Midtown Blogger/Manhattan Valley Follies: endgadget- Intel and Laptops

Sunday, August 9, 2015

endgadget- Intel and Laptops

Intel's professional-grade Xeon processors are no longer confined to fancy workstations or data centers. The chip designer has unveiled its first-ever Xeon processor family for laptops, the E3-1500M v5. The Skylake-based part is meant to deliver the kind of heavy lifting that you'd want as a pro (such as rendering 3D models or crunching big data sets) while giving you a laptop that's still thin and light enough to carry around. It has Xeon mainstays like error-correcting memory and remote management, but it also rolls in support for brand new features that any self-respecting techie would like, such as the newThunderbolt 3 connector. If you want, you can drive dual 4K displays, USB-C devices and more from a single port.

The semiconductor firm isn't talking about everything the E3-1500M can do just yet, and you won't the chips in shipping laptops until the fall. However, their existence shows that even the high-end computing world is affected by the shift from desktops to laptops. As IDC notes, the mobile workstation market is one of the few areas where Windows PC sales are growing -- it only makes sense for Intel to court the increasing numbers of creatives and engineers that want to do their jobs away from the office.

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TimmmayTimmmay4 hours ago

This doesn't sound like an exclusive chip. Xeon's traditionally haven't had an IGP, and the transistors where the IGP were are disabled/powergated or physically replaced with other lithography to expand L2/L3 cache, etc.

If this Xeon-M has an IGP, it's probably just a Core i5/i7 Skylate with ECC enabled in the memory controller (meaning ECC is disabled on all other Skylake CPU's -- it's part of the design)