Core M relative to Core i3/5/7 roadmap?

[user8237492]

I'm somewhat unclear about how Core M fits in with the over all Core i3/5/7 strategy.

I understand Core M will be used for processors that belong to the 5th generation Core processors (Broadwell family) AND have a TDP under 5W.

But what happens to the "Core i3/5/7 lineup" in the 5th gen family?
Will the "i3/i5/i7" nomenclature still stay? If yes, will Core M be above i7 or below i3?
Or will we have Core m3, Core m5 and Core m7?
Or will we have Core i3m, Core i5m and Core i7m?

Thanks

 

[witeken]

You should really see Core M as another name similar to i3/i5/i7.

So, you have the architecture Core (and Atom), which is traditionally segmented in Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, i7 from worst to best.

However, those 5 names are not given based on performance alone, they are also separated by feature set (cache, HT,...) and, more importantly, TDP.

A 15W i7 dualcore CPU can impossibly be better than a 88W version of the architecture, but a 15W i7 is better than a 15W i3.

From high to low TDP, Intel has the suffixes: / (none), -K, -S/-T for desktop; -H(Q), -M, -U and -Y for mobile. For example: Haswell-U i5.

Core M really is just the successor of (Haswell)-Y, but the marketing team wants to make people aware of the possibility of fanless designs due to much lower TDP than any previous SKUs, so they put it at the same level as i3/i5/i7.

So this means if you want a fanless x86 tablet with Intel Core Architecture, you'll have to buy Core M instead of Broadwell-Y i3/5/7. I actually think it makes a ton of sense.

 

[frozentundra123456]

You should really see Core M as another name similar to i3/i5/i7.

So, you have the architecture Core (and Atom), which is traditionally segmented in Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, i7 from worst to best.

However, those 5 names are not given based on performance alone, they are also separated by feature set (cache, HT,...) and, more importantly, TDP.

A 15W i7 dualcore CPU can impossibly be better than a 88W version of the architecture, but a 15W i7 is better than a 15W i3.

From high to low TDP, Intel has the suffixes: / (none), -K, -S/-T for desktop; -H(Q), -M, -U and -Y for mobile. For example: Haswell-U i5.

Core M really is just the successor of (Haswell)-Y, but the marketing team wants to make people aware of the possibility of fanless designs due to much lower TDP than any previous SKUs, so they put it at the same level as i3/i5/i7.

So this means if you want a fanless x86 tablet with Intel Core Architecture, you'll have to buy Core M instead of Broadwell-Y i3/5/7. I actually think it makes a ton of sense.

Perhaps to you, but it sure is confusing me. Desktop alone is clear: pentium/celeron, no HT, no turbo, i3=hyperthreading no turbo, all dual core. Then i5 and i7 quads, i7 has hyperthreading. But the problem is, there are i3, i5, and i7 full power mobile chips, but i5 is dual core, unlike the desktop. But then there are the low power mobile chips where i7 no longer is quad core either. And I dont even pretend to understand the Y and M mobile lineup. When I needed a laptop, I just bought a cheap i3 with the full power mobile chip. At least I wasnt paying twice the price for a machine that required google-fu to find out what the performance would be.

And AMD is no better, now that they are starting to brand Kabini with very similar numbers to Kaveri.

 

[user8237492]

First off, thanks for the info!

Second, this is super confusing with Intel slicing processors in a thousand ways. Just because you can segment the products across a lot of attribute doesn't mean you should ...

I honestly feel that Intel should consolidate their CPU line ups to be more buyer friendly. A confused buyer tends to say "no" ...

 

[user8237492]

BTW, that means we'll actually have
Core i3m,
Core i5m,
Core i7m etc

right? In other words, an "M" version in every performance tier?

 

[know of fence]

I honestly feel that Intel should consolidate their CPU line ups to be more buyer friendly. A confused buyer tends to say "no" ...

Confused and ignorant buyers are obviosly the best kind. They tend to go with their gut or listen to ludicrous recommendations, they are also easily sold on promises.
Which is why tech companies and the tech sites that they finance, often engage or involuntarily participate in confusion and obscurantism.
One prime example is the attempt to create a false parity between mobile and desktop processors and more recently ultra-mobile. Even though typical notebook chips provide a third of performance at best, they routinely carry the name of their desktop counterparts, with an additional letter i.e. Geforce GTX 980 and Geforce GTX 980m.

Whatever you intuit from the naming of the branding is probably wrong, and that's how the marketing department wants it. I hope this point of view helps to comprehend the following.

You should really see Core M as another name similar to i3/i5/i7.

So, you have the architecture Core (and Atom), which is traditionally segmented in Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, i7 from worst to best.

However, those 5 names are not given based on performance alone, they are also separated by feature set (cache, HT,...) and, more importantly, TDP.

A 15W i7 dualcore CPU can impossibly be better than a 88W version of the architecture, but a 15W i7 is better than a 15W i3.

From high to low TDP, Intel has the suffixes: / (none), -K, -S/-T for desktop; -H(Q), -M, -U and -Y for mobile. For example: Haswell-U i5.

Core M really is just the successor of (Haswell)-Y, but the marketing team wants to make people aware of the possibility of fanless designs due to much lower TDP than any previous SKUs, so they put it at the same level as i3/i5/i7.

 

[ViRGE]

BTW, that means we'll actually have
Core i3m,
Core i5m,
Core i7m etc

right? In other words, an "M" version in every performance tier?

No. There is just Core M-[model number]

http://ark.intel.com/products/family/83613/Intel-Core-M-Processors?q=core m

There won't be 3/5/7 tiers since all Core-M processors contain 2 cores. It's not like the desktop where there is a difference in core count or the presence of HT.

 

[Enigmoid]

Confused and ignorant buyers are obviosly the best kind. They tend to go with their gut or listen to ludicrous recommendations, they are also easily sold on promises.
Which is why tech companies and the tech sites that they finance, often engage or involuntarily participate in confusion and obscurantism.
One prime example is the attempt to create a false parity between mobile and desktop processors and more recently ultra-mobile. Even though typical notebook chips provide a third of performance at best, they routinely carry the name of their desktop counterparts, with an additional letter i.e. Geforce GTX 980 and Geforce GTX 980m.

Whatever you intuit from the naming of the branding is probably wrong, and that's how the marketing department wants it. I hope this point of view helps to comprehend the following.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8605/msi-gt72-dominator-pro-performance-preview/3

 

[witeken]

Perhaps to you, but it sure is confusing me. Desktop alone is clear: pentium/celeron, no HT, no turbo, i3=hyperthreading no turbo, all dual core. Then i5 and i7 quads, i7 has hyperthreading. But the problem is, there are i3, i5, and i7 full power mobile chips, but i5 is dual core, unlike the desktop. But then there are the low power mobile chips where i7 no longer is quad core either. And I dont even pretend to understand the Y and M mobile lineup. When I needed a laptop, I just bought a cheap i3 with the full power mobile chip. At least I wasnt paying twice the price for a machine that required google-fu to find out what the performance would be.

And AMD is no better, now that they are starting to brand Kabini with very similar numbers to Kaveri.

Okay, I'll simplify it even further.

When you want to buy a CPU, first ask how many cores you want.

Secondly, how much performance do you want. It is really logical: higher TDP = higher performance.

Lastly, SKUs with the same TDP but different names (Celeron up to i7) differentiate themselves with performance and features. For example, a 15W i7 has more aggressive turbo and resides probably a bit higher in the silicon lottery than i3 or i5.

You don't have to understand every single SKUs, just the concept of product differentiation and the fact that performance is dependent by the amount of cooling available (TDP). If you're still confused;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)

BTW, you could also look for reviews, benchmarks.

 

[witeken]

BTW, that means we'll actually have
Core i3m,
Core i5m,
Core i7m etc

right? In other words, an "M" version in every performance tier?

Currently, there are only 3 Core M SKUs.

The 5 signifies its generation (5th gen Core).
The Y signifies its product category (Broadwell-Y).
The number 10 and 70 signify their relative performance (70 > 10).

 

[user8237492]

Currently, there are only 3 Core M SKUs.

The 5 signifies its generation (5th gen Core).
The Y signifies its product category (Broadwell-Y).
The number 10 and 70 signify their relative performance (70 > 10).

Since there hundreds of differentiating parameters (with price, performance and battery life being top 3), safe to say all Core M processors "lesser" than a 5th generation core i3 from a performance perspective? (I don't mean battery performance or anything - raw computing performance)

 

[Roland00Address]

Intel has never had a logical naming strategy with the core i3, i5, i7. Those terms do not tell you absolute power or constant state of features (i5 being 2 cores 4 threads or 4 cores 4 threads for example.)

Instead they have been very effective as a marketing term. People that go into a store do not understand an i7 surface pro is not the same as an i7 desktop. They do understand though that the i7 surface pro will be faster than every other tablet especially the i3 model that looks the same. 90% of people now a days buy computers due to form factors, price, and features not absolute speed.

In effect by creating a great marketing term they allowed you to be upsold, and by allowing you to be upsold they make the majority of the extra profit for most computers cost the same to make with an pentium, an i3, or an i7 with all other components besides the processor.

Core M on the other hand is a wonderful invention and continues the good naming scheme from the marketing perspective. It tells people that it is different than the normal i series. a 5m70 is not the same thing as a core i7. Yet it still has the "core name" which is intel's new pentium and it is easier to explain to a customer that you want a tablet with a core in its name just like you want an intel in its name instead of wierd words like exynos, qualcomm, tegra, etc.

The names are not for you the customers, nor are they for the geeks, they are for the salespeople and the OEMs to help them sell products since Intel's true customers are the OEMs and the OEMs are who that sells the final product. Intel now is a fungible commodity the more we go to an non windows world. They have to leverage their marketing muscle, their size of manufacturing base, their rebate programs (I mean contra revenue), and their absolute performance advantage to compete in a world with 20 dollar processors to convince someone to buy a $50 to $250 processor (what my guess the real cost to the OEMs wha the core M costs after rebates and volume discounts)

 

[witeken]

Since there hundreds of differentiating parameters (with price, performance and battery life being top 3), safe to say all Core M processors "lesser" than a 5th generation core i3 from a performance perspective? (I don't mean battery performance or anything - raw computing performance)

Core M probably would be slower than a Broadwell Core i3. But those are things you need benchmarks for.

 

[user8237492]

People that go into a store do not understand an i7 surface pro is not the same as an i7 desktop. They do understand though that the i7 surface pro will be faster than every other tablet especially the i3 model that looks the same.

Exactly why they need to clearly communicate (market) if the Core M is slower than a Core i3 or faster than a Core i7.

[vent]
The concept of Core i3/5/7 is great but then intel shoots itself in the foot by hundreds of product segments. I'm pretty sure they only do this to match their yield to sales but it confused the f*** for consumers comparing a laptop with a core i5-4321-abc to a core i5-4411-xyz (or whatever alphabet soup gibberish it is). Then you have 'gotcha' landmines where some product lines don't have VT-x or some other feature - all in the fine print without proper segmentation.
[/vent]

 

[witeken]

If something isn't clear to you, you can go to Wikipedia or Intel Ark. Intel's product segmentation seems to be fine, at least it doesn't seem to hurt their revenue or market share. The marketing team invented the Core names to be easily understandable for people who don't want to do the research. Else, you can look beyond the ix and you immediately see a glance of how capable the CPU is.

Other companies certainly aren't better. For example, Nvidia's 700 series GPUs for desktops consists of both Kepler and Maxwell GPUs. Their mobile nomenclature is even worse. AMD also has old or refreshed GPUs, etc.

 

[ElFenix]

Intel has never had a logical naming strategy with the core i3, i5, i7. Those terms do not tell you absolute power or constant state of features (i5 being 2 cores 4 threads or 4 cores 4 threads for example.)

on desktop, i3 has always been 2 cores, 4 threads, no turbo, i5 has always been 4 threads with turbo, and i7 has always been 4+ cores, hyperthreading, and turbo.

things break down when you get to mobile, but within TDPs the i7 is usually going to be the fastest. and all the hardware quads have been i7 on mobile.

core M actually should result in slightly less confusion because the ultra low TDP big cores are being broken out to a 'separate' line.

Since there hundreds of differentiating parameters (with price, performance and battery life being top 3), safe to say all Core M processors "lesser" than a 5th generation core i3 from a performance perspective? (I don't mean battery performance or anything - raw computing performance)

Core M is going to be lower in absolute computing performance than the rest of intel's big core line because it's going to have a lower TDP (or SDP or whatever they're on to). so, yes.

 

[Roland00Address]

Exactly why they need to clearly communicate (market) if the Core M is slower than a Core i3 or faster than a Core i7.

You are still looking at this wrong. The people who buy a core m tablet were never interested in a desktop experience with a few exceptions.

1) They wanted a tablet first
2) Now of all the tablet options, all the different prices and features what do they want? Well if they want the fastest than the only choice is intel with the core M line. If they want the cheapest intel still gets some money with their atom line.

By comparing it to an i3, i5, i7 15w+ processor (remember these tdps are 5 watts or less) you are in a lose lose place for intel.

1) You tell people that a core i3 is fast enough for there uses, thus less upsales to the i7 in the bigger devices form factors.
2) You made those people who get the 1k ultrabook/tablet feel ripped off for a $400 computer does cinebench faster and you made it plainfully obvious.
3) You make people feel this is all a racket you mean it is the same chip? Why do I pay more? People do not understand cpu binning and package costs, they don't understand how a metal tablet is more expensive than a plastic laptop on the build of materials. They also do not like people making profit when they spend their own money, they have to be seeing this as getting a value.

The marketing term core M allows everyone to win. Intel Wins, The Customer Wins (for they get this awesome technology) and the OEM Wins. To borrow a term from Stephen Covey Think Win Win Win. These people are not thinking how in 5/6 years we got a computer that has faster single threaded performance than the i7 920 over half that amount in multithread from a 130 watt chip with no graphics and no southbridge down to a sub 5 watt chip that is barely bigger than a 100mm2 (I can't remember the exact size I am doing this from memory).

on desktop, i3 has always been 2 cores, 4 threads, no turbo, i5 has always been 4 threads with turbo, and i7 has always been 4+ cores, hyperthreading, and turbo.

things break down when you get to mobile, but within TDPs the i7 is usually going to be the fastest. and all the hardware quads have been i7 on mobile.

core M actually should result in slightly less confusion because the ultra low TDP big cores are being broken out to a 'separate' line.

Stop over thinking it for the i5 arrandale desktop cores were dual core with turbo and not quad cores. Yes now with haswell it makes sense but it has not always been that simple. But with Sandy and the 2390T desktop chip it was a dual core i5, yet 2400 and above including the 2500t it was quad core, same thing with Ivy the desktop i5 3470t was dual core 3300 models were quad cores but the 3570t was quad core.

But you realize as well that core M creates less confusion. It may be the same architecture underneath it all but think of this chip not as a desktop or laptop chip but think of it as a cellphone and tablet chip that has power similar to the previous years desktops and laptops. Now there is no cellphone that is going to use a 5w chip with no baseband included but in theory it is easy to make. 7.1 mm thickness is thinner than the iphone 5s, and thicker than the iphone 6. The PCB size is the bigger problem for you will need something that is bigger than the galaxy note 4 but most people do not want 7" phones.

 

[ElFenix]

Stop over thinking it for the i5 arrandale desktop cores were dual core with turbo and not quad cores. Yes now with haswell it makes sense but it has not always been that simple. But with Sandy and the 2390T desktop chip it was a dual core i5, yet 2400 and above including the 2500t it was quad core, same thing with Ivy the desktop i5 3470t was dual core 3300 models were quad cores but the 3570t was quad core.

arrandale clarkdale i5s were 4 thread w turbo.
2390t was 4 threads w turbo.
3470t was 4 threads w turbo.

 

[Roland00Address]

arrandale clarkdale i5s were 4 thread w turbo.
2390t was 4 threads w turbo.
3470t was 4 threads w turbo.

Sorry I misread what you wrote substituting 4 cores for 4 threads. My apologies.

 

[ElFenix]

np. didn't realize intel made 2/4 i5s for desktop after the clarkdales.

 

[Roland00Address]

np. didn't realize intel made 2/4 i5s for desktop after the clarkdales.

Only for the very low power tdps that were effectively laptop chips but with a desktop socket. Even then they still had quad core versions but Intel succumb to the OEMs wants for they did not want to pay the extra for a true quad core (higher bins) but they would pay extra to call it an i5 vs i3.

In other words haggling bullshit. The T series has both 35w and 45w skus. This type of thing is what annoys me for the features should be constant for the i3 or i5 moniker for each tdp. A T that is 35w should use a different letter than the 45w sku if they have a different feature set like number of cores. If I have to look at intel ark to figure out if the T model is 35w or 45w and dual core or quad core it drives me crazy. The 45w i5 sandy and ivybridge chips were quad cores, the 35w i5 t models were dual cores.

Damn it (looks at wikipedia real quick) Intel make it even worse with haswell they still have an i5 desktop dual core.

The 35w T quad cores only started with Haswell. But now we have i5s that are 35w dual cores and 35w quad cores. 4570t is a dual core but 4460t is a quad core (and a lower model number) and 4590t is a quad core as well as the other high model numbers.