I don't think there were any changes other than the improved TIM and the multiplier bumps.
Unfortunately they don't ship to Europe. And it's almost impossible to buy on in west Europe under 400 EUR, delivery is 2+ weeks.Newegg has it right now.
Unfortunately they don't ship to Europe. And it's almost impossible to buy on in west Europe under 400 EUR, delivery is 2+ weeks.
Only three shops have it on stock but are selling from 416 EUR (~ 470 USD) to 460 EUR (522 USD). Thats a complete mess.
Shipping from Taiwan to US: 2 weeks.I wonder if demand is that high, yields are that low, or that supply is being artificially regulated to support a higher price.
Shipping from Taiwan to US: 2 weeks.
From Taiwan to Europe: 4 weeks.
I think Intel has delivery problems in general.
Early on, Europe had it and the US didn't. I wasn't aware that the situation had reversed itself. I wonder if demand is that high, yields are that low, or that supply is being artificially regulated to support a higher price. Or perhaps excess Haswell CPUs need to clear out.
More likely because they are changing stepping for the SGX support.
Oh, maybe, but it's not a new stepping afaik:
http://qdms.intel.com/dm/i.aspx/5A160770-FC47-47A0-BF8A-062540456F0A/PCN114074-00.pdf
Compared to Surface Pro 3 which has an i5-4300U Haswell chip, the multi-threaded increase is 22.7% and the single-core score is increased 21.4%. A 20% gain over the previous model is a pretty nice amount.
Overall, the change to Skylake has made a pretty nice jump in performance with the Surface Pro 4. The Intel Core i5-6300U manages to pretty much outperform the Broadwell Core i7-5600U in multi-threaded tests, and single-threaded workloads come in pretty close to the higher clocked Broadwell i7. The performance difference from Surface Pro 3’s Haswell Core i5-4300U is even larger.
Much like the synthetic tests, once you get into a real world gaming test, the difference between Gen 8 graphics in Broadwell and Gen 9 in Skylake is actually pretty decent. And once again, as the complexity of the benchmark goes up, the increase in performance goes up as well. On our value settings, the increase was 14.6% but that increased all the way to a 31.8% better score on Surface Pro 4 on the Enthusiast settings.
Looking at the overall picture then, the graphics performance in the Surface Pro 4 is clearly a healthy jump over Broadwell based notebooks, but it is an even more significant jump over Surface Pro 3. The move to Skylake has brought even larger gains to the GPU than it does to the rest of the system’s performance.
On the tablet comparisons, I’ve installed the OpenGL version of GFXBench. Once again the Surface Pro 4 outperforms everything, although in this test the margin is not quite as high. As with 3DMark, on Windows PCs, GFXBench runs at high precision only due to limitations in OpenGL versus OpenGL ES.
Looking at T-Rex framerates, the increase over Broadwell is 22.2% and the jump over Haswell is 61.4%. A 20%+ gain over the last generation is great news. Intel has been behind on graphics for a while but they’ve put a lot of effort in on the last couple of generations. It would be fascinating to see what the GT3e GPU in the Core i7 model of Surface Pro 4 could achieve in the same 15 Watt envelope.
...The first thing that is obvious is the better performance of the Surface Pro 4, but also the consistency between runs is much better. There is no evidence of throttling occurring with the new model.
...The Surface Pro 3 approached 80 degrees Celcius, but the Surface Pro 4’s Skylake processor doesn’t even hit 60 degrees in this test. Part of this is the new 14 nm processor but the new cooling system is also doing a nice job.
The move to Skylake has also been a big help for Surface Pro. Not only is it much faster – sometimes 50% faster even – but it can keep its performance up in an 8.4 mm thick chassis, which is something that was not true of the previous generation. Microsoft has gone all-in with the hardware, offering up the best of Skylake-U as an option in the Core i7-6650U, including Iris graphics with 64 MB of eDRAM. Memory capacity has been increased to 16 GB, which should be plenty for any workloads that are going to be done on a tablet. The storage changes to NVMe based SSDs has push performance almost as high as it can be in 2015.
The performance increase of the discrete GPU is a sizable jump over the integrated graphics of Skylake, and by moving the GPU into the base away from the processor, Microsoft is able to put the GPU in its own thermal zone. We don’t have exact TDP numbers from NVIDIA, but the GPU should be somewhere under 30 Watts. There is no way to fit that kind of TDP into a normal Ultrabook.
15W Skylake-U beating Carrizo's MT CPU performance @ 35W mode, and that's not even the Core i7 model:
Toshiba Radius 12 review: It stuns with Skylake speed and a spectacular display
I think Carrizo is optimized for 15 W. Moving to 35 W does not give much extra performance.15W Skylake-U beating Carrizo's MT CPU performance @ 35W mode, and that's not even the Core i7 model:
And yes, you can play games: I eked out 34 frames per second on Crysis 2 (1280x720, High settings, DX11 off); 30 frames per second on Dishonored (1600x1200), but only 25 frames per second on Batman: Arkham Origins (1024x768, all options off). If you're the type of person who doesnt mind playing older games on the cheap, the Surface Pro 4 suffices.
I think Carrizo is optimized for 15 W. Moving to 35 W does not give much extra performance.
15W Skylake-U beating Carrizo's MT CPU performance @ 35W mode, and that's not even the Core i7 model:
With a poor battery, janky trackpad & a processor and GPU that maybe can't always drive all those pixels.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/14/9526171/toshiba-radius-12-4k-review-walt-mossberg
From what Intel's showing, 2016 may be more interesting from the GPU side of things as 28nm ->14/16nm GPU become available with HBM2.
Are you sure that's running with a cTDP of 35W? People have been looking for an actual notebook that has cTDP options of unlimited 35W and nobody I know of has found one yet. I would definitely look at some of The Stilt's reference system benchmarks since he has manage to "unlock" the TDP on his system through extensive h4x0ring so that it won't throttle itself all to hell.
So now that the mobile Skylake quads are trickling onto the market, does anyone have any idea when we'll see uptake in to business laptops of the major OEMs? Dell hasn't yet announced anything other than some cheaper laptops based around the U chips. The Precision line is still using Haswell chips with no ETA on an upgrade. Only the Alienware series has an update to quad Skylake thus far.