Does this "price list" that Intel put out have the dates these processors will be available?
Did the article forget to mention it, or do people really order processors without knowing when they'll arrive?
I think that once a processor is in Intel’s price list, that means it is available to buy now. In the past, Apple have shipped computers with processors that hadn’t made it yet to Intel’s price list.
Some things the AI article doesn’t mention:
Intel now have a quad-core i5 mobile chip: the 2.3 GHz Core i5-6350HQ. They might use this on the entry-level 15” MacBook Pro to keep costs down, but I hope not. In any case, it would make marketing more complicated as the i5 doesn’t have hyper threading but the i7s do.
Also, Intel have launched the Xeon mobile chips. I’m pretty sure the only substantive difference between these and the i7 is ECC (RAM error correction). It will be interesting to see if Apple use them in the MacBook Pro. If they do, RAM will be expensive (except these days it’s not user-upgradeable anyway).
Prices for the i7 vs. Xeon as follows (courtesy this post on anandtech forums):
Does this "price list" that Intel put out have the dates these processors will be available?
Intel will use Quad-i7 mobile chips with Iris Pro in their small desktop boxes. They said there would be more details about this at the Games Developer Conference mid-March:
If that's accurate then it should bring the 13" rMBP almost up to the level of the old 650M/750M 15" Macbook Pro graphics. That GPU has 48EUs, the one for the 15" should have 72 and a higher clock speed. This should make it 50-80% faster than the 5200 in the current entry 15". This would bring it roughly up to the dedicated Radeon GPU it has now, the R9 M370X, which is close to the NVidia 945M.
There aren't any dGPUs out just now that would offer much benefit over the existing models Apple uses so that replacement would have to be an upcoming AMD Arctic Islands/Polaris or NVidia Pascal model:
Both of those are moving to high bandwidth memory vs GDDR5. NVidia and AMD are marketing 2x performance-per-watt because it's a new 14nm/16nm process vs 28nm they use now. If they can pull that off, this would be 970M level of performance in the 15" rMBP and that would start to bring 4K gaming to mobile as well as smooth 4K/5K external display support:
Last year the 13" was updated in March and the 15" in May. The 15" will likely be held back until AMD/NVidia can deliver their mobile chips. The CPU performance probably won't change much but with these large GPU gains, TB3, some design changes that applied to the 12" MB, this would be a good update for the rMBP.
Comments
Some things the AI article doesn’t mention:
Intel now have a quad-core i5 mobile chip: the 2.3 GHz Core i5-6350HQ. They might use this on the entry-level 15” MacBook Pro to keep costs down, but I hope not. In any case, it would make marketing more complicated as the i5 doesn’t have hyper threading but the i7s do.
Also, Intel have launched the Xeon mobile chips. I’m pretty sure the only substantive difference between these and the i7 is ECC (RAM error correction). It will be interesting to see if Apple use them in the MacBook Pro. If they do, RAM will be expensive (except these days it’s not user-upgradeable anyway).
Prices for the i7 vs. Xeon as follows (courtesy this post on anandtech forums):
Xeon E3-1545M v5 (8M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 2.90 GHz, 14nm) - $679
Xeon E3-1515M v5 (8M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 2.80 GHz, 14nm) - $489
Core i7-6870HQ (8M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 2.70 GHz, 14nm) - $434
Core i7-6770HQ (6M cache, 4 Cores, 8 Threads, 2.60 GHz, 14nm) - $378
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/01/intels-next-nuc-will-be-a-quad-core-mini-pc-with-iris-pro-and-thunderbolt-3/
http://www.gdconf.com
The low-end Skylake Iris Pro seems to be around double the Broadwell one:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-540.149939.0.html = next 13" rMBP
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-6100.125591.0.html = current 13" rMBP
If that's accurate then it should bring the 13" rMBP almost up to the level of the old 650M/750M 15" Macbook Pro graphics. That GPU has 48EUs, the one for the 15" should have 72 and a higher clock speed. This should make it 50-80% faster than the 5200 in the current entry 15". This would bring it roughly up to the dedicated Radeon GPU it has now, the R9 M370X, which is close to the NVidia 945M.
There aren't any dGPUs out just now that would offer much benefit over the existing models Apple uses so that replacement would have to be an upcoming AMD Arctic Islands/Polaris or NVidia Pascal model:
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/220302-amds-next-generation-polaris-gpu-architecture-unveiled
http://vrworld.com/2015/11/16/nvidia-unveils-pascal-gpu-16gb-of-memory-1tbs-bandwidth/
Both of those are moving to high bandwidth memory vs GDDR5. NVidia and AMD are marketing 2x performance-per-watt because it's a new 14nm/16nm process vs 28nm they use now. If they can pull that off, this would be 970M level of performance in the 15" rMBP and that would start to bring 4K gaming to mobile as well as smooth 4K/5K external display support:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-970M.126694.0.html
Last year the 13" was updated in March and the 15" in May. The 15" will likely be held back until AMD/NVidia can deliver their mobile chips. The CPU performance probably won't change much but with these large GPU gains, TB3, some design changes that applied to the 12" MB, this would be a good update for the rMBP.