end tweaking/overclocking.
They’ll probably be really good for normal users, though. And I can see the benefit for the laptop segment.
What I don’t want is to get us all locked into generic product segments like iPhone -
The more integrated systems get the closer we will get to this philosophy.
All we can do at this point is speculate. (Not that speculation isn’t enjoyable!)
All I know for certain is that Intel coming back strong, with something even a bit more than the incremental changes we’ve seen lately, is going to be good for the marketplace and good for consumers.
If battery life is the #1 concern for one’s laptop purchase, I don’t think anything either Intel or AMD has waiting in the wings will stand up to the new ARM MacBooks Apple is releasing soon. If rumors are to be believed, the 12" Macbook coming out this fall will feature 15-20 hours of battery life, iPad-like standby/sleep time, and power on par with the current 13" Intel MBP starting at a $800 price point (the unusually low price will drive quick adoption and get more devs on board with the arch migration).
Keep in mind that the previous 12" model was only 0.52" thick, so it’s not like its battery was huge. Just imagine what they’re going to be able to do with a more “normal” laptop chassis, like the current 16" which has a ~100Wh battery.
If those rumors are even partially true, it’s going to be hard for x86 laptops to compete in terms of battery life. x86-ARM hybrids will have a better chance, but will still struggle if only due to badly optimized programs frequently spinning up the “big gun” x86 cores when they’re not needed (chrome and electron apps will be notorious for this).
I can’t help but wonder how many people put battery life before everything, including platform. It’s just an opinion, not a fact based observation, but I would think that more people would say “I need the best battery life in a Windows laptop” or “I need the best battery life in an Apple laptop” than would be truly platform agnostic.
In any event, with all these developments it’s a good time to be an enthusiast!
Purely anecdotal: I don’t actually know anyone who doesn’t prefer either Windows or Mac (sorry Linux dudes, there just aren’t that many of you to include in this scientific analysis!). I have not met a single person who is truly platform agnostic. And that’s after a long career in and around IT…
Not many for sure, but battery life is probably one of the bigger factors going into the laptop purchase decisions for most (gaming/workstation laptop users are a minority), so if the device in question checks 90%+ of the individual’s other boxes, standout battery life may just be enough to push them over the edge.
The other thing to note about ARM Macs is that in addition to standard macOS apps (including x86 apps via translation) they will be able to run unmodified iPhone/iPad apps which vastly outnumber Mac apps, which will go a long way for filling the gaps in Mac software that would keep many people tied to Windows.
Sadly reminds when Microsoft thought they were going to turn the corner on Windows Phones by making the same apps available on mobile and desktop. I really liked my (now retired) Windows Phone.
Yeah, think that while Microsoft’s end goal (a unified desktop-mobile platform) may have been more or less correct, their execution was lacking — first, desktop apps and Windows proper getting “touchified” in Win 8 freaked people out, and second, MS totally rebooting how to develop for Windows Mobile multiple times scared away developers (with good reason, no sane platform demands total rewrites of apps every year or so).
Apple’s approach is to instead let desktop to be desktop and let mobile be mobile, with the latter augmenting the former, which I think is a much more solid plan. Their app dev story is far less tumultuous too, so it won’t send developers running for the hills.
More on-topic, I think Intel can earn back their lead eventually, but from what I’ve read/heard it’s going to take significant internal restructuring, and they’re going to have to move quick or everybody else will be eating their lunch.
I chuckled a bit when I read this (with you, not at you!). I’ve been in startups and established firms - and the big firms are not exactly known for being nimble and quick … often they’re more like lumbering giants or trying to change the direction of the Titanic!
That being said, I feel confident that Intel understands that they need to protect their market share and that the structural changes they are making will, as they say, ‘right the ship’!
